Moving on from the Clemson loss

And maybe learning a few things along the way

You might remember Bob Fleischer. He was a post player for Duke in the middle 1970s. He was pretty good but the teams he played for were not.

In 1974, his junior year, he averaged 15.7 points and 12.4 rebounds per game. Bernie Janicki (1952), Ronnie Mayer (1955), Mike Lewis (1968) and Randy Denton (1969, 1970, 1971) are the only Duke players to average more rebounds per game in a season.

To look at it from another angle, no Blue Devil has averaged more rebounds in a season since Fleischer.

His rebounding average dropped to 10.5 per game in 1975 but he averaged 17.2 points per game, while making 62% of his shots from the field.

He did all this while playing in an ACC universe that included Tommy Burleson, Bobby Jones, Tom McMillen, Len Elmore, Tree Rollins and Gus Gerard, among others.

Tough neigborhood.

Fleischer’s classmates inlcuded Kevin Billerman--Ryan Kelly’s prep cpach-and Pete Kramer. They played on Duke’s last freshman team, in 1972. Their sophomore season was Bucky Waters’ last season as a coach. Neil McGeachy’s only season at Duke was their junior year. Bill Foster came in as they were going out.

You have to go back to the 1920s to find the last time Duke had three coaches in three seasons and Duke was still Trinity.

They won some games-35 to be exact. But they lost 43, some blow-outs, some agonizing.

Anyway. Fleischer played professionally in Europe, came back to Duke-med school this time-and became a urologist.

I asked him to talk about those games once, by phone. His response surprised me. He said he didn’t remember any of the wins but he remembered all of the losses. You don’t learn anything from the wins, you learn a lot from the losses.

Maybe an extreme position. Certainly an exaggeration. Mike Krzyzewski used to say that you can learn from losses but he preferred learning those same lessons while still winning.

Which brings us up to date. Are there lessons for Duke to learn from Saturday’s loss at Clemson?

Some context. This isn’t the first good Duke team to go to Death Valley and come back with a loss. Bill Foster’s last Duke team --1980--started 12-0 and reached number one in the polls. The streak ended with an 87-82 Clemson win. In overtime.

Gene Banks and Mike Gminski scored 31 and 30 points respectively for Duke. It used to be the only time Duke had two 30-point scorers in the same. Still might be.

And Duke still lost.

Duke was ranked ninth in 1988, Clemson unranked, when Clemson upset Duke 79-77. Ninth-ranked Duke lost at unranked Clemson in 1989, Fifth-ranked Duke lost at 20^th-ranked Clemson in 1990. Fourth-ranked Duke fell to 10^th-ranked Clemson 74-47 in 2009.

Several of these Duke teams made it to the Final Four but none won it all.

But Duke’s five NCAA champions lost a combined seven times to unranked teams, NC State and Wake Forest in 1991, Wake Forest in 1992, Wisconsin and NC State in 2010 and NC State and Miami in 2015.