Maybe it’s time to start paying attention to Kara Lawson’s Duke women’s basketball team. The Blue Devils spent Sunday in Fort Myers, Florida and returned to Durham with a decisive 71-48 win over Florida Gulf Coast, a periennial NCAA team.
The win ran Duke’s record to 10-1, with only ACC teams left until the post-season.
And I’d be very, very surprised if there isn’t a post-season in this team’s future. Sure, Duke started off 8-0 last season and missed the Big Dance. But that season was derailed by a combination of COVID-19 and a shoulder injury that sidelined Celeste Taylor for seven games.
Hopefully, a combination unlikely to re-occur.
And this team is built around that most indestructible of the basketball arts, a rock-ribbed defense designed to disrupt and discombobulate opponents.
That certainly happened at FGCU. Sha Carter hit 8 of 10 for the home team, en route to a game-high 18 points. The rest of her team hit 9 of 35. That’s 26 percent. Duke forced 15 turnovers and allowed only four offensive rebounds, resulting in six second-chance points.
“I was really pleased with our defense again,” Lawson said. “That’s usually where it starts for me. I thought we had another good defensive effort. I thought we were disruptive and the trait I thought we would have to have against them, I thought we were disciplined.”
Duke last trailed at 5-4 before finishing the first period up 13-10. The home team kept it close until about four minutes left in the half, when Elizabeth Balogun (seven points) sparked an 11-0 run that sent Duke into the locker room up 35-22.
Duke scored the first five points of the second half to go up by 18. Duke started committing fouls, Carter got hot and the lead shrunk to nine at 43-34.
But Vanessa de Jesus hit a jumper and Shayeann Day-Wilson buried a 3 and the threat was over.
“I thought the end of the third quarter was critical,” Lawson said. “They had started to get a little momentum. I thought that spurt at the end of the quarter really helped us out.”
FGCU never got closer than 12 points in the final quarter. The Blue Devils had an unlikely star in the final period. Taya Corosdale is a 6-3 grad-student transfer from Oregon State. She started the first three games at power forward, with fellow OSU transfer Kennedy Brown at center. But Corosdale missed five games due to injury and Balogun took over at the 4, where she’s excelled. But with Brown and backup center Mia Heide ineffective, Corosdale got major minutes in the fourth and responded with nine points.
Lawson has an 11-player rotation right now and some compression seems likely. But a post rotation of Corosdale and Balogun looks like something Duke should explore.
Balogun ended with 16 points and four rebounds, her second 16-point game of the week. And Day-Wilson followed a scoreless game against Austin Peay with a 12-point effort against FGCU. But she had five assists in the earlier game, no assists Sunday. It seems fair to suggest that her role this season may still be in flux.
Jordyn Oliver’s role is not in flux. She’s a pure point guard, not much of a scorer but the kind of asset who routinely churns out stat lines like the one she had Sunday, 6 points, 5 rebounds, 5 assists, 2 steals, 1 turnover.
But Taylor continues to be the team’s key defender, the disruptor in chief. Taylor scored 14 points, with four rebounds. But it was her five steals, three blocks and relentless, suffocating defense set the tone for a defense that hasn’t allowed anyone other than Connecticut to score more than 57 points. And even the Huskies only scored 78 points at a time when they were healthier and more productive than they are now.
Duke is allowing 48.5 points per game, with opponents shooting 32 percent from the field and turning it over almost 20 times per game.
Duke is still unranked in the AP poll. But they’re 10th in the NET rankings and the NCAA selection committee cares not one jot about the former and an awful lot about the latter.
The ACC looks like a minefield this season and Lawson freely admits that the offense has to get better, especially that 27 percent shooting from beyond the arc. But Lawson called the FGCU win a big confidence booster going into conference play. And that defense is a reason to have confidence.