It’s not an excuse, but Duke’s injuries finally caught up with it in the Elite Eight

Duke played the entire ACC Tournament without its starting point guard and its starting center. Yet, the Blue Devils rolled. Then, Duke navigated the first weekend of the NCAA Tournament with just 13 minutes off the bench from Patrick Ngongba II. Against St. John’s in the Sweet 16, Caleb Foster burst back onto the scene with a heroic 19-minute effort. But in the Elite Eight, the Blue Devils’ injuries finally caught up with them. 

Again, Foster and Ngongba both came off the bench. For the first time since his foot injury, Ngongba played more minutes than Maliq Brown, who was dealing with back spasms. Foster played 14 minutes off the bench. Neither looked 100 percent, and against a Dan Hurley team, there’s nowhere to hide. 

Caleb Foster and Patrick Ngongba’s minutes were costly vs. UConn

Hurley, along with his top offensive analyst Luke Murray, who is leaving to become the head coach of Boston College after the season, has designed an offense predicated on constant intricate off-ball movement. Everybody touches the ball, everybody sets and runs off screens, and everybody can score. All five Huskies starters average in double figures. 

Scheyer opted to hide Cameron Boozer, almost always his slowest-footed defender, on UConn’s point guard, typically either Silas Demary Jr. or Malachi Smith. As the primary initiator, they typically do the least off-ball movement, so it largely kept Boozer out of those actions. Caleb Foster wasn’t so lucky. 

In his 14 minutes, Foster was often tasked with chasing Solo Ball or Braylon Mullins through a maze of screens, which he handled respectably in his second five-on-five action since breaking his foot in the regular-season finale against North Carolina. Offensively, however, whether it was from the injury or the toll that UConn’s offense took on him, Foster was clearly a step slow, and the numbers reflect it. 

He finished with no points, two assists, and three turnovers. While Cayden Boozer submitted the most memorable giveaway of the night, in Foster’s time on the floor, Duke’s turnover rate skyrocketed to 35.8 percent of its possessions. Its offensive rating plummeted to 77.4, 14 points per 100 possessions worse than the worst team in Division I this season (Delaware State), and 42 points worse per 100 possessions than Duke’s worst five-man lineup that shared the floor for at least 10 minutes this season (per CBBanalytics.com). 

As for Ngongba, he was tasked with handling UConn’s Tarris Reed Jr. down low, which would have been a handful if he were 100 percent. He was decidedly not. In his 22 minutes, UConn picked on him by involving Reed in screening actions and diving to the rim, or just with straight post-ups. 

Unlike in Foster’s minutes, the offense thrived with Ngongba’s added rim pressure and gravity as a lob threat. Duke’s offensive rating soared to 125.2, but its defensive rating fell to 143.1. That’s 16 more points per 100 possessions than the worst DI team, Bellarmine, and 11 more points per 100 possessions than Duke’s worst defensive lineup this season. 

Duke was a minus 6 in Ngongba’s minutes, a minus 5 in Foster’s, and in their five minutes together, was a minus 4. That net rating in those minutes was even more alarming. 

At 100 percent, this Duke team belonged on the tier with Arizona and Michigan, the two dominant forces set to collide in the Final Four on Saturday night in Indianapolis. While the second-half collapse against UConn was inexcusable, it was emblematic of a team that had so few healthy players that it couldn’t practice on Saturday after beating St. John’s in the Sweet 16. 

Scheyer will face a long offseason of questions after watching back-to-back legendary freshman campaigns from Cooper Flagg and Cameron Boozer go up in flames in the NCAA Tournament. The criticism will be fair for the 38-year-old head coach, but it’s just as fair to acknowledge how short-handed this year’s Blue Devils were in the biggest moments.