Every team is going to have stumbles throughout a season. Duke women’s basketball dropped two early-season matchups to a pair of the top teams in the country. The Blue Devils fell in their third contest of the season to Maryland before losing their marquee nonconference game against South Carolina.
Head coach Kara Lawson’s team lost both of its centers after last season, and incoming freshman and presumptive heir to the paint Arianna Roberson went down before the season began with a knee injury. Lawson’s previous teams had found success on the backs of elite team defense, but this season was shaping up to be different without graduated standout Kennedy Brown.
“[Brown is] the best defensive player I ever coached, and she did so many things on that end to save us that you wouldn't even know that was happening,” Lawson said in November. “The biggest reason Jadyn [Donovan] and Delaney [Thomas] grew last year was because they played alongside her. That's how they got better through the season, it was her. We’re all freshmen and sophomores down there, so we're not at the point yet where we know what we're doing.”
Associate head coach Tia Jackson works primarily with the frontcourt players and had a tall task in coaching two underclassmen to be able to play at an elite level.
This inexperience was clear as the Blue Devils fell to South Florida Dec. 21, giving the Bulls their first ranked win in over two years. South Florida isn’t an elite team; it finished the year as the 67th best team in the country and a No. 12 seed in the NCAA Tournament.
Duke allowed 65 points in a nine-point loss, its seventh time allowing at least 60 points in only 13 games. There were issues on the offensive end of the court as well, but the lack of rim protection was a glaring hole in the beginning of the season and reared its head again. It seemed like Duke simply wasn’t able to defend as well without an anchor in the paint.
Importantly, the battle in the Sunshine State was the Blue Devils’ final matchup before the midseason pause in the schedule for Christmas, with the calendar turning to 2025 indicating the long stretch of ACC play.
“We were not a great defensive team the first couple months of the season and I felt a little worried,” Lawson said after a 35-point drubbing of SMU. “I knew that we would need to become a better one for conference play, and just in the last few weeks, things have really clicked for us.”
Once conference games began, something shifted. Duke only allowed more than 60 points thrice, in losses to N.C. State, Notre Dame and Louisville. The driving factor behind the improved defensive numbers is a massive reduction in points allowed in the paint.
Before the calendar flipped and excluding noncompetitive games against vastly inferior opponents Wofford, Radford, Dayton and Belmont, Duke allowed an average of 38 points in the paint. In the rest of the regular season, that number plummeted to 26.6 points per game.
The ACC has been an elite conference this season, and the Blue Devils’ primary paint defenders — Toby Fournier, Delaney Thomas and Jadyn Donovan — faced it for the first time. Fournier, the conference’s top freshman, gained the most recognition for her work on the offensive end of the court but played outstanding defense on the interior. Additionally, sophomores Thomas and Donovan had never played center in college before this season; the trio of underclassmen were thrust into the fire and met the challenge admirably.
“On defense, we've used the experience of early in the season. We have young players in our frontcourt, and they're growing and maturing defensively. I think their growth has helped the rest of the team,” Lawson said in January. “We’re at the point in the season where we're seeing repeat coverages, meaning we're going to guard certain things certain ways, and they have recall from early in the season.”
They were able to meet the challenge of the regular season, but the postseason is a different game. In their run to the ACC championship, the Blue Devils faced the trio of N.C. State, Notre Dame and Louisville again. In its three regular-season losses to those squads, Lawson’s team allowed an average of 39.3 points in the paint, with the Wolfpack scoring 58 points — Duke’s worst showing of the season.
As the Blue Devils avenged all three losses, they only allowed an average of 22 points in the paint, holding N.C. State to a paltry 20 in the championship game. The defensive emergence of the duo has been a revelation for Duke, significantly raising its ceiling come the NCAA Tournament.
“We've just been running through our defense and focusing on it every single practice,” Fournier said after taking down Cal. “Every single speech [Lawson] makes is about becoming that defensive team that we want to be. Every single defensive drill we have, we're treating it like offense. We're all getting excited for it, getting excited for defense as much as we get excited for offense.”
Through Lawson’s tenure, she’s created a culture of hard work, and it’s been apparent on the defensive side of the ball throughout her five seasons in Durham. This year, her team has developed together in a truly special way.
“I think all of our forwards have grown defensively throughout the course of the season,” Lawson said. “I felt that would happen because our entire forward group is freshmen and sophomores. We're just really young there and didn't have a ton of experience. Delaney and Jadyn played a lot as freshmen; they have become our anchors defensively in terms of their consistency and their knowledge of the schemes and their discipline within what we're trying to do.”
They say defense wins championships, and Duke’s has certainly become championship-caliber.
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