This team is confounding. I think they are good not great, but extremely dangerous when multiple guys are hot shooting, and we have about 5 guys who can get hot. The depth has helped win games at times as well, and the offensive ball movement has been much improved this year and lead to much more balanced scoring, making the team much harder to guard on any given night. The defense has also improved, especially down the stretch.

Issues from past years we have seen still pop up far more often than I would like to see. Too many bad shots and decisions at times leading to many blown leads in the 2nd halves, some we recovered from and some we did not. Too aggressive at times defensively leaving us exposed, and we have trouble matching up against the top teams from a positional size perspective. 5’9” guards and 6’6” and 6’7” post guys will leave you at a disadvantage from the jump against some of the better teams offensively and defensively. Not to mention a seeming lack of coaching adjustments/strategies at obvious/crucial periods of games.

Too often I find myself thinking I wish we just played smarter basketball, and if we did would likely have 2-3 more conference wins this year. This speaks to both player and coach letdowns throughout the season at times.

All that being said, I think this team’s range of outcomes for the rest of the season include an A10 tourney one-and-done performance, all the way to winning the thing and going to the Big Dance (one can dream).

I am a data nerd, and I plotted out the A10 season and schedule for the Dukes prior to our last game to get a better sense of who this team really is. You can obviously go deeper with stats at the individual player level but I wanted to keep this at the team level to get people’s general senses about the teams performance to date, and likely range of outcomes for what has really been a wild year.

The best way to do that from my perspective is to look at data and facts. Wanted to only look at conference play, and any reference to rankings in the below stats refer to the current A10 standings, no perfect way to measure but this at least reflects team rankings given a full body of work.
Some Stats:

• Record vs teams ranked 1-4: (1-3)
• Average Margin of victory: 9 Points (VCU)
• Average Margin of defeat: -8 Points

 

• Record vs teams ranked 6-10: (5-2)
• Average Margin of victory: 12.83 Points
• Average Margin of defeat: -6.50 Points

 

• Record vs teams ranked 11-15: (4-2)
• Average Margin of victory: 12.75 Points
• Average Margin of defeat: -5 Points

 

• Wins by less than 5 points: 1
• Wins by less than 10 points: 3
• Wins by more than 10 points: 7
• Wins by more than 15 points: 3

 

• Losses by less than 5 points: 2
• Losses by less than 10 points: 6
• Losses by more than 10 points: 1
• Losses by more than 15 points: 0

 

• Record in games decided by 5 or less: (1-2)
• Record in games decided by 10 or less: (3-6)
• Record in games decided by 10 or more: (7-1)
• Record in games decided by 15 or more: (3-0)

 

• Average Winning Margin: 13.70
• Average Losing Margin: -6.71

 

• Average Rank of teams beat: 9.40
• Average Rank of teams lost to: 7.14

• Record in first 2 months: 4-5
• Record in last 2 months: 6-2

We lose close games, and when we win its usually a blow out. When we play the bottom 2/3's of the league we  win at a 69% clip, and we beat the top 4 at a 25% clip.

Based on these numbers, sitting 5th makes a lot of sense for this team. Huge game to end the season and if we win, these numbers could change in our favor considerably. A whole lot to play for with a team that can win.

Just need to start turning the corner against the top dogs, go Dukes!

Last edited by Duques102 (3/03/2023 1:28 pm)