Duke head coach Mike Krzyzewski is known for his ability to adapt.
Whether it is changing his coaching style to fit his players’ skillsets in the one-and-done era or allowing NBA stars to create their own standards as head coach of the U.S. men’s national team, the five-time college champion avoids putting players into the systems that define other top programs like Syracuse and Virginia.
But that does not mean that Krzyzewski lacks preferences for how he wants his teams to play.
And when it comes to defense, players say the 69-year old has one ideal scheme in mind entering the season.
“Coach K is real traditional and he thinks that man-to-man is the best way to go, so that’s what we’re going to play,” freshman center Marques Bolden said at the team’s media day in early October.
Five years ago, it would have been unthinkable for one of the Blue Devils’ newest players to answer questions about what defense Duke would employ. Like many other top programs, the Blue Devils traditionally utilized a full-court, man-to-man defense predicated on sound fundamentals and team discipline.
When one Duke player was beaten off the dribble, one of his teammates would slide over at the right time to cut off penetration, then another Blue Devil would neatly fall into place to help the helper. The strategy made Duke one of the most dominant programs in the country in the early 2000s.
From 2002 to 2010, the Blue Devils finished in the top five nationally in defensive efficiency as measured by basketball statistician Ken Pomeroy six times.
But with freshmen commonly leaving school after one year and the number of transfers across the country shooting through the roof, the continuity and depth needed to effectively play man-to-man defense has become increasingly rare.
Duke has had to learn that lesson the hard way, as it finished 78th in defensive efficiency in 2011-12 and suffered a Round of 64 upset at the hands of 15th-seeded Lehigh. Two years later, Duke finished 87th in defensive efficiency when it lost to 14th-seeded Mercer in the first round of the NCAA tournament. The Blue Devils were relying on lineups that had not played together often, and it showed when Duke’s man-to-man defense was a step slow in critical situations.
For perspective, only one team in the last 15 years has won the national championship that finished outside the top 15 in defensive efficiency—the Blue Devils are projected to finish 18th in the category this season.
After the 2014-15 Blue Devils looked downright lost defensively early in ACC play—they fell from 11th in defensive efficiency to 67th in two games—Krzyzewski decided to mix in some zone to spark his team.
The change of pace worked brilliantly in the regular season, as Duke relied on its new wrinkles to overcome limited depth and inexperience in road wins at Louisville and Virginia. By emphasizing the importance of communication, the Blue Devils went on to address their midseason defensive woes, eventually peaking in the NCAA tournament en route to the national championship.
Led by Matt Jones and Amile Jefferson on the defensive end, Duke finished that season 12th in defensive efficiency after almost exclusively playing man-to-man in the NCAA tournament.
But last season, with Jefferson missing most of the year with a foot injury and Jones forced to play through his own ailments, the Blue Devils never found a comfort level on defense. Whether it was zone, man, or the combination that fueled Duke the previous year, the Blue Devils’ lack of depth caught up to them as they finished 86th in defensive efficiency—the third time in five seasons Duke was outside the top 75.
The Blue Devils will count on another crop of talented freshmen and likely boast another high-powered offense again this season—Duke has finished in the top 10 in Pomeroy’s offensive efficiency stat every year since 2009. But the team’s history begs the question: What type of defense will we see from this year’s Blue Devils?
So far, the answer seems to be Duke’s traditional bread and butter.
“We are going to be a team that will attempt to play full-court, man-to-man defense. It won’t be the only defense we play, but it will be our primary one,” Krzyzewski said at the team’s media day. “We just have to make sure we’re cognizant of team fouls, not just individual fouls, so we don’t have our aggressiveness go against us in that regard and slow the game down.”
With more depth and athleticism at each position than the Blue Devils have had in quite some time, this year’s Duke team could make its mark on the defensive end. The Blue Devils have a natural rim protector in Bolden, a ball-hawking guard at the point of attack in freshman Frank Jackson and a trio of seasoned veterans in Grayson Allen, Jones and Jefferson—meaning they might not need to switch defenses as often as they have the past two seasons.
Throw in versatile freshmen forwards Jayson Tatum and Harry Giles and Duke’s full-court, trapping defense has the potential to wear teams down that can’t match the Blue Devils’ depth.
“We can be very versatile. We can have guys like Jayson, who’s 6-[foot]-8, 6-[foot]-9, playing the point guard,” Jones said at the team’s media day. “Obviously, Frank is very athletic, so I know he can defend the ball better than anyone in the country, so with guys like that and me and [Grayson] bringing the physicality of it, we can definitely pose a huge matchup problem for the other opponents.”
The entire season likely will not be smooth sailing for Duke defensively given the number of new pieces it still has to integrate.
But how the Blue Devils respond on that end of the court will likely determine how far they go this year given their number of offensive weapons, and no one is more cognizant of that than the player who might set the tone in Duke’s full-court press.
“When I came here, I made it a goal to myself to kind of lock in and be the best that I can be as an on-ball defender and off-ball defender,” Jackson said. “This year, that’s definitely going to be a huge part of my game.”
Hank Tucker and Sameer Pandhare contributed reporting.
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