Duke basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski rarely trumpets his own team. When you’ve won four NCAA titles and nearly 900 games, your record pretty much speaks for itself.
But a few days ago, recalling the team with which he started the season — the defending national championship squad that won its first eight games with ridiculous ease under the precocious leadership of freshman point guard Kyrie Irving — Coach K let slip a wistful boast.
“For eight games,” he said, “we were probably the best team in the country.”
But then Irving went down on Dec. 4 with a foot injury during a win over Butler, the team the Blue Devils also defeated in last year’s NCAA title game.
The offense that helped win those first eight games by 23.5 points against a schedule that included then-No. 4 Kansas State, then-No. 6 Michigan State and Butler had to be instantly retooled. The result is 10 wins in Duke’s first 11 games without Irving, but an average margin of victory of 21 points despite facing no ranked teams.
Or as Krzyzewski said last week, “This is a different team; we’re not a well-oiled machine, but it’s a good team.”
But how good? Are the Devils good enough to repeat as ACC tournament champs? Are they good enough to reach the Elite Eight? The Final Four? Are they good enough to win it all again?
“If Kyrie Irving comes back, they could easily win it all,” said ESPN analyst Dick Vitale, who doubts Irving will return this season. “Even without him I still see them getting to the Final Four. But with him, they could be special again.”
They remain special enough without the rookie’s 17.4 points, 5.1 assists, 90 percent accuracy from the foul line and 45 percent marksmanship from the 3-point line to stand 18-1 overall and 5-1 in the ACC heading into Thursday night’s visit from Boston College.
And they seem to be getting better, as witness Saturday’s 84-59 win at Wake Forest a little more than a week after being shocked at Florida State.
“Duke’s still a tough team,” North Carolina State coach Sidney Lowe said after his Wolfpacks lost at home to the Blue Devils by 14 points last week. “They spread you out and make tough shots. And they’re very active.”
They actually are pretty much the same team that won it all last season, minus graduated guard Jon Scheyer and center Brian Zoubek. And Irving aside, senior guard Nolan Smith and senior forward Kyle Singler just might be the best 1-2 punch in the entire college game.
They average nearly 40 points between them (Smith leads with 20.1), and they can score from anywhere against any defense — particularly Smith, who could wind up winning the Wooden Award as the national player of the year.
In fact, Smith even sounds like a coach, which might be reasonable given that his father Derek won an NCAA title at Louisville and later played for the Philadelphia 76ers before dying of a heart attack 15 years ago.
“We’ve put in more offensive sets [since Irving went down],” Smith explained earlier this month. “With Kyrie we could run ball-screen stuff and get a great shot every possession. With the squad we have now, our emphasis is on trying to hit the post a lot.”
Yet even as the Devils feed the post more, they’re taking more outside shots. They fired 26 treys in the Wake Forest win to just 16 early in the year against Michigan State when Irving was still on the floor.
Then again, the Blue Devils are hitting 40 percent of their 3-pointers with the season more than half over.
Which brings us back to the original question. Can the Blue Devils, whether Irving returns or not, repeat as champs?
Said Maryland coach Gary Williams after a seven-point loss in early January: “If you ask people for a list of the top seniors in the country, those guys [Smith and Singler] would be on anybody’s top 10. And they have national championship experience, which kind of separates them from other seniors in the country.”
And quite possibly separates Duke from other teams in the country come March, with or without Irving.