Arkansas Was Fun, But Hardly A Perfect Win

Most Duke fans watched the win over Arkansas and probably had some fairly universal reactions: 1) we won. Yay! 2) Day-um Boozer! and 3) take that Calipari.

Old habits die hard.

As much fun as it was though, it wasn’t perfect. In fact, there is a particular point of concern.

As we all saw, Boozer was stunningly effective against the Razorbacks, who for some reason opted not to double team him. And if they had, Duke might have had a real problem in the second half because no one else, other than Caleb Foster, was really hitting.

Isaiah Evans only took two shots after the break and missed both, including that massive dunk attempt. Patrick Ngongba hit three shots, all around the basket. Dame Sarr missed two. Nikolas Khamenia took and missed one. No attempts for Cayden Boozer or Maliq Brown at all.

We should point out a couple of things here. We don’t know things like minor injuries or the like. Y0u could imagine, for instance, that Evans jammed a finger and wasn’t comfortable shooting (the dunk attempt kind of suggests that he was fine).

And of course it’s possible that Jon Scheyer just thought that it was best to let Boozer run wild since he was doing so well.

However, Duke plays Florida next and while we’ll get more into that later, for now, just a couple of things to keep in mind: 1) Florida will see that Arkansas didn’t defend Boozer very well and 2) they were eaten alive by Koa Peat in the season opener when he racked up 30 points on 11-18 from the floor (no threes here, thank you: Peat has not taken a three yet for Arizona).

So not only has Florida watched Duke-Arkansas, it has applied lessons from the Peat destruction. They’re going to try hard not to repeat that and that means essentially applying Jordan Rules to Boozer: stop him by any means necessary. If the Gators don’t double team Boozer, we’ll be very surprised.

That means that somebody will always be open and if Duke doesn’t move the ball and take advantage of that, it’ll be a long night.

In other words, we wouldn’t count on Boozer saving the day again if he has two guys in his grill all night and no one else is hitting shots.

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