This column is part of our dueling columnist series in our men's basketball season preview. The point can be viewed here.
Seven National Players of the Year and 32 first-round draft picks have all played for head coach Mike Krzyzewski at Duke. None of them have ever lost fewer than two games in a season.
The Blue Devils did not go undefeated in 1992, with the entire core back from their first national championship team, nor in 2001, when Shane Battier and Jason Williams split National Player of the Year honors in the same season. They didn’t run the table in 2006, when all-time leading scorer J.J. Redick and National Defensive Player of the Year Shelden Williams were both seniors.
And we think a team with a bunch of unproven freshmen and all of four players that have spent significant minutes in a Duke uniform can do what its storied predecessors could not? Not a chance.
Since Indiana went 32-0 on its way to a national championship, four teams have entered the NCAA tournament unbeaten—Indiana State in 1979, UNLV in 1991, Wichita State in 2014 and Kentucky in 2015.
All of those teams played in conferences without another team in the top 15 of the final AP poll. The Blue Devils play in the ACC.
It is hard to make it through an ACC slate unscathed any year, but the conference is particularly strong this year. Five ACC teams are in the top 12 in the nation in basketball statistician Ken Pomeroy’s preseason projections, and Duke has to face North Carolina, Virginia, Louisville and Syracuse on the road.
The showdowns in Chapel Hill and Charlottesville, Va., will be tossups by themselves, and if Duke escapes those hostile environments with two wins, there will still be 38 other games on the schedule to win. The Blue Devils may have a good chance to win each individual game, but there are too many chances at slip-ups for Duke to win every game.
It is not impossible to run the table in ACC play, though—in fact, Krzyzewski and the Blue Devils did it in the 1998-99 season.
That team might be a reflection of the best-case scenario this year’s squad, with a plethora of young talent and four eventual lottery picks in the 1999 NBA draft. Duke coasted past a No. 4 Maryland team on the road and routed the Tar Heels by 20 in the Dean E. Smith Center, winning every ACC regular-season and tournament game they played by at least eight points in the midst of a program-record 32-game winning streak.
But by the time those Blue Devils got to ACC play, they had already lost to then-No. 15 Cincinnati in November.
Young teams that get tested early often falter, and Duke is less than two weeks away from a Champions Classic matchup with Kansas, which is right behind the Blue Devils at No. 2 in the preseason USA Today Coaches Poll.
The Jayhawks return upperclassmen Frank Mason, Devonte’ Graham and Landen Lucas and are also adding 6-foot-8 wing Josh Jackson, ESPN’s second-ranked freshman in the class. They could easily derail Duke’s bid at a 40-0 season before it picks up steam.
Although the Blue Devils have the other two-thirds of this season’s top three freshmen, Harry Giles has not played basketball in nearly a year and seems unlikely to recover from a knee scope in time for the Kansas game.
Jayson Tatum—currently sidelined with a foot sprain—is expected to be back for the start of the regular season, though, which could set up a highly anticipated matchup between the 6-foot-8 swingman and Jackson reminiscent of the 2013 Champions Classic game between Jabari Parker’s Blue Devils and Andrew Wiggins’ Jayhawks the last time the two teams faced off. Kansas won that battle.
There is no yellow brick road to perfection in the regular season for Duke. Its schedule is too strong, and there are too many questions marks surrounding the team. Nobody knows if Giles will return and be a major factor this year, and post depth could wind up being a weakness for the second straight year.
It will be hard enough for Duke to get to 31-0 entering the postseason, and that is not to mention the NCAA tournament, which is a different animal in and of itself. It takes a lot of talent and a little luck to conquer, and a lot of the Blue Devils’ greatest teams have come up short.
It is ridiculous to think Duke can enter the postseason undefeated, something even Krzyzewski has never done as a coach, and it is rational but wishful thinking to believe Duke will win the NCAA tournament.
Putting the two perfect segments together will be nearly impossible.
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