Duke uses methodical pace, not speed, to beat Tiger press

Kyle Singler’s modest stat line of 12 points and two rebounds belied his influential role Saturday, and his baseline dunk helped put Duke’s lead beyond Clemson’s reach.
Kyle Singler’s modest stat line of 12 points and two rebounds belied his influential role Saturday, and his baseline dunk helped put Duke’s lead beyond Clemson’s reach.

Often in college basketball, the box score garners far too much attention. Scoring and rebounding totals are tossed around as measures of players’ effectiveness when frequently they don’t tell the whole story.

Saturday’s game against Clemson was a perfect example, as Lance Thomas, Kyle Singler and Jon Scheyer played some of their best basketball of the season despite not accumulating eye-popping statlines.

The Tigers’ press is one of the greatest weapons in the country, as North Carolina learned after being run off the court at Littlejohn Coliseum earlier this year. Saturday night, in one of the most hostile environments in the nation, Singler, Scheyer and Thomas rendered the Tigers’ greatest strength completely ineffective.

It all began with Thomas. Closely guarded by athletic forward Trevor Booker, the Blue Devil senior successfully inbounded the ball nearly every possession, sprinting along the baseline to create space.

“They want you pass the ball to the first corner, so that the trap goes well,” Thomas said. “By running the baseline it makes your man have to move, and it takes longer for him to get to the trap.”

All night long, Thomas was able to do just that, forcing the Tigers to retreat a bit. That’s when Singler and Scheyer took over. By swinging the ball from one side to the other, Duke’s veteran perimeter players forced Clemson’s full-court zone to move, exposing openings.

The Blue Devils then sliced right through those holes, breaking the press with composed dribbling and smart passing.  That, however, may have been the easiest part of dealing with the press. What happened next in the broken court was what made all the difference.

“What we wanted to do was not beat the press to score, but beat the press and score,” head coach Mike Krzyzewski said. “If we broke the press and had a numerical advantage we wanted to take advantage of it. If we didn’t we still wanted to score instead of having the press beat us up. I thought our veteran perimeter did a really good job of controlling the pace of the game.”

Time after time, Scheyer and Singler found themselves in the open court, identified that numbers were against them and set up a half-court offense. As simple as this may seem, the temptation to force a bad shot right away is one of the press’s strongest attributes.

“The press is only effective if it speeds you up,” Thomas said. “If you take your time with it, then you can break it.”

During the second half against Clemson, Duke ran a clinic in game management. The Tigers managed to force only two second-half turnovers as the Blue Devils built a 13-point advantage in the period’s first eight minutes and hardly let Clemson close the gap.

“When we started the second half, our goal was to make sure we got consecutive stops,” Thomas said. “We caused a timeout and after that we just took it to them.”

Stopping Clemson over and over took on added importance Saturday because each stop gave the Blue Devils a free pass up the court before the Tigers could set up the press. Duke executed its plan to perfection, limiting Clemson to 47 points and linking stops together countless times over the course of the second half.

Perhaps nothing told the story of Duke’s performance better than the atmosphere inside Littlejohn. The orange-clad Tiger fans usually feed off the energy created by Clemson’s exciting play, but the orange shirts in the stands started giving way to empty purple seats before this one was even over.

Unfortunately, smart passes, intelligent decisions and crowds silenced aren’t part of a player’s stat line. Against Clemson, however, they were a major part of Duke’s win.

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