Chapter 1: What is the focus of DBR Bites episode #133?
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Hey there, Duke fans. Welcome to episode number 133 of DBR Bites. These are the, air quotes, small episodes that we have where we preview certain opponents. Of course, this week, a big week. Duke goes out to the West Coast, and we will preview the first game out West against the Cal Golden Bears. I'm Donald Weinheimer, host for this episode.
Jason, still in Africa, still having a great time, still sending us pictures. I'm still jealous. With me, as always, Scott Rich, who's been filling in for Scott. Appreciate you once again jumping back on.
Have I ever been a part of a bite that has actually been bite-sized? I'm not sure that's ever functionally happened.
I think our last one was actually pretty decent.
The vibes check was actually bite-sized.
Yeah, yeah. We've had some small nuggets here. This one will be a little bit small of a nugget. We're obviously going to preview the Cal Golden Bears, and we have some audio from the weekly ACC coaches press conferences that happen between all the different coaches that are coaching throughout the week. With the exception of anybody who's playing on Monday, we have sound from Mark Madsen, a
Cal's coach and we also have sound from John Shire. We will play that in a little bit. We ended the last show, Scott, with a great stat. Maybe great if you're Cal and Stanford, not so great if you're the rest of the ACC.
So far in the 18 months or so that Cal and Stanford have been a part of the Atlantic Coast Conference, no ACC team has gone west to play both of them and come back 2-0 with the exception of Wake Forest last year. So, so far this year and with the exception of Wake Forest last year, Every team that has gone out west to play two games has come back with a loss.
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Chapter 2: How did Cal Golden Bears perform before facing Duke?
So, you know, hopefully we can get the ball rolling and get him that medical red shirt. And this is a guy who can be that big, big body that break in case of emergency big, you know, for another two years at Duke. It's a shame for him. You know how vital and important it is to have that big, to have that body and practice, you know,
We've benefited from that, from having that type of guy on our roster for years. It's a shame we're going to lose that the rest of the season.
Yeah, and again, he may not get as much playing time, but as you mentioned, Scott, he is a big, big part of all the success that we have here. Not just before he got injured, but also after. He's still going to be a part of the team, just not playing or suiting up for the games. Let's talk about the Cal Golden Bears.
Now, first of all, I just want to let everybody know, on the East Coast, where both Scott and I are located, 11 p.m. Eastern Time on ACC Network. Let me repeat that. 11 o'clock p.m. in the nighttime on ACC Network. ACC After Dark. involves the Duke Blue Devils. So get your coffee in tomorrow, Wednesday, for this game because you are going to need it if you're going to stay up.
Now, some of us, Scott, don't have newborns that will dictate our schedule. I will be up for this game. So again, I don't expect anyone to email immediately after the game, but dbrpodcasts.gmail.com to send me headlines. We will record at some point on Thursday the recap to this game. Let's talk about who they have played. They are 13-4 so far this season, 1-3 in the ACC.
We're in the part of the season where we're going to talk just about the top 100 wins, those being UCLA and Notre Dame, which is their lone ACC win. They have some, again, very, very... Their losses were against really tough teams. Kansas State by three in November against Louisville by 20 to open up their ACC slate. They kind of had rattled off nine straight between K-State and Louisville.
And then this past week, they went to Virginia to play Virginia and Virginia Tech in a series of games. This wasn't a great week for the Cal Golden Bears. They lost to UVA by 24. They had a very tough game against Virginia Tech and ended up losing by three. Now, I mentioned some of the metrics as we get into them.
But Scott, they're 82 in Kempom, they're 90 in both Torvik and Evan Mia, but they're 71 in the net. So the net really likes Cal so far this season. And as I mentioned, because we're going on the road, it is a quad one game. Barely, but it's still a quad one game as it will show up in that metric, which of course is so over-important.
You know, I've talked on this show in my writing before about how the net they've they've given us all the ingredients to how the net is calculated, but not told us the recipe. So we know what goes in, but we don't know what the weighing is.
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Chapter 3: What are the metrics and records of the Cal Golden Bears?
They're, again, this two-point distance metric that Ken Palm has rolled out that has been the en vogue analytic tool of the year. They're another team that is very poor in that metric. They are
prone like smu to taking a lot of mid-range jumpers you know not following the analytics that free throws and threes or sorry layups and threes are all you do so this is a team that by all accounts is fundamentally sound they're very very experienced even if that experience wasn't at cal we'll talk about that when we talk about the players they do everything well but there's
They don't seem to squeeze that extra juice out of the orange in terms of maximizing their efficiency, which is why they're, again, a barely top 75 net team, a team that's more in the muck of the ACC.
So it's interesting because, you know, on Ken Palm, they have two different types of metrics this time of year. Now that we're in the conference, the metrics that you kind of discussed were a lot of the over overall rankings. And then they also have the conference rankings and some of those. The reason why they've had a couple of bad games is because they've been very skewed.
You mentioned that they're pretty decent at shooting threes. They've been terrible at shooting threes lately. You mentioned the offensive rebounding rate, how bad it was. It's even worse in conference play. So there's certain things about that. And it's funny, it leads me to the sound that I mentioned at the top by Mark Madsen.
Again, all the coaches, with the exception of the coaches who are playing on Mondays, participate in this 10-minute session each where everyone gets a rapid fire of questions from national media.
And I was able to ask Mark Madsen a question about what he saw last week in the two losses against Virginia, Virginia Tech, and what he wanted to improve as he goes into a week that features not just Duke on Wednesday, but but also UNC on Saturday. Both Cal and Stanford basically are having the big week where both the two biggest draws in the ACC are coming to town.
I wanted to know what he thought about what they needed to do to improve on that. Here's what he had to say.
Thanks, Donald. Thanks for the question. I would say... Ball security. We have been a pretty good team in terms of taking care of the ball and not having bad turnovers. In our most recent game, we did a poor job of taking care of the ball. We also fouled way too much. And so we have to play without fouling and we have to take care of the basketball.
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