Duke basketball: 5 excuses Coach K cannot honestly use next season
By Matt Giles
The third inexcusable Duke basketball excuse next season: Schedule
Sure, the matchup against reigning NCAA runner-up Gonzaga in Las Vegas on Nov. 29 will be no joke. Plus, Kentucky probably won’t be a pushover in the Nov. 9 Champions Classic, and the Duke basketball opponent for the ACC-Big Ten Challenge is sure to be a formidable one as well.
Yet if Blue Devil losses amount to anywhere near the tune of last season, then the players and their coaches will be left with no other sensible choice but to take a long, hard look in the mirror.
Why is that?
Well, for one, Duke’s only other scheduled non-conference games thus far are the clash with The Citadel on top of the potential outings versus Army, Hartford, and Campbell in the program’s planned multi-team event in Durham.
Furthermore, it’s important to point out that the conference the Blue Devils play in is no longer much of a top-to-bottom juggernaut. With the rise of mid-majors and the relative lack of multi-year sensations in ACC country recently, it makes sense that Duke is alone in consistently landing inside the top 15 on early preseason rankings.
It’s also worth mentioning that Mike Krzyzewski will at least twice battle rival UNC, a squad that will be relying on the mind of a first-year head coach in Hubert Davis.
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Again, no matter what Coach K may want people to believe when next season arrives, his team will not be facing some historically difficult schedule.