Blue Devils emerge from off date with matchup against familiar foe
Looking at the results — eight straight wins — would make you think Duke didn’t need a break in the schedule and would’ve wanted to keep the momentum rolling along.
Of course, looking deeper and thinking of the knee injuries Mark Mitchell and Jeremy Roach are dealing with tells you having this past week off came at a good time for the No. 7 Blue Devils.
“I think we needed a couple of days,” coach Jon Scheyer said at the beginning of the week. “Just to try to get healthy.”
Duke had Sunday off and only lifted Monday. Scheyer said he didn’t anticipate either Mitchell or Roach practicing in the first couple of practices once they resumed, and their statuses will be closely monitored heading into Saturday night’s game against Pittsburgh.
That’s where the awkward part, as Scheyer termed it, comes into play.
Duke and Pitt will have had 10 days between games. The Blue Devils blew out Pitt 75-53 on Jan. 9, leading 62-28 with about 12 minutes left. Duke’s only game since then was last weekend’s comeback win over Georgia Tech, which Mitchell missed and in which Roach suffered his knee injury in the second half.
This won’t be Duke’s only opponent it sees twice within two weeks, either. The Blue Devils play host to Wake Forest for a Feb. 12 game (a Monday night), and then head to Winston-Salem for a rematch on Feb. 24.
Pitt also enters Saturday night’s game having played once since these teams previously met. The Panthers were off last weekend and lost at home to Syracuse on Tuesday night.
“That’s unique,” Scheyer said. “And so, the preparation — it’s not like you’re watching a whole lot of new film. So, you have to really understand, I didn’t think they played very well against us.
“They missed a lot of shots. We did something in the beginning that might have thrown them off a little bit. And they’re not going to be thrown off. It’s going to be a much different game the second time around.”
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Here’s what to know ahead of Saturday night’s game:
Time: 8 p.m.
Location: Cameron Indoor Stadium.
TV: ACC Network.
Announcers: Wes Durham (play-by-play) and Dan Bonner (analyst).
Series; last meeting: Duke leads 17-8; Duke won 75-53 at Pitt on Jan. 9 and has won four straight games in the series.
Records: Pitt 10-7, 1-5 ACC; Duke 13-3, 4-1.
Stat to watch: 19-for-58.
That was Pitt’s shooting clip when these teams met 10 days ago. The 32.8% clip isn’t even the Panthers’ worst of the season; that came a week earlier in a loss to UNC (21-for-68, 30.9%).
The Panthers weren’t much better on the other side of having the weekend off. On Tuesday night, Pitt was 23-for-65 (35.4%) in an 11-point loss to Syracuse.
It’s a far step backward for a team that boasted several shot-makers a season ago.
Duke wanted to improve its defense during the past week. Scheyer wasn’t pleased with how his team defended the ball against Georgia Tech, with the obvious caveat that missing Mitchell for the whole game and Roach by the end of it was a detriment.
The second-year coach was thrilled with the way the Blue Devils defended Pitt in the first meeting, so this presents an interesting litmus test of whether Duke can get back to doing what made its defense successful against Pitt (and most of the other teams the Blue Devils played in the games leading up to the first matchup).
Matchup to watch: Pitt’s frontcourt against Duke forward Kyle Filipowski (No. 30).
Something sets Filipowski off when he sees Pitt as the opponent. Or maybe the Panthers just don’t match up well with Duke’s 7-footer.
In three games against Pitt, Filipowski has averaged 25.3 points on 75% shooting (27 of 36), having hit 9 of 14 3-pointers. Two of those games have been double-doubles — 28 points and 15 rebounds in last year’s first meeting, and 26 and 10 this season.
“The ball keeps falling for me and I was getting in the right spots because of them as well,” Filipowski said after Duke’s win at Pitt this month. “It was just a great night on the offensive end because of how we played together.”
It seems obvious Pitt’s primary objective is stopping, or at least slowing down, Filipowski in this matchup.
That means relying on the Diaz Graham sophomore duo, twins Guillermo and Jorge, and junior center Federiko Federiko. Guillermo (6.4) and Federiko (7.5) have decent block rates, per KenPom, though neither blocked a shot in 40 combined minutes in the game 10 days ago.
Panther to watch: Forward Blake Hinson (No. 2).
Hinson is the opposite of Filipowski in three games against Duke.
Pitt’s volume-shooting forward has averaged 8.0 points in three meetings against the Blue Devils, shooting 7-for-22.
Hinson’s nine-point game against Duke earlier this season was the second time in 17 games he didn’t score in double figures; the other was a 14-point win over Purdue Fort Wayne.
He’s coming off a 12-point game against Syracuse on Tuesday night in which he was 4-for-17 from the field. It was the second time in the calendar year that he was 2-for-11 on 3s, the other coming in a loss to UNC.
Duke did a great job in the first meeting against Hinson of limiting his space and making him uncomfortable. Repeating that effort would go a long way toward continuing Pitt’s offensive struggles.
Blue Devil to watch: Guard Tyrese Proctor (No. 5).
There’s a little bit of a cruel twist in fate that Proctor had his get-right game and has to wait a week to build on it.
The sophomore guard had a combined three points on 1-for-10 shooting in wins over Notre Dame and Pitt, and then caught fire in the second half against Georgia Tech when Duke needed someone to step up.
Proctor finished with 17 points — the second-most he’s scored this season — on 5-for-10 shooting, including three 3s. He had a strong floor game, with six rebounds and five assists, against Pitt, and parlayed that into looking like the player he was projected to be against the Yellow Jackets.
It was also his first start since returning from the ankle injury that basically cost him four games; though, that was because Mitchell was out, and it remains to be seen if the sophomore forward will return for Saturday’s game.
What’s on deck: Duke has back-to-back games against the only two teams in the ACC with one league win so far.
After playing Pitt, the Blue Devils head to Louisville for a Tuesday night game. The Cardinals have presented some challenges, it’s worth noting, having won at Miami and given N.C. State all it could handle last weekend in a six-point game.
This is the first of three straight road games for Pitt, as the Panthers are at Georgia Tech and Miami on Tuesday and Saturday, respectively.
KenPom prediction: Duke wins 78-65.
Devils Illustrated prognosis: There’s some trickiness to this matchup.
Most of it stems from two places: One, that Pitt can’t possibly play as bad and miss as many shots as it did in the first meeting and two, that Duke could come out of this extended break having lost some of its rhythm.
And then you factor in the health of Mitchell and Roach — sure, there’s some trap-game element to this.
But it’s also a Duke team that’s been rolling for six weeks. The Blue Devils found their formula in mid-December after the road snafus and it’s spelled out an eight-game winning streak. There’s little reason to think they’ll deviate from what has worked.
And when they applied what’s worked in the first meeting against Pitt, the result was a 22-point win that wasn’t even that close.