In its storied history, Duke men’s basketball has captured two dozen ACC regular-season titles and 27 conference tournament championships.
Few, if any, of those teams bulldozed through the league quite as convincingly as this year’s Blue Devils have.
Duke’s latest victim was a North Carolina team that entered Saturday evening’s regular-season finale having won six in a row to surge back into contention for an NCAA tournament bid. The Blue Devils withstood a mid-game Tar Heels surge, steadied themselves and sent their Tobacco Road rivals tumbling back to the NCAA tournament bubble with an 82-69 road victory at the Dean Dome.
Credit North Carolina for briefly opening a seven-point early second-half lead and at least making Duke work for it. Not many ACC teams have even done that. Twelve of Duke’s 19 ACC wins this season have come by 20 or more points. Ten times, the margin was at least 25. Only Wake Forest and Notre Dame lost to the Blue Devils by nine or fewer. Only Clemson beat them.
The ACC’s switch from 18 conference games to 20 five years ago helped Duke pile up a historic plus-434 point scoring differential in league play this season. That’s the largest in ACC history and among the largest in college basketball history, . The last team to post a bigger scoring differential in conference play was 2016-17 Gonzaga (plus-471). The last power-conference team to do it was 1953-54 Kentucky (plus-503).
Why is the gap between Duke and the rest of the ACC so massive this season?
The explanation starts with this being the best Duke team in a decade, better than the 32-win Zion Williamson-R.J. Barrett juggernaut, better than the Paolo Banchero-led group that took Mike Krzyzewski to one last Final Four. This year’s Blue Devils (28-3) are challenging the narrative that a freshman-driven team cannot win a national title in the era of 24-year–old COVID seniors and grad transfers.
Cooper Flagg has been the rare ballyhooed teenaged prospect who has exceeded reasonable expectations as a college freshman. The future No. 1 overall NBA draft pick averages a team-high 19.6 points per game and leads Duke in every other major statistical category, from rebounding, to assists, to blocks, to steals.
While Flagg has soaked up most of the attention this season, his supporting cast features fellow projected 2025 lottery picks Kon Knueppel and Khaman Maluach and a handful of savvy, proven veterans. On Saturday, that group helped Duke extend its lead from five to as many as 15 when Flagg went to the bench with two fouls less than eight minutes into the game. Then it coughed up all but one point of that lead after Flagg returned and immediately picked up a third first-half foul barrelling into North Carolina’s Jae’Lyn Withers.
The other factor is that this year’s ACC is down. Way down, in fact.
Louisville and Clemson are the only ACC teams certain to join Duke in the NCAA tournament. The 18-team league will only get a fourth NCAA bid if North Carolina, Wake Forest or SMU bolster their resumes with a deep run in the ACC tournament.
