This year’s Duke roster looks very different from last year’s, but one thing that hasn’t changed is Azurá Stevens’ dominant play.
The USA Basketball gold medal winner posted a game-high 29 points, leading the Blue Devils on their way to a 113-36 rout in an exhibition against Pfeiffer Thursday night. Stevens finished the game shooting an impressive 12-of-13 from the floor, re-asserting herself as an essential piece of Duke’s offense. It took the 6-foot-6 forward nearly 11 minutes on the floor before she missed her first shot attempt of the night, and it turned out to be the only time where one of Stevens’ attempts failed to fall.
Stevens’ box score was busy from the very start of the game. In the first quarter, she started off hot, going a perfect 3-for-3 from the field and also making 3-of-4 attempts at the free-throw line. The Raleigh, N.C., native was a staple of the Blue Devils’ early offensive flow and also involved herself in the paint on both sides of the floor, notching five defensive rebounds in addition to two offensive boards in the first half.
“Azurá, I thought, was just tough, from start to finish…Overall, I thought she played very, very aggressive,” Duke head coach Joanne P. McCallie said. “I know Azurá was not pleased about [the Blue-White scrimmage] …and she came back very strong.”
Playing alongside a backcourt full of inexperienced guards who had yet to step onto the court against an outside opponent, Stevens provided a level of reliability that allowed the rest of the team to flourish around her. She found herself on the receiving end of assists from five different Duke players, including freshman point guards Haley Gorecki and Kyra Lambert. The team finished with 28 assists, and Stevens was involved in more than one-third of them.
Throughout the game, the forward displayed the composure that merited her All-ACC preseason selection. Although she was a target on the block for the Blue Devils all night—allowing the team to score more than half of its points in the paint—she showed that her talents are not contained to the low post.
One of the sophomore’s most impressive moments came at the midway point in the third quarter, when Stevens stole the ball from the Falcons and took it the length of the floor but was halted by a final Pfeiffer defender near the basket. Instead of trying to take the player one-on-one, she used the space given to her by the defender and swished a mid-range pull-up jumper with confidence.
Stevens’ success was not only facilitated by her keen decision-making and talent, but also by the fact that the Falcons only had four players on the roster standing taller than six feet. Stevens had a height advantage of six inches or more against opposing defenders throughout the game, which allowed her to find the rim uncontested and provided an easy target for the team’s variety of guards.
“To exploit the mismatches, that’s what we try and focus on every game because we have the height advantage, especially at my position most of the time,” Stevens said. “We just try to exploit that whenever we can, and we knew coming in that this would be a shorter team.”
Defensively, Stevens asserted her dominance and held her own against smaller players that attempted to slip by her. It doesn’t show up in the statistics, but Stevens’ presence was a frequent deterrent for potential shots by a Falcon offense that had 14 less scoring attempts than Duke. Often times, a Pfeiffer player would begin to drive toward the basket, but instead passed the ball to the perimeter after realizing that the towering body of Stevens stood in front of them.
Stevens’ high-level play on both ends of the floor has a tangible impact on the final score, but also has an intangible impact on the attitude and demeanor of her teammates. McCallie pointed to Stevens’ consistent scoring as a major benefit to the team as it makes its push toward the start of the regular season.
“The best players, the great players, the special players are extremely consistent. You can rely on them. When you project that to your team, it’s worth gold,” McCallie said. “When your teammates know, ‘We can count on you’—that’s a special thing, and that’s how you become a great player. That’s how you become an All-American, [and] that’s how you lead teams to championships.”
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