Cooper Flagg, freshmen, defense: Duke dominance by the stats
The 2024-25 men’s college basketball season in the ACC is shaping up as a supremely disappointing one.
The conference hasn’t been anywhere near as dominant as its reputation suggests: It is tracking to get only five NCAA tourney entries yet again in the latest bracket forecast from ESPN’s Joe Lunardi, and it sits seventh in aggregate winning percentage — behind not just the likes of the powerhouse SEC, Big Ten and Big 12, but also Conference USA, the Big East and even the Atlantic 10.
Still, there has been at least one bright spot for the ACC in its 72nd season of operation.
Duke, the conference’s lone ranked team in the latest AP men’s basketball poll, has lived up to preseason expectations that were high, but guarded, given the team’s personnel losses and reliance on inexperienced talent. Led by highlight-reel freshman and 2025 NBA draft projected No. 1 pick Cooper Flagg, the Blue Devils are 12-2, with their sole losses coming at neutral sites against ranked teams Kentucky and Kansas, a pair of highly rated fellow blue bloods.
The No. 4 Blue Devils, who host Notre Dame on Saturday at noon on ESPN, also have the potential to be better by March than they are right now, the rare ACC factor that should strike fear into the hearts of contenders.
As the ACC-leading Blue Devils dive into the full swing of conference play, let’s look at five themes that have shown up in the early numbers.
Flagg is the real deal
It’s not exactly like Flagg, who turned 18 on Dec. 21, had tons of doubters coming out of high school — the versatile 6-foot-9 forward from Maine was the projected No. 1 pick in this summer’s NBA draft before he set foot on the court in Durham, North Carolina.
But freshmen can be unpredictable sometimes; the past two top high school recruits (Isaiah Collier in 2023 and Duke’s own Dariq Whitehead in 2022) both failed to crack the top 20 of their respective drafts after their one-and-done seasons. Flagg, though, hasn’t budged from the No. 1 spot in ESPN’s Top 100 rankings, and with good reason.
Flagg is one of 11 players in the nation to post a +5 Box Plus/Minus (BPM) on both sides of the ball, joining a club with Houston’s Emanuel Sharp, Kansas’s Hunter Dickinson, Auburn’s Johni Broome — who is the Wooden Award front-runner — and others. Flagg ranks seventh among high-major players in BPM, sixth in usage rate, and he’s one of 25 players with block and steal rates both in excess of 3%.
He hasn’t been perfect, as evidenced by his shooting 30% on 3-pointers and ranking well below average in effective field goal percentage. But Flagg’s BPM performance is better in conference games so far, a sign of his generally improved trajectory since his college debut on Nov. 4, an 86-82 win against Maine.
Beyond Flagg, more freshmen are leading the way
Flagg was always destined to headline the 2024-25 Blue Devils’ crop of rookies, given his status as the nation’s top recruit and one of the most hyped freshmen in program history — which is saying something, as this is the same team that gave us Zion Williamson and Paolo Banchero, among others. (Both players made the cut when ESPN’s Myron Medcalf compiled a list of the top 25 seasons by a freshman over the past 25 years, beginning with the 1999-2000 season.)
Flagg is leading Duke in value according to a blend of the metrics found at BartTorvik.com, with a value of about 10.5 points above replacement per game. But among fellow freshmen, Kon Knueppel ranks second (7.9), big man Khaman Maluach is fifth (6.2) and wing Isaiah Evans ranks eighth (3.8).
Overall, the Blue Devils are getting an estimated 31.2 points above replacement per game from their first-year players, the most of any team in the country by a wide margin. The closest comparison is Rutgers, who also added highly touted recruits Ace Bailey and Dylan Harper — but Flagg has Harper (9.8) narrowly beat, while each of Duke’s next two top freshmen are ahead of Bailey (6.1).
The flip side — and downside — to this is that Duke ranks among the bottom 50 nationally in value from its seniors, with forward Mason Gillis being practically the only rotation member (4.3 points per game in 13.8 minutes per game) from that class on the roster. But that might not be a bad thing. There is some evidence that freshmen improve their shooting more rapidly during a season than older players, which would figure to help Flagg and Maluach at the very least — Knueppel and Evans are already good shooters — as the 2024-25 season progresses.
Duke’s defense is as good as it has been in decades
With previous scorers such as Banchero, Kyle Filipowski, Jared McCain and Jeremy Roach on hand, recent iterations of the Blue Devils did not lack for offensive talent. The Blue Devils ranked eighth in Ken Pomeroy’s offensive efficiency rating last season and had led the nation in offense during the 2021-22 season, the last of Mike Krzyzewski’s legendary tenure as coach.
But Duke hasn’t been quite as dominant on defense.
While everything is relative — being that many programs would love to rank 16th in defensive rating, as Duke did last season — the Blue Devils hadn’t cracked the top 10 on defense since 2018-19, and they finished that high only twice in the 13 seasons since 2010-11. (By comparison, they were top 10 on offense 11 times in that span.)
This season has been different.
With Flagg hounding opponents for nearly 31 minutes per night, plus other elements such as the defensive impact of senior Sion James on the wing — according to Evan Miyakawa’s data, only two other qualified players in the nation (Houston’s Milos Uzan and Joseph Tugler) have been associated with stifling opponent scoring more while on the court than James — the Blue Devils currently rank third in the country in KenPom defensive rating, trailing only AP No. 12 Houston and No. 1 Tennessee.
The last time Duke ranked top 5 on defense was 2009-10; the last time the Blue Devils were better than third was 2004-05, when Shelden Williams, Shavlik Randolph, Daniel Ewing and Sean Dockery spearheaded the nation’s No. 2 defense.
That team had superior rim protection (a 13.9% block rate versus 10.9% this season) with Williams and Randolph swatting away a higher share of opponent shots on the interior than anyone on the 2024-25 roster. However, this year’s version is cleaning up the defensive glass more efficiently and allowing a lower effective field goal percentage — including holding them to worse shooting on both 2s and 3s while, just as importantly, fouling less. That’s a sign of how deep and versatile this Duke defense is, something ACC opponents will have to keep trying to break through.
This team will live and die by its shooting
We’ve talked a lot about how much Flagg has put his fingerprints on this Duke team, from leading the freshman charge to helping the program find a new level on defense. But ironically, one of the biggest hallmarks of the 2024-25 Blue Devils might be their shooting — a factor that Flagg (who takes a comparatively small 26% of his FGA from downtown) plays less of a role in shaping.
Unlike rival North Carolina under longtime coach Roy Williams, whose teams famously avoided the rising trend of 3-point shooting, the Blue Devils didn’t strongly resist the deep ball under Krzyzewski. Several of his teams hovered around or above a 40% share of their shots from 3, including the 2001 championship squad.
But after ranking outside the top 150 in 3-point tries per FGA in each of Jon Scheyer’s first two seasons as the Blue Devils’ coach, with only about 36% of their shots happening from 3, this year’s team is up to taking nearly 48% of its shots from beyond the arc. Led by the sharpshooting of Tyrese Proctor, Knueppel and Evans, that share ranks 33rd nationally and would surpass any previous season for the program (since the earliest data of the KenPom era in 1996-97) by 5.9 percentage points.
More than any other Duke team ever, the fate of this squad will rest on its ability to knock down shots from the 3-point line.
Duke could see its first No. 1 seed since 2019
We’re used to the Blue Devils being a fixture with a 1-seed next to their name in the brackets. Since seeding began in 1979, only North Carolina (78) has played more NCAA tourney games as a No. 1 seed than Duke (64).
But in recent years, that top seed has been tougher for the program to come by. After earning a No. 1 seed 10 times in the 14 tournaments from 1998 through 2011, Duke was a No. 1 only twice in the next 13 seasons — in 2015, when it won the title, and in 2019. (While there was no official bracket in 2020 because of the coronavirus pandemic, Lunardi pegged them as a 3-seed that season.)
There’s a good chance this season restores the Blue Devils to the upper seeds. According to BracketMatrix, which aggregates all public NCAA tournament bracket forecasts, Duke was a No. 1 seed in 40 of 48 projections — including Lunardi’s latest Bracketology update.
The Blue Devils’ average seed of 1.17 across all of the forecasts was tied with Iowa State for the third-lowest average seed of any team. (Auburn and Tennessee were unanimous 1-seeds.) The next-best averages belonged to Alabama (1.85) and Marquette (2.02), relatively far behind the Blue Devils and Cyclones, which speaks to the gap in perceptions between the top four and the rest of the country.
Given that Duke also ranks second — trailing only Auburn — in the NCAA’s official NET rankings, which help guide the committee in its seeding process, and the fact that Duke faces just the 69th-most-difficult remaining schedule according to BPI, it seems like that coveted No. 1 seed is Duke’s to lose.
Source: espn.com