After the Blue Devils gave up 77 points in an early-season loss to Vanderbilt, one wondered whether Duke’s defense would improve enough to make the team an ACC contender.
The Blue Devils responded by using a stifling matchup zone defense to knock off then-No. 3 South Carolina just a few weeks later and hold opponents to fewer than 70 points in 22 straight games after their first defeat of the season in Nashville.
The active defense propelled the Blue Devils to new heights, as Duke earned eight top-25 wins on its way to tying for second in the ACC regular-season standings and advancing to the conference tournament title game. The Blue Devils’ zone held opponents to just 54.9 points per game and 33.3 percent shooting from the field entering Monday’s contest, giving head coach Joanne P. McCallie’s team a proven formula for staying in games even when its offense was out of sorts.
The key to Duke’s matchup zone was the activity at the top, with Kyra Lambert and Lexie Brown among the nation’s best at pressuring the ball and jumping into passing lanes. Even when opponents hit the high post or short corner—the two soft spots in any zone scheme—Lambert and Brown had a knack for disrupting plays as help defenders and using their speed to still close out on 3-point shooters.
But with Lambert lost to a torn ACL she suffered in Saturday’s first-round win against Hampton, the Blue Devils looked like a completely different team defensively, and Duke’s recipe for success quickly turned into a beacon of failure. Although the Blue Devils tried to use a bigger lineup to match up with a hot-shooting Oregon team, their lack of quickness on the perimeter without their fiery sophomore guard highlighted the unit’s limited perimeter depth.
“You could never replace a person like Kyra,” McCallie said at a press conference the day before Monday’s game. “We will not try to. We will not try to reinvent that.”
Based on those comments, one might have expected Duke to try a different defensive strategy—especially after the Ducks assisted on all eight of their buckets in the first quarter—but the Blue Devils stayed in the matchup zone throughout their season-ending loss.
Oregon had little trouble exploiting the gaps early and often, comfortably getting the ball to the high post and either kicking the ball out for uncharacteristically open 3-pointers or attacking in the paint. Duck freshman Ruthy Hebard controlled the interior with 20 points and 15 rebounds, forcing Duke to collapse inside and leaving the Blue Devils susceptible to quick passes back out to the perimeter.
“The game plan was just to play through the high post,” Hebard said. “We would always have open shooters and [players] inside, so I just tried to be strong with the ball and do what I do.”
A few defensive lapses early on were expected, especially as Duke learned to play without its perimeter spark plug.
But as the contest wore on, it became clear that Oregon was not getting sped up by the Blue Devils or bothered by their length like so many previous victims of the matchup zone. Without Lambert’s ball pressure, the Ducks were able to play at a comfortable pace in a way no opponent had at Cameron Indoor Stadium all season.
“Kyra was one of our best perimeter defenders, so you have to factor that into our defense,” Brown said. “I thought that we held them in check at times and at times we had breakdowns defensively.”
As is the case with any zone defense, Duke’s is susceptible to quick ball reversals and precise 3-point shooting. The Blue Devils had still been one of the nation’s top 3-point shooting defensive units, often rotating fast enough to force rushed attempts and holding teams to just 25.9 percent from beyond the arc before Monday—the second-best mark in the nation.
Against one of the nation’s top perimeter shooting units, however, Duke was unable to impose its will. The Ducks entered the game ranked fourth nationally at 39.2 percent, with junior Lexi Bando leading the way with a quartet of triples.
Although Bando missed her first five triples Monday, her team was generating wide open looks and executing well enough to maintain the lead on the road. Once Bando got going to make four of her next seven 3-pointers, Oregon pulled away, going ahead by 15 early in the fourth quarter after Bando and Maite Cazorla—who also knocked down four triples—hit back-to-back daggers.
“Those guards deserve a lot of credit,” McCallie said. “They worked the ball well, the three of them, and created. There were stops, obviously, that we didn’t make, whether they could penetrate and kick or passes around the perimeter.”
The Ducks were slotted as a No. 10 seed in the NCAA tournament, but their rare combination of strong interior scoring and an array of sharpshooters was the perfect combination to capitalize on Lambert’s absence. Even with Oregon missing several open perimeter shots, the Ducks finished with 74 points—a far cry from what McCallie’s team had gotten accustomed to allowing during its 87-game home winning streak against unranked nonconference opponents.
And as is often the case, one side of the court affected the other.
Without long rebounds to start Duke’s transition attack and Oregon pressuring the Blue Devils to wear down Brown, Duke’s normally efficient shooting disappeared. Redshirt junior Rebecca Greenwell seemed particularly affected by Lambert’s absence, shooting just 3-of-11 with five turnovers after being thrust into a more prominent ball-handling role.
The end result was the same as it was in 2014 following another injury-plagued season.
The Blue Devils were left watching an elated opponent celebrate a rare triumph for a less heralded program at Cameron Indoor Stadium and wondering what happened to their perimeter depth.
“They had more players step up and play across the board,” McCallie said. “They had better balance with 20 assists and they played more of a full 40 [minutes].”
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