Duke basketball discovers a level of defense not seen since its coach was a player

There are certain memories from last March and early April that Jeremy Roach would just as soon forget if he could, and have them wiped out of his mind. It’s never that way, though. Roach knows what happened a year ago, both in Duke’s final home game and in the national semifinals against the same North Carolina team.

And as much as he focuses on the present, and this year, sometimes those thoughts prove difficult to escape. One, he acknowledged with a slight laugh here on Thursday night, has come to him a few times of late, during a stretch in which these Blue Devils, the ones he recently led to the ACC tournament championship, have played their best defense of the season — of many seasons, in fact.

And so yes, the thought has occurred to Roach, Duke’s junior guard. Why wouldn’t it have?

It’s a natural question: What if last year’s Duke team, about as talented as any during the late-stage Mike Krzyzewski teams built around freshmen, had played defense like this year’s Duke team? What if that one, a year ago, possessed the defensive will and nastiness of this one? It’s not a stretch to suggest last year might have ended a little differently.

“I was thinking the same thing,” Roach said in front his locker at the Amway Center in the moments after the Blue Devils’ 74-51 victory against Oral Roberts in the first round of the NCAA Tournament. “But I just think with this team — like, everybody wants to guard. Everybody wants to get stops. Everybody wants to get that feeling of getting a ‘knockout.’

“We call a knockout three stops in a row. Everybody wants that to happen.”

Three stops in a row is nice and all, and fits into the boxing metaphor to which Roach alluded. But if three consecutive stops is a knockout, then what about 14 consecutive stops? That’s how Duke began Thursday night defensively, by stopping the Golden Eagles again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again.

And again, if you lost count. Fourteen times.

By the time Oral Roberts found its way onto the scoreboard, Duke held a 15-2 lead. It only grew from there, and never became fewer than 14 points in the second half. The potential drama of March, so thick in this building earlier in the day when Furman delivered the best day-one finish, disappeared into the maw of Dereck Lively’s wingspan.

Lively, the 7-foot-1 freshman from Philadelphia, blocked his first shot 26 seconds into the game. He blocked his second a few later. He blocked his third about eight minutes after that one, but the official stat sheet didn’t come with a category for all the other attempts he altered, or the ones his presence didn’t even allow. More than any other player, Lively is the defensive difference between this Duke team and its recent counterparts. He finished Thursday night with six blocks.

Mark Williams, the Blue Devils’ departed center, was the ACC Defensive Player of the Year a season ago — but he wasn’t as versatile as Lively is, and Williams wasn’t surrounded, either, by teammates who’ve bought in on the defensive end the way these Blue Devils have. In some ways, Lively is the on-court attitude-setter, the one whose defensive energy and will infects his teammates. It helps, too, that he’s capable of erasing just about any shot, from any location on the court.

“That’s something I take personally,” Lively said, of being challenged at the rim — and elsewhere. He likened himself to the role of a player who does the dirty work, the little things; the kind who’d rather make a name for being more gritty than pretty.

“I’m the clean up man, you know,” Lively said. “Anything on offense and defense, I’ve got to clean up.”

Consider things clean. We’re but one game into a journey that Duke hopes lasts the next couple of weeks, and ends in Houston. It’s early yet. And yet, even so, a discomforting reality is emerging for Duke — discomforting, that is, for any of its potential opponents, and all those who take solace in Blue Devils’ defeats.

That reality: Duke is defending as consistently well as it has in a long time — perhaps at a higher level than any Blue Devils team since Jon Scheyer, now on the sideline in his first season as head coach, was a senior captain in 2010. That Duke team, you remember, ended the season by winning the national championship. This Duke team lacks the senior-laden makeup of 2010 — most high-profile teams do these days — but it’s coming to prove it has the same kind of defensive spirit.

At some point, and maybe it was early on; maybe it was after the drubbing the Blue Devils endured at Miami early February, the team committed to defense in a way that has eluded most, if not all, of Duke’s recent freshman-laden teams. It doesn’t take much of a coaching savant to inspire young players to play hard on offense. Defense, though, can be another matter.

“Everyone’s buying into their role, and everyone’s buying into winning,” Lively said. “There was a point in the season where we were playing like five individuals out there. And now we’re playing as a team.”

That is perhaps the greatest challenge of all this era of college basketball, with constant roster churn: building cohesive teams before players go their own ways. In Scheyer’s playing days, it took years for Duke to become the defensive juggernaut it was on its way to the 2010 national championship. He had considerably less time this season, his first as head coach.

“To hold that team to 51 points is a big deal,” Scheyer said of Oral Roberts, which entered the tournament on a 17-game winning streak, the nation’s longest, and left it after a night of endless frustration. Max Abmas, the Golden Eagles’ leading scorer (22.2 points per game) and among the top 10 leading scorers nationally, mustered but 12 points.

Scheyer and his staff, meanwhile, crafted a masterful defensive game plan built upon the Blue Devils’ versatility. Lively’s talents, his ability to guard multiple positions despite his size, allows for Duke cover considerable ground. On the sideline, Scheyer coaxed whatever he could out of his players, at times looking as though he wanted to be among them.

He’s most active when Duke is on defense. At times he’ll crouch down, hand on his knees, as if he’s ready to run onto the court and take a stance. He had to have been concerned early on Thursday, upon the sight of Duke’s best offensive player, Kyle Filipowski, kneeling over a trash can behind the Blue Devils’ bench, depositing a belly full of nerves.

“It was a little bit of that,” Filipowski said, acknowledging that he owed his episode of vomiting at least in part to the jitters of playing in his first NCAA Tournament game and “just realizing how much I want this.”

Filipowski re-hydrated and rested a bit and came back soon enough. By then, Duke was well on its way, and with a defensive performance that suggested the makings of another deep March run. Starting this tournament, the Blue Devils lack the star power of a season ago. There’s no Paolo Banchero. No Wendell Moore. Yet they’ve discovered a defense reminiscent of old Duke.

No floor-slapping, exactly, but plenty of shot-swatting. A tenacity that hadn’t been seen, with this kind of consistency, since its head coach was a player.