In a down year for the ACC there are many more opportunities for the Blue Devils to flounder than to acquire any meaningful wins. Jon Scheyer’s team has to be careful to take each team, each possession seriously and with urgency as they are now everyone else’s opportunity. Records rarely matter in conference play, what does matter is having night in and night out consistency.
Miami entered Cameron Indoor with an awful record, an interim head coach but still, they are a team with immense talent that at some point is going to sting someone. Matthew Cleveland and Lynn Kidd are no strangers to what it takes in ACC play, those two players in particular gave me some pause about this game. Kidd came to play but so did the Blue Devils. Kidd scored 8 of Miami’s first 10 points on his way to a 20 point game, unfortunately for Kidd Miami points came few and far between as Duke clamped down defensively on the Hurricanes while simultaneously exploding offensively. With the score nearly knotted but Duke holding a slight edge 9-8 at the 16:11 mark, Duke went on the first of their runs starting with a 12-2 run that pushed the lead to 13. The Blue Devils quickly followed that up with a 17-5 run and opened up a 27 point lead. Miami seemed shell shocked calling time-out after tim-eout to no avail. On the strength of freshman Kon Knueppel’s 18 first half points, the Blue Devils entered the half with a 50-26 lead.
The second half saw the Hurricanes score five of the first seven points of the second half, leading to a Duke time-out with 17:26 on the clock. After the time-out Duke went on a 13-5 run to right the ship that started with a Cooper Flagg mid-range pull-up and ended with a short jumper from freshman Patrick Ngongba who saw more minutes due to the injury to Maliq Brown against Notre Dame. The Blue Devils never looked back winning 89-54 notching their 11th straight victory, the longest win streak by the Blue Devils since the 2017-18 season.
Kon Knuppel had a career high 25 points, hitting 6 triples in the win. The freshman has made at least two three-pointers in six consecutive games. Center Khaman Maluach added his second double-double in the last 2 games, scoring 12 points and grabbing 15 rebounds.
The Blue Devils shot 53% from beyond the arc hitting on 17 of their 32 attempts and 54.8% from the field overall. Duke netted 15 second chance points off of their 12 offensive rebounds surrendering just 4 points off of their 5 surrendered offensive rebounds. Duke dished 17 assists on 19 made field goals in the first half, and ended the game with a season-high 25.
Miami came into the game as a top 50 offense but the Blue Devils defense limited Miami to a season-low 54 points on 23-of-59 (.390) shooting from the field. The Hurricanes entered the contest averaging 77.5 points per game and shooting 47.8 percent from the field.
