Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Thank you.
Hey there, Duke fans. Welcome to episode number 787 of the Duke Basketball Roundup. We are coming to you, as I mentioned, not immediately after. Duke beats Cal 71-56. It was an all-night affair. At least took us into the wee hours of the morning. I am Donald Wine. I'm your host for this episode. I have Scott Rich with me. Scott, I know you have a, we've talked about this, you have a newborn.
So tell the people how you were able to watch this game because I know it wasn't live.
Yeah, I think we're going to get to the good and the bad. I think an extra good is the ESPN app making replays much, much easier to watch nowadays. I watch this at 7.30 in the morning with Quinn in my arms. So maybe she was a retroactive good luck charm. I'm going to go with that. But yeah, it was very nice that I was able to watch the game on replay a few hours later.
I think it's the first game I haven't watched live in freaking years. Probably not going to be the last with a newborn at home, but such is life.
And yeah, speaking of birth, it is January 15th as we record. This game obviously started, at least for us on the East Coast, on January 14th, bled into January 15th. But January 15th! It's Jason Evans' birthday. Jason is not on this episode.
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Chapter 2: What was the outcome of the Duke vs. Cal game?
He is still in Africa guerrilla trekking.
Continuing to make us very, very jealous with all these pictures he's sending.
Yeah, so he had a nice little guerrilla trekking. We'll just keep you abreast of Jason's whereabouts, but he is having a lot of fun on his birthday. Jason Evans, happy birthday, sir. Many, many happy returns, and we will see him in a few days. I think he comes back over the weekend, and we'll probably see him back on the show next week. Scott...
Let's get to the game because, again, it was an ACC after dark. You didn't get to partake in the after dark part of things, but at least you got to watch this game in a similar manner that we all did. As I mentioned, 71-56, Duke wins. They move to 16-1 on the season, a perfect 5-0 in the ACC. We begin as we always do with the headlines, and we got some good ones. And I'm surprised.
We got most of our headlines right after the game. So kudos to all of you out there. who are watching the game, I imagine a lot of you were sending them from the West Coast, which is totally fine. The West Coast, as they say, is the best coast, but the East is the beast.
And us in the East Coast, I'm not mad at any of you who had to wake up early in the morning to send your headlines in to dbrpodcast at gmail.com. I start with Jason Perkins. Jason Perkins, I think, maybe had the best one. Slim's Wednesday night and Cam's Thursday morning powered Duke to a 15-point win. We will talk about the halves that both of those guys had.
Scott Sauer wrote, Duke barely shakes off jet lag to recalibrate in West Coast win. I thought that one was cool. John Grantland, who always writes in, sends in several headlines. One of them that I liked was Grin and Barrett. Duke's D strikes golden cow and great road win for the Devils.
Isaiah Kirby, a first-timer, so welcome to the show, Isaiah Kirby, wrote, Free throws falter far from home, yet Duke stays atop the ACC throne. We will talk about free throws a little bit later. And then finally, Josh Dill, who writes in all the time, wrote in a great one, A showtime start and a second-half surge send us to sleep time satisfied. Perfect, perfect, perfect, Josh Hill.
Great use of alliteration. And again, summed up the game quite well. Thank you to everybody who submitted headlines again after every game. dbrpodcasts.gmail.com. Once the final horn sounds, send in your email with your headline. If it's good, it will make the show. So let's start with the good. You know what, Scott? I want to talk weirdly about the defense because...
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Chapter 3: What were the key headlines from the game?
Speaking of shots, I want to talk about the second half because I think in that 12 to one run midway through the second half where the team started to pull away. They did something, as you mentioned. They kept it simple, stupid. They said, number 12 is very good when he's two feet away from the basket. Let's get him the ball inside two feet away from the basket. We got inside looks from Cam.
We had guys rolling to the rack. Caleb Foster went to the rack a couple of times. Nick Hamania went to the rack a couple of times. But it was almost a concerted effort. And again, we still shot more threes than twos in this game. But in the second half, it felt like every play, for the better part of six or seven minutes, every possession ended at the rim.
And the lone couple of times that we got a three, they were open threes as a result of someone crashing, going to the rim. So I like the fact that, you know, we sat there and said, okay, our shots aren't falling from outside. So let's do what we do best. Let's get to the rim. Let's get, you know, at least, and in theory, either get the bucket or get fouled. And in many times it was both.
And we got a lot of, we got a lot of finishes through contact. And I really commend it. It was led by, you know, Cam Boozer. I mean, we're looking at Cam Boozer. Jesus. 21, was it 21 points? 13 rebounds? Four offensive rebounds? And I think he tried to score off of each and every one of them. Three assists.
Again, we had a point, and there was a couple points, and you mentioned this a couple games ago, maybe against SMU, where he would catch the ball, at the top of the key, and he would settle for a three. In the second half, he caught the ball at the top of the key, and the couple of times he did,
ended at the rim because he said, okay, let me just play bully ball right now and get down low because nobody can guard me inside. And even if they can, they got to follow me to stop me. And even if they follow me, they still might not stop me.
That's how this game was able to go from, as you mentioned, a five point lead to a 10 point lead to a 15 point lead, because they were able to go right at Cal and Cal had nobody in front of them to stop them. And even if they did, they were very good at finishing through contact.
I think the raw numbers of three-point shots taken are a little bit misleading because Isaiah Evans took 13 of those. Isaiah Evans was chucking up the ball. But you know what? I'm not mad at it. I didn't see that – he took some questionable shots, but there was – none of those were a what are you doing slim, taking it completely off balance type of thing.
Those were all shots that we think Isaiah Evans can make. And you know what? I think we saw – why we want Isaiah Evans taking those shots in how this game played out, because as his gravity well increased, as he made a couple of those hard shots, as he had to draw that defense, that is what led the paint to be open.
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Chapter 4: How did Duke's defense contribute to their victory?
He has eight points during that stretch. But Nick Kamenia is on the court for a vast majority of that run. Nick Kamenia subs into the game when Duke's down four. He leaves the game at halftime with Duke up seven. The other big run, the 12-1 run that broke things open with 10 minutes to go in the second half. Isaiah and Nick were both on the floor during that stretch.
Nick Kamenia, who only played 24 minutes, who didn't start this game, was on the court for the two biggest runs in this game. One that gave Duke the lead going into half, the other that gave Duke the insurmountable double-digit lead that we ended up carrying to the finish line. That's extremely encouraging.
I think that's a major plus for Nick Kamenya continuing to get those minutes because he was solid defensively, good, not great. We know that. But he was the facilitator. He was the connector. Even if he wasn't knocking them in from threes, he was the guy who was getting a lot of those hockey assists, who was touching the paint and then kicking it out.
He was doing those connector things consistently. that this team needed. I think it was one of his better games in the Duke uniform, even if he didn't have a monstrous 20-point game like his colleague Isaiah Evans.
Yeah, I want to go back to that second run, again, that 12-run run midway through the second half where, as you mentioned, they kind of got the insurmountable lead. Again, in the preview, you had talked about specifically wanting this team to figure out how to stretch a lead and then to hold on to it. And then that under-12 timeout, the under-8 timeout, that you saw that lead getting bigger.
And that's what happened here. And again, the 12-run run was over the course of maybe four or five minutes, I want to say. It wasn't a quick fast where Mark Madsen could call a timeout and stem the bleeding. It was one where you kind of looked up and you go, oh... wow, that got out of hand. And especially when you're on the East Coast and loopy at 12.45 in the morning.
It was a great sight to see that these guys were able to really see a lead, see the blood in the water, and go, finish him. Like, go out there and do the job. And, yeah, as part of the connecting, the fact that they were, you know, the reward for that is seeing Jack Scott and Cam Sheffield get some run at the end of the game. You know, guys who...
Give it their all in practice, but we haven't been able to get on the floor in quite a while because we've had some of these closer games. The fact that they were able to get some run should be, again, a reward for that. And again, it pains me that Ify is not healthy because he would have been right out there too. So those kind of guys being able to see the end of the game and
it closed this out for us is, is a huge testament to the run that they had. And also just the ability for the defense to say, okay, the door is shut. Now, Cal, you're done. Like we're taking this lead and we're going to, you're going down the road to Stanford. This is going to be very, very, very important for our team to continue to build upon because we, Yeah, sure.
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Chapter 5: What adjustments did John Shire make during the game?
And I think, hopefully, Scott and I have the same one. Find out after this.
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All right, we are back. We continue our discussion of the Cal win, 71-56. Duke is the final from Haas Pavilion. We get to the things to improve in this game, and Scott, I just want to start with we just didn't shoot well. And if there's one thing that did not make the trip out west, I don't know if it missed the flight and if the bags are still at the airport, but the shooting was not there.
We did not shoot well from any facet of the floor. including the free throw line, 8 for 17, 47% from the free throw line. Again, I'm glad that we pulled this game out and pulled away at the end, but the shooting from the free throw line cannot help keep a team in the game. We've talked about that and how that's come back to bite us before. And also just the shooting in general.
Again, like you, I don't think there was a lot of terrible shots. There might have been a lot of shots that are – There could have been a better shot if the offense had materialized a little bit more. But hopefully that they're able to kind of get that kind of rust out. And against Stanford, they're able to shoot a little bit better. But that was the reason why Cal was in it for so long.
I mean, this is why you build a team defense first, because defense travels. And again, these are 18 to 22 year old young men playing on the West Coast, doing a West Coast trip for the first time in their lives. If you told me they were going to have an off shooting night, I would have said, yeah, that makes sense. But this team was still able to come away with a 15-point win.
So there's definitely room to improve on the offensive end with the shooting. Free throws should travel. That's something that there is no excuse for. That's something that we're almost kicking a dead horse at this point. The free throw shooting has to get better. But I'm not overly concerned about that.
The thing in the bad that is a little bit more concerning for me were those turnovers in the first stretch of the game. And like I mentioned, the slow start, and there was another slow start today, but it was a slow start in a different flavor. It was a slow start that was offense and turnover driven, not poor defense driven. So...
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