'A defining month': In its win against Miami, No. 3 Duke men's basketball showed its flourishing chemistry

Mason Gillis made himself open for Khaman Maluach at the top of the arc. Without a dribble or a pivot, Gillis passed the basketball into the paint, where Kon Knueppel caught it, took a pivot and followed through on a layup. It all happened in a matter of seconds.

By that point — with 6:19 left in the first half — Duke already led Miami 37-17. As the minutes dropped, so did Blue Devil shots. The home team’s lead grew, its points working like energy shots: Every successful basket fueled yet another one.

When Duke beat Notre Dame Saturday, Cooper Flagg, rightfully so, carried the narrative. But when the Blue Devils took down the Hurricanes, the story was about every man on the court and off the bench, about the way the nine rotation players identified and amplified each others’ best strengths.

What many of the Blue Devil faithful likely noticed Tuesday night was delivered by Gillis, who, alongside an improving Patrick Ngongba II, stepped up to fill the sizable hole left by an injured Maliq Brown. Indeed, this was the question many fans tossed around leading up to the Miami game: What will Duke look like without Brown? Few worried that the junior’s loss would mean the difference between a win or a loss against Miami, but the finer points of Duke’s functionality were certainly on trial in Durham Tuesday.

Maybe the answer to Brown’s absence is as simple as depth in the form of Gillis and Ngongba. The former took six shots all night, all from three, and landed four. Gillis’ two recorded assists do little justice to his eagerness to move the ball around to his teammates all night. Ngongba, for his part, put in the work on the boards, catching five rebounds as he looked to settle into the rhythm of a midseason matchup.

But it’s not as simple as depth. There’s a wealth of talent on head coach Jon Scheyer’s bench, but basketball players are not numbers — you can’t add talents together to make a winning sum. Duke’s success Tuesday had less to do with Gillis’ individual performance and much more to do with the playstyle that this roster has so clearly adopted.

“We’ve found out how good we can be when we share it,” Scheyer said postgame. “I think our guys have fallen in love with that.”

Less than a minute remained on the clock. Cameron Crazie favorite Spencer Hubbard, joining the game in the waning minutes on Duke’s comfortable 30-point lead, had just a matter of seconds to score. Hubbard doesn’t get many opportunities to show off his polished ball handling or jump shot, and yet when he had the chance to attempt a layup on the Hurricanes and get his name in the box score, he gave it up. The graduate student drove through Austin Swartz and, airborne in the paint, mimicked a layup motion. Then, he threw the ball to the other side of the court, where a wide-open Caleb Foster caught the pass and swished a perfect trey.

“Maybe Coach K was just saying this because we were losing a lot of games my freshman year in January, but he talked about January being a defining month, and a month you can find something,” he said.

Against Miami, the “something” the Blue Devils were looking for was a good game without Brown. The “something” they showcased was a true understanding of how each other play. This January, Duke has found something magical.

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