Duke didn’t dominate Florida State on Saturday on either side of the ball, but the Blue Devils leaned on talent and made the right changes on both sides of the ball.
Florida State made Duke uncomfortable, putting them on the ropes on the road. However, instead of collapsing, Duke responded the way good teams do, doing what it had to do.
That’s something Jon Scheyer has been encouraged by all season.
“I just think this team, they've been in some tough positions this year already and they've shown really good toughness to make the plays necessary in order to win,” Scheyer said, per Anna Snyder. “And I think that's a skill. There's things we obviously have to do better, which we will continue to work on, but I'm really proud.”
That toughness showed up on the defensive end. Scheyer pointed to his decision to go in a zone as the move that changed the game.
“(Zone defense) saved us, it did,” Scheyer said. “These guys have done a good job of just adapting on the fly. … I thought our guys did a good job of figuring the zone defense out and making them hit some tough shots, really down the stretch.”
Duke looked comfortable making those adjustments in real time and that’s perhaps the biggest takeaway.
Scheyer knows this isn’t a finished product, and if it is, Duke won’t be what it wants to be. There are still ways to improve, rotations to figure out, and more, but wins like this are always nice.
Duke didn’t win because everything went right. It won because they figured it out. As the season moves forward, that might be the biggest thing.
Duke doesn’t have much room to relax over its next few games.
Louisville is always good and never easy to beat, SMU can score in bunches, and the West Coast trip to Cal and Stanford looks easy on paper but probably won’t be.
If Duke takes care of business, it only shows that this team is built for a deep run come March. Saturday was a nice step in the right direction for that.
We’ll see if that continues over the next few weeks.