Duke women move to 7-1 with win over Northwestern.
But that final period left a lot to be desired.
Well, we can close the door on the ACC/Big Ten Challenge. Which means that Jon Scheyer and Kara Lawson will forever and ever be undefeated in that event.
You can’t win more than 100 percent of your games but in one sense Lawson did better than Scheyer’s 1-0 record. She went 2-0.
You might remember Duke’s 79-64 win over eighth-ranked Iowa in last year’s challenge. It might have been Duke’s best game of the season.
Northwestern was this year’s opponent and they represented a different kind of challenge, specifically whether Duke could maintain its intensity for 40 minutes against a hopelessly over-matched opponent.
The Wildcats came into Cameron with a 4-2 record, which doesn’t sound so bad. But the losses were 100-57 to Oregon and 92-58 to Notre Dame.
For thirty minutes Duke looked poised to replicate that margin of victory. But Duke put it in cruise control over the final 10 minutes and ended with a 66-50 win that left about as strong a sour taste as a 16-point win can leave.
Lawson is still experimenting with her rotation. Duke started Kennedy Brown, Elizabeth Balogun, Celeste Taylor, Reigan Richardson and Shayeann Day-Wilson.
Taya Corosdale is still out with an undisclosed injury.
It was a brick-fest early. It took Duke almost five minutes to make their first field goal but they were only down 6-2 when Balogun finally scored inside.
But the bench came in and flipped the narrative. Lee Volker had four field goals in a span of three minutes. Volker tied it at 6-6, put Duke up 8-6, then it became 11-6 and 13-6 after one, then reserve Ashlon Jackson hit a triple and two foul shots and it was 22-6.
Jackson led Duke with 10 points.
Jordyn Oliver didn’t score much, only two points on the night. But Lawson credited Oliver with jump-starting Duke. Oliver isn’t much of a shooter. The redshirt junior has made exactly two 3-pointers in her college career and that was during her freshman season at Baylor. But she had seven rebounds, seven assists, three steals and zero turnovers in 22 minutes off the bench.
There's not a part of the game that she can't impact,” Lawson said. “I thought this was one of her best efforts of the season, particularly in the first half. When I put her in the game, the game changed. I mean, it changed right away defensively in our press. She is a good playmaker, she sees the floor well, and she is a big guard and can get in there and rebound. A good all-around game.”
Northwestern went over nine minutes, without scoring, a 20-0 Duke run that effectively ended the game.
Some of this was good defense. Duke’s pressure forced turnovers, sped up Northwestern and forced them out of their comfort zone. But this also was against a team that ended the first half making one of six from the foul line, one of 10 from 3, five of 31 from the field.
Duke led 32-12 at the half.
Lawson said she say some signs of slippage in the third quarter. But Duke still outscored the visitors 20-15 and led 52-27 after three.
But, oh that final 10 minutes. Northwestern scored almost as many points (23) in the fourth period as the first three combined. Duke turned it over nine times in the fourth, with Volker accounting for four.
Volker’s explanation for the late turnovers? “I think just trying to force something that wasn’t there.”
“They were careless,” Lawson added. “I thought most of them were unforced.”
Lawson rejected human nature as a valid explanation for that final stanza.
“I think it's human nature for average people. I don't think it's human nature for elite people, elite competitors. I think when you're an elite competitor, you don't care what the score is. You don't care if it's practice, if it's a game, you have a lot of pride in how you play. We have to improve in that area. And I think we talked about it at halftime, we talked about in the third quarter: don't relax. There's a lot of things that we need to work on and improve on. I feel like we wasted a second half of opportunity to improve, because we didn't play the way we did with the same effort as the first half.”
So, a comfortable win with some very obvious teachable moments. And Duke is 7-1, with a road test at Richmond this Sunday and a chance to put it together for 40 minutes, not 30.