Scott Rich

we talked about how transcendent he was in the second half against Louisville.

Something was off yesterday.

There were people at the game who sort of said that, you know, saw him getting some work done on the bench.

You know, maybe he had that same flu that Boopie Miller did and was trying to push through it.

I don't think we'll know.

That wasn't mentioned in any of the post-game availability I saw.

But if you sort of ignore that element of things because we don't know for sure,

What I saw from Caleb yesterday was the old Caleb Foster, who was trying to finish around contact rather than through contact.

There was a little bit in the second half where you saw the flashes.

He started attacking the basket downhill again, and he got past his defender.

He sort of put himself in the exact same position he was against Louisville, but he tried to do that little hook shot or tried to do a little fadeaway finish rather than stopping on two feet, waiting for the defender to go by and going up strong.

That was the difference in the game against Louisville.

It seemed like he sort of had a little bit of a brain fart, for lack of a better term, and reverted back into old Caleb Foster yesterday.

Again, it sounds like maybe there are some extenuating circumstances that account for that,

The ceiling of this Duke team gets where we want it to be when Caleb Foster is the Louisville Caleb Foster, not the Caleb Foster we saw against SMU.

Hopefully yesterday was a blip on the general trajectory.

And again, the weirdest thing to me that I think points to that, you know, again, some sort of extenuating circumstance was, A, how prolonged a period he was on the bench in the first half.

You know, he came out in that first batch of subs when Caden came in, and I don't think he reentered the game until, you know, five or so minutes left in the first half.

That's not something that John Shire really ever does, you know, give his players 15 minutes of rest on the bench.

The other thing that was, you know, hey, something's up for me was even though the starting lineup didn't really work out all that well, John Shire still went with that starting lineup to start the second half with the exception of Caden going in for Caleb.