Duke’s defense slips — even as the wins pile up against ranked teams like SMU

DURHAM, N.C. — Normally, a fifth win in six games would sound far different.

More jovial. More encouraged. More befitting of a team that just moved to 15-1 on the season, 4-0 in the ACC and remains a verified national title contender.

But one of Jon Scheyer’s best attributes, even when things appear to be going well, is transparency. Telling things like they are.

And after No. 6 Duke’s 82-75 win over No. 24 SMU on Saturday — its sixth win over a ranked opponent — the Blue Devils’ fourth-year head coach wasn’t going to talk around the elephant in the room: his once-vaunted defense has been nowhere near good enough for most of the last month.

“It’s been an issue,” Scheyer said.

Imagine saying that at any previous point in Scheyer’s tenure as head coach. Scheyer learned firsthand from Mike Krzyzewski — first as a player, then as an assistant — that defense wins championships, and reaffirmed that as the tentpole of the program the last three seasons. Duke finished 16th nationally in adjusted defensive efficiency, per KenPom, in each of Scheyer’s first two seasons before last year’s Final Four team finished fifth in the country.

And while Duke still ranks 10th in the country in adjusted defensive efficiency even after Saturday — when it allowed SMU (12-4, 1-2), down its leading scorer Boopie Miller, to shoot 56.6 percent overall and 50 percent from 3 — that doesn’t tell the full story.

“Collectively, it’s not there at the moment,” Scheyer said. “It’s hard to feel very good when they shoot 56 percent from the field all game.”

The thing that must be difficult for Scheyer to square is that earlier this season, Duke did flex elite defensive potential. But the Blue Devils’ first 10 games this season, and their last six — dating back to the Lipscomb game on Dec. 16 — have looked like two totally different teams:

“There’s obviously things we’ve got to clean up and do better,” Scheyer said. “To me, it’s mentality, and then obviously there’s some X’s and O’s strategic things that we’ve gotta help them with as coaches.”

About that second point. While Duke, like most college basketball teams, changes its defensive coverages depending on matchups, Scheyer’s defensive trump card through his first three seasons has been undeniable: the ability to switch one through five.

In each of Scheyer’s first and third seasons — when Duke had mobile 7-footers Dereck Lively II and Khaman Maluach at center — the Blue Devils unveiled that wrinkle in mid-January.

This team, though, isn’t building toward new defensive schemes — or, at least, it hasn’t been lately.

Instead, on Saturday, Duke almost exclusively played man-to-man, the latest defensive tinker in Scheyer’s search for stability. Ever since the Michigan State game — when Scheyer abandoned Duke’s switching late in favor of a zone — Duke has toyed with different zones, drop coverages and now man-to-man in an attempt to find some consistency stopping the ball.

But against an SMU team with the best offensive rating in the ACC, the Blue Devils’ communication and rotations still weren’t where they needed to be, with multiple breakdowns that led to the Mustangs being wide open.

Those were especially pronounced when Duke “blitzed” SMU’s ball screens, sending its big man as a second defender and leaving everyone scrambling on the back end. Not to mention the man-to-man scheme limited Duke’s help defense, which burned it time and again as SMU scored 28 points in the paint.

“Whenever you have adjustments, you know you’re going to have mistakes,” center Patrick Ngongba said of Duke’s man-to-man defense. “It’s something we’ve just got to keep working on to get better.”

A potential solution

While the SMU game exposed that Duke’s defense remains a serious work in progress, it also offered some potential solutions — namely, Dame Sarr, who has now shown for 60 straight minutes that he can be the sort of perimeter stopper the Blue Devils sorely need.

In some ways, maybe that shouldn’t be surprising. Per CBB Analytics, Sarr has easily the best defensive on-off rating of any Blue Devil, with Duke allowing 17 fewer points per 100 possessions when Sarr’s on the court. That was evident against Louisville on Tuesday, when Scheyer inserted Sarr at halftime and had him face-guard sharpshooter Ryan Conwell, who had 16 first-half points.

With Sarr as his primary defender, Conwell went 0-for-3 in the second half, per Synergy.

Sarr continued that stretch Saturday, corralling four steals — and recording Duke’s only block, which forced a shot-clock violation — in just 18 minutes. He wasn’t perfect, but his ability as a point-of-attack defender has a huge trickle-down impact on Duke’s defense. With Sarr deflecting passes and poking away turnovers, it naturally makes life much easier for the rest of Duke’s defenders.

“Dame in that first half, man, his defense was loud,” Scheyer said. “That was a heck of a segment.”

He’s still figuring out how to be effective enough offensively to justify more minutes. Scheyer did start him (and Maliq Brown) on Saturday for one obvious reason — “defense” — but to solidify Duke’s inconsistent perimeter, Sarr has to maintain his 3-point prowess while improving his negative assist-to-turnover ratio.

However, at the end of the day, there’s no doubting Sarr’s defense can be a difference-maker — especially with a level of effort that’s contagious.

“They need that from me,” Sarr said. “I feel like I have some characteristics that nobody has on this team. It’s my job, you know? Like (Isaiah Evans) shooting, Cam (Boozer) passing, scoring. For me, the defensive end — that’s what I have to bring to the team.”

For Scheyer, striking that balance is his ongoing challenge. How does he weigh Sarr’s defense, for instance, against Cayden Boozer’s passing and scoring? How does he stagger Ngongba — who tied his career high with 17 points and is one of Duke’s best offensive threats — and Brown, who, like Sarr, is one of the few Blue Devils whose defensive effort is never in doubt?

There are no easy answers there. But the longer Duke’s defensive slippage persists, the harder it is to argue this stretch is just a blip.

Maybe, as Scheyer alluded to Saturday, this team may just have a lower defensive ceiling than years past — or at the very least, one without the same versatility as his best defensive groups.

“There’s some things for me, idealistically, how I would like us to play and want to play,” Scheyer said, “but also things that I have to be honest with myself and with our guys — areas we aren’t being as good.”

At least in the interim, Duke deserves credit for finding ways to win despite some of its defensive deficiencies. But for the Blue Devils to accomplish their season-long goals — to make a second straight Final Four run, especially — their current defensive lapses aren’t sustainable.

The top-tier defense Duke showed earlier this season is still in that locker room somewhere, even as ACC play picks up.

But it’s on Scheyer and his staff to find it before the rest of the nation’s title contenders pass them by.