Loaded Duke looks ready to defend its national title next season

PRINT EMAIL FACEBOOK DIGG TWITTER RSS SHARE

Incoming freshman point guard Kyrie Irving should make Duke a fast-paced team once again. Jim Rinaldi/Icon SMI

When Kyrie Irving committed to Duke on Oct. 22, 2009, the feeling among Blue Devils coaches, assistant Chris Collins said, was that Irving would be a "game-changer" at point guard. They considered Irving, who played at St. Patrick's in Elizabeth, N.J., to be the best point guard in the high school class of 2010, ahead of Brandon Knight, Josh Selby and Cory Joseph. The Blue Devils had been trounced by a far-more-athletic Villanova team in the Sweet 16 of the previous NCAA tournament and the prevailing wisdom in the media was that Irving (along with the other mega-recruit they were chasing at the time, Harrison Barnes) was the key to them getting back in the national-championship hunt after an eight-year drought. Duke needed a few future lottery picks on its roster to return to glory -- or so we all thought.

Duke managed to win a national title in the season before Irving set foot on campus, and I asked him after last month's Jordan Brand Classic if that was something he expected to happen. "To be honest," he said, "not really."

Now Irving is joining a team that's likely to be No. 1 in the post-draft-deadline Power Rankings I'll release next week, and has a realistic shot at back-to-back titles. While potential 2010-11 contenders Butler (with Gordon Hayward) and Purdue (JaJuan Johnson) are in limbo leading up to the May 8 deadline for underclassmen to pull out of the NBA draft, the Blue Devils' one first-round possibility, Kyle Singler, passed on the draft altogether, giving Duke the country's best 1-2-3 trio for next season in himself, Nolan Smith and Irving. This won't the same kind of Blue Devils team that we saw last year, though: Coach Mike Krzyzewski has a history of changing styles according to personnel, and as Collins said, Irving is a game-changer. So as we wait for the rest of the national landscape to come into focus, let's examine the preseason favorite for '10-11, whose roster is already locked in.

The Irving factor

Irving's impact won't be as much on offensive quality as it will be on tempo. Duke had the most efficient offense in the country last year and much of that was because senior point guard Jon Scheyer had a brilliant final season, posting a 127.0 efficiency rating with a 2.98-to-1 assist-to-turnover ratio. Even though Irving's NBA potential is much greater than Scheyer's, I think it'll be impossible for Irving to be that efficient in Year 1.

What Irving can do, though, is make Duke a fast-paced team once again. He said that Krzyzewski recruited him "to be a pure point guard and get up and down the court," and playing alongside Smith, he should be able to make that happen. Scheyer was more of a methodical point guard, and as the Blue Devils made more and more use of 7-footer Brian Zoubek last season, they had to slow down the game. "We made a choice to be more of a half-court, physical, defensive team last year, because of our personnel up front and how little depth we had on the perimeter," Collins said.

And they were wildly successful doing just that, finishing No. 1 overall in kenpom.com's efficiency rankings. But the smart adaptation this year, Collins said, will be to "play fast" -- and a likely lineup of Irving, Smith, Singler and the Plumlee brothers would give them five athletes who can make plays in the open floor.

It's common for coaches of slower-paced teams (Duke ranked 249th in possessions per game in '09-10) to talk about playing fast in the offseason, and then not actually put it into practice, but the stats show that the Blue Devils are willing to run when they have the right personnel. Their pace has varied wildly over the past five seasons:

Compare that to their rival, North Carolina, which has played a similar (fast) pace for each of the past five seasons:

I'd expect Duke to get back in 70-plus possession territory this season -- and there's a chance the Devils could play even faster than Carolina.