It was an up-and-down week for Duke women’s basketball.
Or maybe down-and-up is a better descriptor.
The down portion was Thursday night in Clemson, a dispiriting 80-64 loss to the Tigers.
Clemson hasn’t been very good recently but they hit the transfer portal hard and that game looked a lot like a young team against a veteran team, which it was. But the Duke team that took Stanford and Georgia into overtime on the road, losing the first and winning the second, was nowhere to be seen.
Duke never led and other than Taina Mair’s 19 points, there wasn’t much positive going on.
A team that prides itself on defense allowed Clemson to shoot 61 percent (11-18) on 3s, many of them wide open.
“We weren’t where we were supposed to be and didn’t take away what we had hoped to take away,” Kara Lawson said, while adding that “they played with much more energy than we did, wanted it more than we did.”
How would Duke respond, hosting Florida Gulf Coast Sunday?
If you don’t follow women’s college basketball, this might seem like an easy win for a program like Duke.
Nope. FGCU is one the sport’s top mid-majors. They win 30 or so games every year, go to the NCAAs and don’t always go home quickly or easily. They beat Virginia Tech in the 2022 tourny, Washington State last year. They’ve already posted wins this season over Kentucky and North Carolina.
It’s not just that they’re good, it’s how they’re good. Their tallest player is 6-1. They spread the floor, drive and dish and launch 3-pointers at an impressive rate; they came into the Duke game averaging 30.6 3-point attempts per game.
Plus they started five players in their fourth or fifth college seasons.
Lawson said controlling the barrage of 3-pointers was crucial to Duke’s chances of winning.
“We talked about with our team that they shouldn’t give up any open shots. You can’t really stop someone from taking a shot because you can be closely guarded a still take a shot. But we felt like their offense generated so many open 3s that if we could take away those then it would be harder for them to score.”
How did Duke do? Well, the Eagles attempted a dozen 3-pointers, making five, scoring less than half of the points they usually score from beyond the arc.
The result was an 82-63 Duke win, arguably Duke’s best game of the season.
“We came out knowing what we had to do,” Taina Mair said. “Holding them to under 25 [attempted 3s] was the goal. We essentially did that and ended up with the win.”
It still took Duke some time to pull away, mainly because Duke kept figuratively shooting itself in the foot. The Blue Devils had 13 fouls and 12 turnovers at intermission. Lawson likes to sit players down if they pick up an early foul in the first period but Duke had nine fouls in the first period, which left her scrambling to put together cohesive lineups. Kennedy Brown had two fouls in 2:45, Jadyn Donovan two fouls in 5:10.
FGCU wasn’t any better. They had 14 fouls and 13 turnovers in the first half.
An aesthetic masterpiece it was not.
Duke led 5-0 and 7-2 early but fell behind 25-19 early in the second after Maddie Antenucci hit back-to-back 3-pointers to break a 19-19 tie in a span of 26 seconds.
This really was Duke’s only wobble in that area.
But Duke was able to get out and run. Freshman Oluchi Okananwa had four steals in the first half, twice going coast-to-coast for a layup.
“We did play a lot of four-guard lineups,” Lawson noted. “That may have had something to do with it. But I thought that T [Mair] and Oluchi specifically in the full-court game changed our pace today and we got a lot of easy things because those two were playing at a high rate of speed.”
“We really wanted to get out there and push the ball,” Mair said, “playing at a high speed. Being in transition is our best offense.”
Duke ended the game with a 20 to eight advantage in fast-break points.
Duke looked like they were getting some separation, up 43-34, with 1:12 left in the half. But the Eagles got a four-point possession when they rebounded a missed free throw and knocked down a 3.
It was 43-38 at the half.
Duke cleaned up the turnovers in the second half, committing only three.
“I wish I knew how that happened,” Lawson quipped “because if I did I would do it every half, every game. Credit them for being able to make that switch and do it.”
Once Duke started holding on to the ball, the points started mounting and the lead kept growing. Okananwa hit a 3, then Mair and Emma Koabel scored in transition and FGCU coach Karl Smesko was calling timeout barely two minutes in the second half with his team down 50-40.
The Duke lead never got less than eight after that and reached 16 at 58-42 midway through the third.
Duke got a little sloppy but another Okananwa 3-pointer left Duke up 65-53 after three and Duke never really gave Gulf Coast any hope of a comeback in the final quarter.
Mair ended the game with 24 points, two off her career best, established last season for Boston College.
“It was just the flow of the game,” she said. “I got into my rhythm and started hitting shots. It felt good.”
Mair was 11 for 18 from the field, making her only 3-point shot.
She was joined in double figures by Okananwa (18 points), Ashlon Jackson (14) and Kennedy Brown (all 10 points in the second half).
Lawson wasn’t happy with being outrebounded 34-26 and said frankly that Duke isn’t a very good rebounding team right now. But other than that it was a really solid win to go into exam week.