Duke Weaknesses (Perceived and Real)

Clearly, this year's Duke team is neither entitled nor even favored to win the National Championship. The widely respected human opinion polls put, at time of writing, half a dozen teams above a Duke team that has failed to receive a single first-place vote this entire season. Clearly, something scatters the blue sunshine. There are many common memes surrounding Duke, though only a few of them actually apply to this years' team. Let's take a look at some of the common criticisms levied against this year's Duke squad, analyzed from a tempo-free perspective (statistics, as always, from Ken Pomeroy).

1) Duke has played a soft schedule. If we go based on the tempo-free stats, nothing could be further from the truth. Pomeroy ranks Duke's schedule second in the nation, behind West Virginia. Sure, their non-conference schedule is ranked 83rd, but take a look at the teams on top of the non-conference SOS rankings: other than Butler, none of the top 20 have a prayer at an at-large tournament bid. And a number of the teams up top are probably there because they played Duke... this criticism is tired and should be sent to the land of misfit memes.

Making the argument worse is the observation that not only does Duke have the #3 offense in raw efficiency (1.17 points/possession), they have accomplished such lofty efficiency against a harder slate of defenses than anyone in the nation (adjusted efficiency of defenses Duke has played: 0.95 points/possession).

Taken more subjectively, Duke will play 15 non-conference games this regular season (counting Thursday's game against Tulsa). Of these, as many as 7 teams could make the NCAA tournament; what is a better preparation for NCAA tournament play than contests against teams that will actually be there? For comparison, Duke is #2 in the Sagarin strength of schedule as well, and played the fifth-toughest slate in this version of RPI.

2) Lack of backcourt depth. It seems only yesterday that the meme was about the lack of frontcourt depth (well, last year anyway). Assuming that Kyle Singler counts as a guard, Duke's main men play a ton of minutes, while backup shooting guard Andre Dawkins has struggled in limited minutes. I have a problem with this criticism on a number of levels. Part of this argument comes from the same area as the Duke Fade, which is that too many minutes are given to the Big Three. Here's the tempo-free stats.

Player......%Minutes........ORtg....%Possessions
Scheyer.........91.6.............130.7.........23.1
Singler.........89.5............114.3.........23.1
Smith.........82.2.............117.5.........23.1

First of all, pretty cool that all three are used in the same percentage of possessions. Second, if you have three players capable of contributing those massive tempo-free player ratings, why would it be a bad thing to play them all the time? If a player was used so much that they tired in-game, his offensive rating would plummet, due to the extended number of possessions played. Duke's top three men (by % minutes played) have a higher combined rating (362.5) than the top three men on Kansas (358.5), Syracuse (333.4), Purdue (343.1), West Virginia (354.4) and Kentucky (334.5), to pick a few. Scheyer/Singler/Smith are doing it in far more minutes than any of those teams, save perhaps WV, who do get 80%+ minutes from Butler and Jones.

For another avenue of argument, I shall paraphrase what I overheard this morning on 99.9 The Fan in Raleigh: "While Duke has the best trio of players in the country, what happens when they are all shut down?" This, of course, has an easy answer: Duke would lose. The better question is: "what's the likelihood of all three being shut down?" The three Duke stars average a combined 53.8 points/game; the fewest they've scored, combined, was 41 in the Preseason NIT championship win over UConn. In Duke's four losses, the trio has averaged about the same amount, and scored a combined 61 points in the loss at Georgetown. Indeed, it seems that Duke's wins will come down to how many points they can drag out of their frontcourt. Which leads to...

3) Duke has no talent in the frontcourt. I should hope that the last three games would silent anyone who would make such a bold claim. There is clearly some talent in the frontcourt, and that is in the (massive) form of Brian Zoubek. The man who makes girls swoon so hard that their marriage proposal signs are upside down has averaged nearly a double-double (9.7 points, 12.7 rebounds) in those games. With his new-found ability to avoid foul trouble, Zoubek has slipped back above the 40% minutes played mark. This finds him back atop the nation in offensive rebounding. Let's nail that home for the readers too lazy to click on the link:

Category: Percentage of a team's missed shots rebounded by a player while he's on the court.
Qualification: 40% of a team's minutes played (that's about 16 min/game, ignoring OTs)

1. Brian Zoubek, Duke 23.0%
2. Demarcus Cousins, Kentucky, 22.8%
3. Anthony Johnson, Fairfield, 17.4%

So, other than the stud freshman at Kentucky, no one is even close to Brian Zoubek in offensive rebounding ability. Against Maryland, Zoubek used missed shots by the Big Three to have an amazing offensive night, scoring 16 points with 17 rebounds (8 OR). Then, against Virginia Tech, Zoubek benefited from Duke's cold shooting for another 16 rebounds (8 OR). This time he tended to kick the ball out to open men, including two assists on Nolan Smith three-pointers.
The tempo-free world is only six years old, but in that time, only three players have had an OR% above 21%: DeJuan Blair was at 23.6% last year. (The next highest season total is 20.8%).

Of course, there's more to the frontcourt than Zoubek, and the tempo-free stats have mixed feelings about Duke's other big men. Miles Plumlee is a very strong defensive rebounder, and at 22.6% is currently vying for Duke's best defensive rebounding mark since Pomeroy started tracking individual stats in 2005 (Shelden Williams' best was 22.0%). Mason Plumlee currently has the lowest offensive rating on the team (94.5), thanks