Simple short-term solution to Duke basketball shooting woes

Having fewer green-light shooters may be the only quick fix to the Duke basketball program’s glaring issues of late from beyond the arc.

Across the current calendar year — i.e., the final 26 games of the 2018-19 season in addition to the Blue-White Scrimmage on Oct. 18 and Saturday’s 69-63 concerning squeaker over Division II foe Northwest Missouri State — Duke basketball players have shot a combined 188-for-648 from 3-point distance.

For those without a calculator or a quick mind for numbers, that’s 29.0 percent, which ranks in the bottom one percent of all 353 Division I programs since New Year’s Day. Meanwhile, to the understandable confusion of many fans and surely to the delight of opposing coaches when game-planning for the Blue Devils, Duke’s number of attempts across this span (23.1 per game) ranks in the top 10 percent of all Division I programs.

It doesn’t take a degree in logic to see that, side by side, these two stats are troublesome. And it doesn’t take a degree in basketball to see that opposing coaches have instructed their players to let Duke keep shooting itself in the foot. On Saturday night, Northwest Missouri State played a compacted zone and barely contested perimeter shots, yet the Blue Devils only managed to hit two of their 16 attempts from deep.

So what’s the short-term solution? It’s actually quite simple: stop having below-average shooters shoot so many 3-pointers.

This Duke basketball squad is old-school in that it is hard-nosed defensively. Plus, the offense may need to look like something out of Hoosiers — i.e., with no elite drivers and only a few decent outside shooters, the Blue Devils may have to rely on crafty ball movement to create buckets from close range.

So while the game as a whole continues to trend toward an unprecedented quantity of 3-point shooting, the Blue Devils should learn from one of the most obvious pitfalls of last season’s team. In short, they should employ the opposite strategy of most programs until Mike Krzyzewski and his staff are able to recruit a significantly greater number of reliable shooters.

Sticking with the old-school theme, Duke’s all-time greatest squad, 1991-92, only attempted 10.9 shots per game from 3-point land. And the only three guys who attempted more than 40 for the season — Christian Laettner, Thomas Hill, and Bobby Hurley — each knocked down better than 40 percent.

ALSO READ: Current Duke roster shows throwback to one 33 years ago

Based on their strokes and stats from either high school or at Duke, freshman forward Matthew Hurt and junior guard Alex O’Connell — maybe freshman center Vernon Carey Jr. and freshman guard Cassius Stanley as well — should be the only ones regularly launching 3-pointers until their teammates invest the countless hours of practice that honing a sweet stroke requires.

Besides, the 3-point line is now more than 22 feet from the basket, which is more than a foot deeper than last season and two feet deeper than the high school distance — yet another reason Krzyzewski might want to consider turning some of his gang’s green lights into either yellow lights or red lights.

Granted, some would argue that the modern game requires a team to take far more than 10 attempts per game from beyond the arc in order to keep defenses honest. That being said, all that hitting 20-something percent of more than 20 attempts per game does is keep defenses laughing.

Stay tuned to Ball Durham for more updates, analyses, opinions, and predictions regarding the 2019-20 Duke basketball team.