Technically this is Kara Lawson’s third season as head coach of Duke’s women’s basketball team. But Duke played only four games in 2020-’21 before shutting down the season over COVID-19 concerns.
So last season was her debut in any practical sense of the word. Lawson did a pretty serious roster overhaul, bringing in seven transfers and two freshmen to blend with a handful of holdovers.
It worked.
For awhile.
Duke started 8-0 and reached 15th in the AP poll. Early victims included nationally-ranked Iowa and Notre Dame.
But things started to go wrong. COVID hit the team hard in mid season. Even Lawson missed some games. Celeste Taylor--the team’s best all-around player-injured her left shoulder in a collision at Syracuse and missed seven games.
Cohesion was always going to be shaky with that many new faces and Duke never really regained its mojo. Duke lost eight of its final 11 regular-season games, seven by at least a dozen points, hitting rock bottom in a 67-54 road loss to a Virginia team that finished 5-22. Following a loss to Miami in the ACC Tournament quarterfinals Duke ended its season 17-13.
COVID, injuries, too many new faces. All culprits. But there were other reasons for the slump. Lawson had never actually been head coach of a 5x5 program and there’s a learning curve even for someone with her resume.
And Duke didn’t have any star power. The ACC curiously has a 10-player first-team all-conference and a five-player second-team all conference. The league also listed six honorable mentions last season.
None of these players were Blue Devils. We have to go back to 1993 to find the last time the Duke women didn’t have an All-ACC player, excluding 2021 of course.
Shayeann Day-Wilson a freshman guard from Ontario was voted freshman of the year by the coaches; the media selected her as runner-up to Notre Dame’s Sonia Citron. But Day-Wilson was absent from this season’s 10-player preseason All-ACC list.
Lawson and her staff did a deep dive into last season and identified the biggest causes of last season’s slump.
“You have to have a lack of tolerance for undisciplined play,” she told the media earlier this week. “You have to not only call it out, you have to correct it and then you have to make sure everybody understands why that’s undisciplined. I think we’ve paid more attention to detail as coaches, to be a more disciplined team and overall more attention to detail from our players.”
Lawson said that lack of discipline could be seen most on the defensive side of the ball.
“We were very poor defensively overall and certainly in a number of areas. So, that’s what we kind of targeted when we looked at the spring. We wanted to get more size, more depth, more athleticism. I think we achieved that on paper. Now we have to achieve that on the court. But that’s definitely one of our goals, be more disruptive defensively, be tougher to play against defensively.”
The statistics back up Lawson. Duke didn’t really excel in any area defensively. Duke was eighth in the ACC in defense, seventh in defensive rebounding and sixth in blocked shots. But Duke was near the bottom in other stats, 12th in steals, 11th in opponent’s field-goal percentage and an appalling 14th in opponent’s 3-point percentage.
Duke alternated Jade Williams, Onome Akinbode-James and Amaya Finklea-Guity at the center spot and all three used up their eligibility.
Duke needed to find some size in the transfer portal and Lawson thinks she found a couple of solid rim protectors.
Kennedy Brown is a 6-6 transfer from Oregon State. The Kansas native is a redshirt junior and was a McDonald’s All-American. She averaged 7.9 points, 6.3 rebounds and 1.1 block per game last year. But that was after missing all the 2021 season with an ACL injury.
Brown is on the preseason Lisa Leslie Watch Award list as one of the nation’s top post players.
She acknowledges her defensive reputation but said she can do more than just defend.
”I can play with my back to the basket when that’s an advantage for me and I can also step out and knock down shots or facilitate at the high post.”
Mia Heide is Duke’s other new post player. She’s a grad-student transfer from Tulane. She’s 6-3 and averaged 8.6 points, 5.9 rebounds and 1.6 blocks per game last season.
Heide said she prioritizes defense.
“Being a rim protector comes with pride. It’s something that comes naturally. I focused on that earlier in my career and I take pride in that.”
But Taya Corosdale might be the most intriguing of the big transfers. She’s 6-3, also from Oregon State and a grad-student. But she’s more of a 3/4 than a 4/5 and could give Duke some impressive size at the forward positions or play small-ball center. She averaged 7.4 rebounds per game last season but also notched nine assists in a game against Stanford.
Duke also added some athleticism on the perimeter. Ashlon Jackson is a 6-0 freshman, a McDonald’s All-American and a fearsome shooter from outside. She won the 3-point shooting contest at the McDonald’s game.
Reigan Richardson is another McDonald’s All-American joining the program. She’s a combo guard from Charlotte and left Georgia for Duke after one season in Athens.
All of these newcomers will be competing against six--or is that seven-holdovers for playing time. Point guard Jordyn Oliver--she’s another McDonald’s All-American-- transferred from Baylor but sat out last season rehabbing an Achilles injury.
She says she’s 100 percent healthy now.
“All summer I stayed here instead of going home, just to make sure I could be ready when the team came back summer two. But there’s no pain, no anything.”
Lawson has 14 recruited players and nobody is going to have a 14-player rotation. It’s likely that she’ll build her team around Day-Wilson and Taylor, while 6-1 grad-student Elizabeth Balogun showed flashes of brilliance last season, more often earlier in the season than later.
Day-Wilson is a super quick, super skilled 5-6 player. Her size screams point guard and she did lead Duke with 3.7 assists per game last season; she also led Duke with 12.7 points per game. But she’s more than comfortable playing off the ball and says doing so can enhance her game.
“I can play on the ball or off the ball, whatever my team needs me to do. I think a lot of teams are just going to be on me, put a lot of pressure, so I think playing off the ball would be really good for the team.”
But she can only play off the ball if Oliver or holdover Vanessa de Jesus, maybe even Jackson or Richardson can ably fill the role of facilitator.
Lawson said that Day-Wilson’s comfort level with the college game is noticeably higher than last season.
Taylor may check more boxes than anyone on the team. She’s the best defender, can get to the rim and is a good rebounder from the wing. She’s not a great shooter and says she’s been working to rectify that.
She absolutely agrees with the emphasis on defense and versatility.
“The biggest thing is leading by example. Once you see somebody giving it everything they’ve got, see somebody hawking the ball from one baseline to the other the people behind you just get hungrier. They want to dig down deep and get that stop just as bad as you do. Defensively, we’re more athletic than we were last year so I think that we can focus on the defensive end more.”
Many of Lawson’s better players can play multiple positions and she loves that about this team. But she says winnowing those 14 players down to a manageable eight or nine will start on the defensive end.
“You can’t have a weak link defensively out there. Because if you do, they will find it and they will take advantage of it. So, our goal for all of our players is to be strong, two-way players. If you don’t defend at a high level, it’s going to be hard to get minutes on our team this year because we have players who can defend at a high level. That’s going to be the biggest determining factor to get to those eight or nine spots, who can really guard. If you guard, you have a chance to play.”
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Without belaboring the obvious, I will be covering Duke women’s basketball this season, probably a weekly wrap-up. So get the word out. The more the merrier.
Thanks for this well done report. I'm all in as Coach Lawson seems to have a grip on how to get the program to championship quality.