DURHAM — Duke was a beaten up team when it hosted Charlotte on Saturday. The game didn’t help matters much.
“Ankle, elbow, face,” Kyle Filipowski said, listing everything he’d injured or damaged during the Blue Devils’ 80-56 win over the 49ers. “I can go on down the line.”
Duke entered the game on a two-game losing streak and without starting point guard Tyrese Proctor, who was on crutches after injuring his ankle during last weekend’s loss to Georgia Tech.
“He sprained it pretty good,” said coach Jon Scheyer.
With new football coach Manny Diaz hamming it up with the Cameron Crazies, wearing one student’s Duke Blue chef’s hat and tossing another’s blue-painted baby doll into the air, the basketball Blue Devils looked like they might need helmets and pads.
Filipowski limped off the floor after injuring his own ankle. He returned, only to take a hard fall and hit his elbow. The sophomore big man struggled to his worst day as a Blue Devil, managing just five points on 2-of-10 shooting.
With Proctor in street clothes and Filipowski embattled, Duke found other sources of offense. Freshman Jared McCain shook off an early-season shooting slump, hitting three 3-pointers and scoring a career-high 21 points.
“It’s funny, whenever we lose, I gotta get off every social media platform,” said McCain, who boasts 2 million TikTok followers. “I don’t want to even look at anything. We’ll always bounce back. Coach says we’re a family, we’re in this together, and I think that’s what we did this week and we really capitalized. We weren’t being the tougher team in these losses, and that’s been a main thing for us in practice — just play as hard as we can.”
Reserve junior Jaylen Blakes, who entered the game with as many scoreless outings (five) as made shots this season, hit all three of his 3-point attempts and poured in 15 points as Duke pulled away from a game Charlotte team to snap its losing streak with an 80-56 win. At one point, Blakes scored five straight points to quell a Charlotte run, also drawing a charge on the other end to force a turnover.
“It can either make or break us and, for us, it kind of brought us together,” he said. “We had a collective energy where we needed to make a statement that the two games don’t define us. We have a lot more season left, and this is going to help with our momentum. We obviously see [the negativity on social media], but we can’t listen to it. We have an internal belief in ourselves. Nobody sees what’s going on behind closed doors, the way we’ve put in the work, and at the end of the day, we understand the work that we put in. People can write us off, they can do all of that, but we have an internal belief in ourselves that our work will pay off and we’ll continue to build off this momentum.”
Without their point guard, Duke was able to share the ball well, assisting on 15 of its 24 made shots. Five different Blue Devils had multiple assists
“Our program is about, not necessarily being perfect, but it is about competition,” said Scheyer. “It’s about competing. It’s about responding. In the last two games last week, we weren’t good enough. So, for us, this week was about getting back to work, blocking out anything else outside of our locker room, and taking accountability for what we all have to do better. I thought we had the best week of practice we have had so far this year.”
