This Duke team a work in progress, but Coach K sees positive signs

Nicole Auerbach | USA TODAY Sports

NEW YORK — Inherent challenges currently exist at places such as Duke, in college basketball programs that rely heavily on their influx of young talent year in and year out.

Sometimes, the product that starts the year is far from polished. That appears to be the case for the 2015-16 team; and coach Mike Krzyzewski admits as much.

“All these guys have to be given an opportunity to grow,” Krzyzewski said Sunday. “They’re all adjusting. Because we’re Duke and I’m coaching, it’s supposed to be this, ‘OK, that’s it, they’re supposed to be great.’ We need to give them time to grow. … We’re a good team. We hope to be a really good team — but we’re not this juggernaut. We have a lot of room for growth.”

He’s starting to see some of that growth. To be sure, the Blue Devils played better at Madison Square Garden against Virginia Commonwealth and Georgetown — winning both games — than they did early last week in a loss to Kentucky.

Grayson Allen, in particular, was sensational, scoring 62 points in the two wins after a dreadful performance against the Wildcats — 2-for-11 shooting and six points, to go along with four turnovers, struggling mightily against the defense of Isaiah Briscoe.

“It feels better to play better,” Allen said two wins later. “For me, it was about making adjustments after watching film and (listening to) the coaches’ feedback.”

Allen, the sophomore guard, is the closest thing Duke has to a star player at the moment, and even he has a mere five starts over the course of his career. Everyone’s roles have changed and/or expanded this season, from Matt Jones to Amile Jefferson to Marshall Plumlee.

Heralded freshman Brandon Ingram hasn’t yet adjusted to the physicality of the college game, Krzyzewski said, making him largely a non-factor on both ends at the moment. Freshman point guard Derryck Thornton is improving as he learns how to run this Duke offense, which he’s had to do trial by fire.

Certainly, there’s a ton of talent — and it shows. Allen’s ability to create and penetrate make him one of the most dangerous offensive players in the country. Ingram remains freakishly athletic. The other freshmen, Chase Jeter and Luke Kennard, have shown flashes of their ability on the offensive end.

Duke will be better as the season wears on. It’s hard to argue anything but that, considering the way the Blue Devils have responded from the painful loss. But Duke is a major work in progress, and that’s OK, too.

This is why Krzyzewski schedules the way he does, and why he puts his team through the ringer in non-conference play — or as he put it, “three hellacious games in six days on the road is a heck of a thing for a team.”

Krzyzewski called Sunday’s game against Georgetown a “war.”

And it was, a back-and-forth struggle that came down to the final shot: Georgetown’s last-second heave to win the game fell just short.

The Hoyas used a variety of scorers to hang in, with four players tallying 13 or more. Duke relied heavily on Allen, whose game-high 32 points came on 12 shots, a stat line Krzyzewski found “crazy.”

“(Allen) wanted to show us how much he means to us and the team,” Jefferson said. “The performance he had this weekend was unbelievable. We’re not in this game without him. He kept us afloat. One game (Kentucky) doesn’t judge you. He knows that. … He came back with a toughness, a fight.”

That’s exactly the description of the kind of player Krzyzewski wants to lean on, though of course he’d like to see the rest of his roster grow and develop, too. But if Duke can ride Allen to victory, it will.

“As much as I can,” Krzyzewski said. “I’ve leaned on my great players my whole career. It’s not about coaching — it’s about allowing your great players to be great, putting them in position to do things you can’t orchestrate. We just kept doing the things (this weekend) that gave him the opportunity to make his reads.”

In general, adjustments will prove critical for the Blue Devils moving forward. Krzyzewski is not opposed to making them; Duke played a 1-3-1 zone defense for much of the game against Georgetown, for example, and the lineup has certainly been tinkered with plenty one week into the season. But Krzyzewski will need to get his players, like Allen, to adjust more on the fly. The Blue Devils all spoke of closing halves better, and coming out of halftime with more energy — two things they did not do well against Kentucky last week. That’s just a piece of the puzzle this team is working toward putting together; there are plenty others.

But there's also time to figure it all out.

“Our group just has to get on Coach’s bus,” Jefferson said. “He has amazing energy right now … (At halftime against the Hoyas,) he told us what he wanted. I thought we did an amazing job of responding. We need to do that for a whole game.

“That’s what we have to do — we have to win fights against really good teams.”

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