Scott Rich

The fact that Nick Kemenya is a connector.

And that's one of John Shire's favorite words.

And he hasn't used it very much this year.

He hasn't called people the Sean James-style connector this year.

I think Nick Kemenia has the skill set more than anyone else, given the makeup of this roster, to do that.

I think we saw that a little bit against SMU.

The fact that he got four assists.

And we'll never know how severe his ankle sprain was, how much that's been holding him back over the last few weeks.

But...

If John Shire diagnoses his team and says the slow starts are more offensive stagnation than defensive effort, then the solution to that may be to get Nick Hemenya in the lineup earlier to provide that connective tissue, to get that ball rotation, to make sure that the right people are getting the ball in the right spots.

That wouldn't surprise me if at the very least Nicomeneus sees a significantly increased role during this road trip to, again, be that connector that's seemingly been missing over the last few weeks for Duke.

Those inflection points, as John Shire calls them, are going to be the biggest key to me.

If Duke gets up five early, can we stretch it to 10?

If Duke is up 10 going into the half, can we stretch it out to 10 to 15 rather than letting it shrink to five?

When we get a big lead, do we expand it rather than sitting on it?

Those are the things that are going to lead to the comfortable wins that we haven't had in a little bit, and they've had Duke fans a little bit clutching their pearls.

And that's something that we were a little spoiled last year by.

Last year's team had a hell of a killer instinct.

They knew how to put teams away, and we won a lot of games by 20 and 30 and 40 points.

That is the next step for this team that say, go out and say, we are better than this team and we aren't going to let them hang around and we aren't going to let the home crowd.