Ordinarily, 11-1 against this non-conference slate would be a cause for celebration, but the way that 1 loss happened is hitting hard for Duke fans. The Duke Basketball Roundup gives you a deep dive into the 82-81 loss to Texas Tech including words of praise for Duke's bench players and some pretty strong criticism of Duke's shortcomings in the "details" like free-throw shooting and focus. Jason and Donald take a long look at the 17-point blown lead and what it says about the team moving forward. Will this game go down as a confluence of unlikely stuff that won't happen again or is it a sign of some fundamental problems Duke needs to fix? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What led to Duke's disappointing loss against Texas Tech?
there duke fans uh tough edition of the duke basketball roundup coming to you right now uh this is episode 781 it will be an episode in which we will not be happy uh the blue devils of course lost texas tech before we get to that we will introduce ourselves i'm jason evans i'm sitting in my home in atlanta georgia i'm joined by donald wine who is sitting at a hotel in new york donald you were at the game right buddy
I was at the game. I went with three of my friends and it was great to see so many people in the building. Shout out Steven Van Dude, who is a longtime listener and writer. I got to meet him at halftime, which is pretty cool. A couple other people said hi, didn't give me their names, but just, you know, a lot of love the podcast comments while I was in the garden.
I love it. You know, we need to, you and I need to get on this. We need to make hats, T-shirts, something like that, so that when people see us, they know it's us.
Right. All two people will buy our merch, so we'll get right on it.
I just meant for you and me.
Oh, yeah, yeah. I love T-shirts. Those are easy.
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Chapter 2: What were the key headlines following the game?
In any event, let's get right to it. We're here to talk about Duke's first loss of the season. Again, we lose to Texas Tech 82 to 81. Donald, we're going to do headlines, then we're going to do the good, then we're going to take a break. That should take us about a total of three minutes. And then we'll be on to the bad.
But I really want us, after we do the headlines, I want us to make sure that we focus on the good, because there was some good in this game, even though the game is super frustrating. But let's start with the headlines like we always do. I'll begin with Ryan Blatch, who sent us this headline within seconds. Of the game ending, Ryan's headline is this. They make circus shots. We miss free throws.
Next play. I think that was a pretty good summation of the entire game, Ryan. So you get the headline, the first headline of the day.
Chapter 3: What positives can Duke take away from the Texas Tech game?
I have Ted Allen and Ted Allen's headline was Madison Square Meltdown. Duke wrecked by resilient Red Raiders, which, again, I think sums up the night as well.
That is the alliteration winner of the day. Yeah. He really, he did a nice job on that one. I had that one identified as well. Bart Hopper gave us, and by the way, I should note, I'm a huge fan of the TV show Survivor. He gave us, Duke gets survivored by Texas Tech, outwitted, outplayed, and outlasted.
Yeah, that's about right. I got Corbin Vandeweg. Corbin Vandeweg wrote, Raiders come to collect as costly turnovers and overdue charity strike bill knocks devils on their depreciating assets. Wall Street, a Wall Street kind of a rhyme there. Pretty good one. Pretty good one.
That's strong work.
Chapter 4: How did Duke's free throw performance impact the game outcome?
That is strong work. Doris Marcus gave us no rebounding, no free throws, no urgency equals no win. Yep, Doris, that would be accurate.
Check, check, check, and check. Yeah, I have two more, Jason, before I know you have another one. Nick Soprano wrote, Blue Devils to have a blue Christmas at the hands of the Red Raiders. And Jim Baumgartner wrote, Duke free throw woes, Stoke Red Raider rally. Jason, we will be talking about free throws.
Oh, yes. Yeah, you know. We'll get to it. We'll get to it. Free throws were not, not, not the only problem. I'm going to talk a lot about the other problems as well. Chris Emershine gave us a limerick, and I think this is pretty good.
Chapter 5: What adjustments did Duke fail to make during the game?
His cadence, at least, the rhyming patterns work very nicely. I'm going to be honest. Sometimes we get some limericks in poems where I'm like, that's not, it's not. But Chris has it, so I'm going to read it. You ready for this? Watts and Horner sat in the corner planning a Christmas surprise for Duke free throws, please, but Anderson threes, spelled trouble and the devil's demise.
That's pretty damn good, Chris. I'm impressed. I'm definitely impressed. I also wanted to note that there are several folks who commented that this was a culmination.
I just wanted to, you know, we're not going to get into this right now, Donald, but I wanted to note because we had so many people write to us and say this was a culmination of all of Duke's deficiencies that we've been talking about all year. Poor start to the game, poor free throw shooting, lack of a second score. Those folks are all accurate about that.
There are a lot of people who said to us, Donald, and when they wrote with headlines, they included comments where they said Duke did not deserve to win this game.
Chapter 6: How did Duke's bench players perform in this matchup?
a last second miracle by Duke would have been an injustice. I don't disagree with that at all. And I think there are certainly lessons that can be learned from a loss that maybe would have been papered over had we managed to hold on and win or had we managed to hit a shot at the end to win.
And last thing before we get to the good, I wanted to note, Jim Sumner, we've said this a million times, Donald, folks, you need to subscribe to Jim Sumner's sub stack. He has really, really great commentary. And he closed his newsletter about yesterday's game with these lines that I think are very, very telling. And this is the biggest takeaway that we all should have from this game. He said,
Duke has plenty of time to think about this one. If they learn the proper lessons, it's just a blip in the radar. But if not, these problems are going to lead to losses anyway. That is really, really smart by Jim Sumner. Win or loss, this game actually really doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things.
But if the problems that reared their head in this game are not fixed, we'll be talking about them over and over and over again over the course of the rest of this season.
Chapter 7: What are the fundamental issues Duke needs to address moving forward?
So Jason, the comment that you made actually would be a great way for me to segue into the good because I want to push back on the notion that we did not deserve to win this game. We did deserve to win this game. We didn't play well enough to win this game. Texas Tech played better down the stretch and obviously has some things we got to work on.
But this wasn't a case of Texas Tech was just outclassing us and outmastering us the entire game. We had our moments to win this game. If we had won this game, I feel like it would have been a deserving victory. Now, it doesn't mean that we didn't have issues. But I think we had some guys that stepped up at certain times. We're obviously going to talk about some of the good that we did have.
But this wasn't a, you know, if you look at the column, it's not going to be, you know, 97 things in the bad and one thing in the good. where it's one of those cases where, again, details matter. We said that in the preview.
We had a 20-minute stretch of this game from about the five-minute mark to about the five-minute mark of the second half. There was a good 20.
Chapter 8: What lessons can Duke learn from this game for future success?
Half this game, Duke was beating Texas Tech by 20-plus points.
I mean, it was a 17 point victory or 17 point lead that we had at the 1632 mark in the second half. That was the biggest lead of the game. And again, we didn't get there undeservedly. We got to that point because we were making the like overcoming some of the things that we did wrong in the first half and coming back strong.
And if you think about it, Jason being in the arena, like there was not a point where we looked at the scoreboard. We went, yep, that's that tide has turned right. Like we we know that this is a run that we're on.
On TV, it may have felt like that, but during the course of the game, it was a back-and-forth affair, it felt like, and then we kind of looked up and go, wow, we're up 10 after all of that. That is a deserved stretch. So when I saw the people saying, oh, we didn't deserve to win that game, that's a natural reaction to losing in the way that we did.
But I don't think we did not deserve to win this game. We did deserve to win this game. The details, as we mentioned in the preview for this game, as we mentioned in the preview for all the other big games that we played, details matter. And it was in those details that we lost the game. But don't wake up this morning and say that we didn't deserve to win. We did deserve to win.
We just need to play better to get to that point where we earned the win.
All right. So as we start with the good, I want to talk about Caden Boozer. who was honestly our best player down the stretch, had that big three late in the game with one minute left. A minute left, we were down four. It looked really dire. And Caden confidently and quickly took that three-pointer.
And by the way, all his threes in this game, I thought looked, he usually is like, I'm a little hesitant to take a three-pointer. I feel like Caden's been working on it because he looked very confident taking his threes in this game. That three, by the way, was the only three we hit in the final 15 minutes of the game.
Caden also had a couple really nice drives in the lane, finished well on one of them. It was a really tough shot. He was on the move. He kind of created his own fast break on that play. It was a play where Duke got a rebound and got it up to Caden, and he just sort of said, no, I'm taking this a little bit faster than the defense is going to get back.
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