Maybe It Is Time To Overreact

Every Duke preseason follows a familiar routine. During the summer, fans overanalyze every little scrap of intel or footage from early practices. Come the fall, the chatter becomes louder and the excitement builds, cluminating in a lofty pre-season poll ranking. By the time the team finally hits the floor against a real opponent in the exhibition season, the pent up energy of six months without Duke Basketball makes every fan prone to overreact to those first real glimpses of the squad.

Overreacting to an exhibition result almost always is a mistake. Last night was the “almost.”

It’s hard to overstate how dominant the Blue Devils looked in their dismantling of Tennessee. Six different Duke players scored before Tennessee exceeded six total points. 12 minutes into the game, the Blue Devils had tripled up the visiting Volunteers. For the game, Duke shot 20% better from the field than Tennessee.

Statistic after statistic shows pure and utter domination.

Yes, this was still an exhibition and Tennessee was not at full strength (although notably neither was Duke without Caleb Foster and Drew Scharnowski). That would be important context if this was a tighter contest. But that possibility was essentially out the window 10 minutes into the game.

The fact is that Tennessee came into Cameron Indoor Stadium wanting to win a game in the greatest arena in the sport. And they were humiliated.

Strangely, the best analogue for this performance is not any of the contemporary, televised exhibitions against Division I opponents. It is, instead, Mike Krzyzewski’s old tradition of inviting the reigning Division II National Champion for an exhibition contest each year. The question in those contests was never whether Duke would win, but by how much and how good they’d look doing it. There were many years in which the Blue Devils would come out sluggish and not defeat an inferior opponent with the efficiency fans would expect. A 40 point victory—a margin that could have been higher were it not for significant minutes for the deep bench—would be seen as a exciting sign for the season to come.

But this wasn’t a DII opponent. It was a pre-season Top 10 Tennessee team coached by Rick Barnes.

This is officially the exception to the “don’t overreact to exhibitions” rule. A Top 10 team, even injury-riddled and on the road, is never supposed to lose by nearly 40 points. A squad full of established college basketball players, making up arguably the best collective class of incoming transfers in the country, is not supposed to be embarrassed to this degree. Even if they haven’t yet formed a cohesive unit and aren’t fully deserving of that lofty Top 10 ranking, there was not a DI vs DII discrepancy in talent, athleticism, and size on the floor in Cameron last night. Yet, it looks that way in the boxscore.

Time to get excited, Duke fans. Time to get excited about John Blackwell, who appears to have adjusted from his high-volume role at Wisconsin into an ultra-efficient scorer as a Blue Devil. Time to get excited by Joaquim Boumtje Boumtje, who at 17 years old outclassed opponents many years his senior. Time to get excited by the fact that Duke’s projected fourth guard, freshman Derron Rippey Jr., was the best player on the court in a Top 10 matchup for significant stretches. Time to get excited by the major leaps forward that returnees Dame Sarr and Patrick Ngongba II have made.

By the way: maybe find some space to recognize this Duke team is shooting 87.5% from the FT line through two exhibition contests. But you can be forgiven for overlooking a subplot like that amidst all this excitement.

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