Duke Playing Their Best Basketball At The Perfect Time

The Duke Blue Devils will be taking on Notre Dame in the ACC semifinals Friday night, and unsurprisingly Duke is the heavy favorite. Duke is riding a 12 game winning streak and they are playing their best basketball of the season. The timing of this stretch of great basketball couldn’t be better as Duke is primed for an ACC tournament run, and after that, an NCAA tournament run.

This 12 game winning streak includes victories over Virginia, Notre Dame, North Carolina twice, and Thursday nights thrashing of an NCAA tournament bound NC State team.

Not only have they been winning, but the Blue Devils have looked like a final four caliber team. Early in the season Duke’s biggest problem was defense, but lately that has improved drastically. Mike Krzyzewski has changed up defenses this season switching between man-to-man and different zones, a big change in his usual philosophy, but it has worked.

This Duke team isn’t a deep one, as they only have eight scholarship players, so they can’t afford foul trouble to anyone, which the zone helps with. Of the eight scholarship players, it can be argued that seven of them are playing as well as they have all season.

The only one who hasn’t been playing his best is Jahlil Okafor, and its because he hasn’t had to. Okafor gets so much attention and he is content with setting up his teammates for easy looks instead of forcing a shot against a double team. By no means is Okafor playing badly, but he hasn’t been putting up numbers like he was early in the season, although his defense has improved a lot since early in the year.

While Okafor, the ACC player of the year, isn’t putting up the huge numbers everybody else is stepping up. Quinn Cook has been solid all year, Justise Winslow has been unstoppable lately, and Tyus Jones has run the offense to perfection. Even role players like Matt Jones, Grayson Allen, and Marshall Plumlee are playing tremendous basketball.

Allen has showed what kind of talent he has in recent games, and Plumlee scored a career high 12 points against NC State on Thursday night.

This Duke team is as ready for a deep NCAA Tournament run as anyone in the country. They are playing great basketball, and unlike Duke teams in the past few years they have all of the ingredients to win a Championship. They don’t rely on the three point shot (only 13 three point attempts against NC State), they have the best post player in the country, and they have senior leadership.

Duke still has two more possible games to go to possibly wrap up an ACC tournament title, but at this point they may have already locked up a number one seed in the NCAA tournament. Regardless of what happens in the rest of the ACC tournament, Duke is playing tremendous basketball at the right time as March Madness is ramping up, and they have to be considered one of the favorites to make a run to Indianapolis and the Final Four.