Best player, best résumé.
That’s what No. 4 Duke claims ownership of after its latest high-profile victory, a 66-60 win Saturday at No. 7 Michigan State.
The Blue Devils may also be the best team … but we’ve got a long way to go and a lot of competition at the top of the sport to determine that. As things stand now, Jon Scheyer’s 10-0 Blue Devils are most certainly among the three or four best college basketball has to offer, particularly after Purdue’s debatable grasp on No. 1 disappeared with its baffling home rout at the hands of No. 10 Iowa State.
No. 1, 2, 3 or 4, wherever you want to slot Duke in terms of team prowess, I don’t think there’s an argument against Duke’s case to have the best body of work through the first five weeks of the season. Arizona had that claim in mid-November (I wrote about it here) after winning at shorthanded UConn, and then Michigan held a rightful entitlement to it following its historic three-game romp through the Players Era Championship. (I covered that, too.)
Now it’s Duke’s turn.
If I were to build an NCAA Tournament bracket coming out of this weekend, the Blue Devils would be my No. 1 overall seed. (After Friday’s CBS Sports Bracketology had the Blue Devils at No. 2 overall behind Michigan.)
Half of the Blue Devils’ wins have come against power-conference competition. No other school can match that. Duke is 4-0 in Quad 1 games. No other team has a record that good; Michigan is the only 3-0 team in Quad 1 results. Here’s a surprise: Saturday marked Duke’s first win over a top-10 opponent on the road since February 2019, when Zion Williamson and Co. beat Virginia. (Hey, I was at that one.)
Here are the five big Ws, four of which came against ranked competition. Numbers in parentheses are where the teams currently rank at KenPom.com:
75-60 over Texas (55) in Charlotte on the opening night of the season78-66 over Kansas (18) in the Champions Classic at Madison Square Garden80-71 over Arkansas (30) in the Thanksgiving Classic at the United Center67-66 over Florida (12) on Tuesday at Cameron Indoor66-60 over Michigan State at Breslin Center on Saturday
Notice how four of Duke’s five best wins have come away from home, and with the four most recent wins also transpiring against coaches with national championships to their name: Self, Calipari, Golden, Izzo. And the margin of victory in those five games? A fluffy 8.6 points.
Duke also just won three consecutive games against ranked teams in the regular season for just the second time in program history. (February of 2016 being the other.)
At BartTorvik.com, Duke has leapfrogged Michigan in Wins Above Bubble, a résumé metric that doesn’t factor in predictive data and now also has a proxy that the selection committee uses. (Iowa State is now third in résumé strength following its historic takedown of Purdue.)
What does it all mean? More than you might think.
Duke will inevitably take losses this season, yes, but the fact it’s gotten to 10-0 and still hasn’t played a well-rounded game is an unnerving thought for the rest of the sport. Go look at the past five weeks worth of results around college hoops. We’ve seen Michigan at the near-peak of its powers, and I’d say the same case could be made for Gonzaga, Iowa State, Arizona, even Michigan State. But Duke (and I think UConn fits in this as well) is yet to put it all together.
I’m not sure the team even really knows how to full-on win yet as much as it’s adapted to learning how not to lose. After all, six of its top seven minutes-getters are freshmen and sophomores. And it’s still this good right away? Hooooo, boy.
It would have been entirely understandable for NPOY frontrunner Cameron Boozer and his teammates to simply come up short in the toughest environment they’ve seen this season. They trailed at the half, Breslin was boppin’ and Michigan State looked well on the scent.
Didn’t happen.
To date, it has yet to happen to this team that, despite its super-strong start and influential brand name, wasn’t even ranked in the top five in the preseason.
Scheyer has been able to lose five NBA Draft picks and somehow pick up where Duke left off a season ago, when Cooper Flagg, Kon Knueppel and Blue Devils made the Final Four as a 35-4 team and ranked No. 1 at year’s end at KenPom. If you think just bringing in elite prospects and/or prime transfer portal targets and paying them huge money equates to large-scale winning because you’re at a blue blood, go ask Mark Pope how that’s working out this season.
Duke’s proving it can win in a variety of ways, too. On Saturday, it needed to find its ugliest victory yet. Having Boozer on the team solves a lot of problems, but he can’t do it alone. In fact, Boozer had the worst half of his young career vs. Sparty when he managed just two points. He picked up a third foul — a completely avoidable third foul, at that — early in the second half. At that point, it seemed like Michigan State was going to keep its undefeated season going.
Then Boozer went beast mode again: 16 points and eight rebounds in the second half, finishing with 18 points, 15 boards, five assists and fouling out late in the second half. That fifth assist was the most crucial. When Duke needed a play to secure the win, the option was for Boozer to make it happened. Then he found himself mauled and double-teamed, so he passed to a wide-open Caleb Foster, whose 3 rolled in and clinched the game.
MSU ran out of options down the stretch. For as brilliant of a distributor as Jeremy Fears Jr. has been this season (he leads the country in assists, now averaging more than 10 per game), he didn’t make a field goal on Saturday (0-of-10). Tom Izzo is now a hapless 3-15 all time vs. the Blue Devils, and 1-10 in his last 11 games against top-five opponents. It’s the one big bugaboo of his Hall of Fame career.
And even with Michigan State playing its style of choice against such a huge team — slow-tempo ball, keeping the game in the 60s — Duke was comfortable in the fight for all 40 minutes. That’s in part because, even though Michigan State was holding opponents to 60.4 points heading into Saturday, Duke was a tick better at 59.6. It was a second straight win with a battle into the final minute; Duke held off Florida at home on Tuesday with a big 3-pointer from Isiah Evans with 19.7 seconds remaining.
Now Duke is 10-0 for the first time since starting 11-0 in 2017-18.
And while Duke probably won’t leap to No. 1 in the AP Top 25 — I’d expect Arizona or Michigan to take the top spot — it’s going to have the strongest dossier for two weeks, minimum. The next game of note comes at Madison Square Garden on Dec. 22, a meetup with Texas Tech.
Best team? We’ll see. But no other squad has proven more against better competition literally from Game 1 until now than Duke. It’s starting to make me wonder if, somehow, this team can actually match the historic dominance of last year’s group. That team had games lost on last-second shots and botched plays. That’s not happening here, which doubles as the best news for Duke. It’s not only off to a terrific start, these Devils looks like they might have the one thing last year’s elite team lacked: a closer’s mentality.
