After Georgetown’s convincing domination of the Blue Devils last weekend, most are backing off from talking about Duke as a possible Final Four candidate this season.
It’s easy to understand why.
Their performance against Georgetown was extremely reminiscent of last year’s embarrassing loss to Clemson, and even if that 27-point thrashing isn’t a perfect comparison, Saturday’s game was at the very least a repeat of West Virginia’s man-handling of the Blue Devils in the second round of the 2007-08 NCAA tournament.
There is no way to sugarcoat it—Duke played played poorly against Georgetown, very poorly.
But despite Duke’s awful performance (let’s just be brutally honest about it), don’t be fooled into thinking this is the same Duke team from recent seasons, destined for an early exit from the Big Dance come March.
The ratings experts would disagree with that assumption.
Right now, Duke ranks No. 2 in the Pomeroy rating.
If you’ve never tried to wrap your head around Ken Pomeroy’s rating system, do yourself a favor and try to figure out what’s going on in ABC’s Lost instead—that would be much easier.
Suffice it to say that Pomeroy’s “pythagorean calculation for expected winning percentage” is an extremely reliable snapshot of how well teams are playing at any given moment in a season.
Last year, two of Pomeroy’s top four rated teams, North Carolina and Connecticut, were in the Final Four.
In 2008, all four of his formula’s top four rated teams played in the Final Four.
Four of his top six rated teams made the Final Four in 2007.
To state the obvious, Pomeroy’s formula is ridiculously accurate.
Need more convincing?
Jeff Sagarin’s ratings currently place Duke as the third best team in the nation. His rating system has been heralded for years.
But how is that possible? How can this 17-4 team that lost lopsided games to Georgetown and North Carolina State in recent weeks score so high in some of the most respected ratings systems in sports?
Maybe it’s because the rating systems see things fans often overlook.
Most fans of the game look at the Blue Devils and see the same team from last season minus Gerald Henderson, their best athlete. All they see is a slow, non-athletic group of skilled shooters trying to make threes like it’s the only way to score.
What most do not see is the second most efficient offense (points per 100 possessions) in the nation.
They do not pay attention to the fact that Duke is tied for first in national team free throw percentage.
Fans forget that the Blue Devil’s point guard has the fifth highest assist-to-turnover ratio in the nation because many hesitate to refer to Jon Scheyer as a point guard in the first place, opting instead to dream about Kyrie Irving’s prophesied dominance of ACC basketball.
The point is that, like Scheyer, Duke is deceptively good.
The Blue Devils may not have some of the obvious tell-tale signs of an elite team, but they are an extremely good team that has simply had some missteps in January, a pretty common phenomenon for elite teams as they transition into conference play (just ask this season’s Texas team or, better yet, North Carolina last year).
Scheyer has struggled a bit, Nolan Smith has been up and down, Kyle Singler is fighting through a wrist injury, and Duke’s best two freshmen, Andre Dawkins and Mason Plumlee, have disappeared in the last few games.
As those issues get sorted out, the Blue Devils will begin to look more and more like a team poised for a deep run in March.
January is over, and if the Blue Devils can learn from the lessons their losses have taught them (stop going for traps and steals in the open court), they will be a team that surprises a lot of fans, but not the ratings experts, in March.
