Fight it out basketball got its second straight blowout success on Wednesday evening.
The very first Duke basketball game in the post-Jalen Johnson age was really comparable to the last video game in the Jalen Johnson age for the Blue Devils (9-8, 7-6 ACC).
Similar to in Saturday’s triumph over North Carolina State, Duke went out to a huge lead over Wake Forest (6-10, 3-10 ACC) and never looked back thanks to sophomore star Matthew Hurt.
In the initial match between Duke as well as Wake Forest this period, Hurt set a career-high with 26 points. He threatened to top that number in Winston-Salem, yet because of the score discrepancy, his evening was cut short.
Hurt finished with 22 points in 31 mins during Duke’s 84-60 success on 8-of-9 shooting and also 3-of-4 from three-point range.
“The ways in which athletes perform through physical adversity are ever-plain to see—it’s the philosophical underpinning of the very concept of competitive sport, really. Athletes regularly play through injuries, and we watch with bated breath, praying they don’t collide any more violently than they need to.
The ways in which athletes have to perform through mental and emotional adversity are never clear, and almost always apathetically misunderstood. In that sense, it is all the more remarkable what the Blue Devils did Wednesday, playing some of their best basketball of the season and making numerous schematic adjustments, in spite of the weight of one of their closest friends leaving.
Yes, those schematic adjustments could’ve just as easily been made with Johnson still on the roster, whether it be making a more concerted effort to play lineups with a Johnson-Hurt-Williams frontcourt that didn’t feature Johnson going downhill as the primary action, or deciding to play funnel defense and run opposing perimeter threats off of screens with Johnson.
But sometimes you simply cannot make yourself do what’s clearly right until you’re left without any alternatives.
It is surprisingly difficult to solve a problem as simple as “how do I maximize the talent available to me.” You scheme, you experiment, you observe what works best, and the less time this process takes, the more money a college will pay you.”
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