Louisville basketball: Beating Duke not easy, but possible for Cards

Seize the Moment

Louisville will have to make the most of the few minutes Tre Jones and others aren’t in the lineup.

As anyone keeping an eye on college basketball this season can attest to, there are two different Duke teams and the reasoning behind the variations is not what many prognosticators would have expected at the beginning of the college basketball season.

While Zion Williamson, RJ Barrett and Cam Reddish we’re the most heralded of Duke’s freshman, the heartbeat of their team is the lesser recruited Tre Jones. Never was this more evident than when Jones was forced to miss two games in January with a separated shoulder.

This was most obvious in the Blue Devils’s first game without Jones, at home against Virginia. Duke narrowly escaped a home court loss, winning 72-70. Coach K’s squad seamed baffled on how to move the ball without their lead guard.

They had only 6 assists on 26 made field goals, nearly 11 less than their average of 16.9 assists per game. The Blue Devils also looked hard pressed to find valuable three-point attempts as they shot 17% from behind the arc, well below their already lowly average of 32%.

Plainly, as Tre Jones goes, so does Duke basketball. Along with being the team’s distributor he is an elite defender, perhaps the best defender in the country as his position.

Playing 31 minutes per game the Cardinals will get little reprieve from Jones’s exceptional on-ball defense and heady point guard play. In that time though the Cards will certainly have to capitalize on a rudderless Duke ship. Expect to see shifts in tempo and aggression in the few minutes Jones is absent from the court.

Duke doesn’t utilize many bench player on the whole, but when they do there is a significant fall of in talent. This hasn’t always been true of Coach K’s teams of the past but it’s unarguable here. When the starters do check out for short periods, especially Jones, these should be prime opportunities for Louisville to use its considerable talent and depth and make one of its famous runs.