MADISON, Wis. — Duke may have stayed close to Wisconsin throughout most of its 73-69 loss Wednesday night, but the Blue Devils’ inability to get any crucial stops when they were within striking distance proved too costly to overcome.
And no two players were harder to stop than the Badgers’ Jon Leuer and Trevon Hughes.
In the first half, Leuer dominated the stat sheet with 12 points on 5-of-9 shooting, along with five rebounds, an assist and a block. The versatile forward scored off the offensive glass, off of drop passes after penetration and even from beyond the 3-point line.
But when Leuer’s shot stopped falling in the second half, Hughes took over the game. The senior scored 19 points in the final frame, including a 3-for-4 shooting display from beyond the arc and 4-for-4 at the charity stripe.
“Hughes and Leuer were terrific. They controlled the game—they always looked poised,” Duke head coach Mike Krzyzewski said. “When you have two veterans who are really good players playing like that, the other guys play better.”
Leuer helped the Badgers to a six-point halftime lead, but it was Hughes who time and again preserved it in the second half. Despite Duke being within a single possession of tying the game numerous times in the second half, Hughes seemed to answer every Blue Devil run.
When Duke cut Wisconsin’s lead to two early in the second half, Hughes answered by burning freshman Andre Dawkins on a backdoor cut for an easy jump shot, and then he sank a 3-pointer with a hand in his face on the next possession.
And for an encore after a media timeout, Hughes made a step-back jumper with no less than three Blue Devils in his face, almost singlehandedly turning a two-point lead into a nine-point one.
“He’s a damn good player,” Krzyzewski said of Hughes.
Much of Duke’s inability to stop both Hughes and Leuer stemmed from shortcomings of its decidedly aggressive man-to-man defense. In the first half, although the Blue Devils’ swarming attack forced Wisconsin to use most of the shot clock, Duke’s tendency to over-pursue and switch on pick-and-rolls gave Wisconsin’s big men open shots on the outside. Leuer and Keaton Nankivil, who was 3-for-5 from the field, took advantage.
But when Duke started to key on Wisconsin’s plethora of jump shooters, the Badger guards were able to penetrate the lane. This drew Blue Devil forwards, especially Miles Plumlee, away from the hoop, and led to easy drop passes to open Badgers, like Leuer, down low.
“At the beginning, we let them do whatever they wanted to do,” senior guard Jon Scheyer said. “A couple times we switched wrong and we gave Hughes an open look.”
For at least a few minutes in that first half, though, Duke appeared to have found a solution in the form of a 3-2 zone defense, with either Kyle Singler or Lance Thomas providing a big body up top.
The look initially alleviated many of the issues Duke faced switching on pick-and-rolls and with penetration thanks to the additional help defense, and the Badgers seemed flustered after the switch. Were it not for a Hughes 3-pointer that was from beyond NBA distance, Duke would have closed its deficit to one at that point.
In the second half the Blue Devils elected to ignore the zone in favor of a smaller lineup, with Dawkins replacing one of the Blue Devil forwards. And the move did help Duke defensively—Wisconsin shot less than 35 percent from the field in the second half as opposed to over 53 percent in the first.
“I thought our defense in the second half was good,” Krzyzewski said. “I thought Dawkins really played well for us.”
But with the man-to-man in effect in crunch time, Duke was subject to the same problems stopping penetration that it experienced early on. That shortcoming proved too costly to overcome, as down the stretch Hughes imposed his will on his defender with less fear of running into a shot blocker.
Indeed, the same issues that allowed Leuer to dominate the first half seemed to last until the final buzzer in the form of Hughes’ virtuoso performance.
“[One stop] is maybe all we needed, but they just got on a roll,” Singler said. “We just weren’t able to get a stop.”
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