Coming off their most complete game of the year, the No. 4 Blue Devils have good reason to be confident when they take on Wake Forest Saturday.
“For this team to get their first road win and withstand a team’s run... was huge for us,” senior Nolan Smith said after Wednesday’s win over N.C. State. “It is going to be a big boost for us going forward.”
Not that Duke (17-1, 4-1 in the ACC) has much to fear from the Demon Deacons anyway.
Somehow, Wake Forest (7-12, 0-4) is even less impressive than its record suggests. The team opened its season by falling to lowly Stetson by 10 points at home. While the Demon Deacons recovered to beat Hampton—a member of the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference—in their next game, all of their other wins have come against sub-.500 teams, most of which were mid-majors. In ACC play, Wake Forest’s losses have come by an average of 26 points, most recently in a 74-39 drubbing by Georgia Tech, a middle-of-the-pack ACC squad.
For the Blue Devils, this provides an opportunity to further craft their identity without Irving.
“They are learning their roles.... We are trying to figure out what they do,” head coach Mike Krzyzewski said Wednesday. “We played a really hard schedule with the other team... and we come into the ACC with a really good record but this team wasn’t the team that beat those teams.... The ACC now is more like the late November, early December games for us where our guys are learning... and roles will develop as a result of that.”
In a way, these past two weeks have been a lot like the tough two-week stretch that included games against then-No. 4 Kansas State and then-No. 6 Michigan State.
Except these games have challenged Duke in a way the Spartans and Wildcats did not. Prior to the Maryland game, Duke had trailed in the second half only once—against Butler—and never by more than two points. Against the Terrapins, though, the Blue Devils allowed a 7-0 run in the opening minute of the second half to fall behind by six, their biggest deficit of the season at the time. Although Duke went on to win the game, the team was unable to rally for a victory against Florida State after falling behind by 11 on the road. Against Virginia, the team again needed to stage a comeback after trailing by nine in the second half.
The Blue Devils almost definitely won’t face that type of adversity against Wake Forest, but a big game will help the team build an expectation of success.
“Those seven guys, outside of Nolan and Kyle, they just need experience,” Krzyzewski said. “They need to do things like they did [against N.C. State] and they need to do it a few more times so then they say, ‘That’s what I do. It’s not what I did on Jan. 19 against State; that’s what I do.’ That’s how roles are developed.”
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