They generally don’t get onto the floor with fans in the stands until near the end of blowouts. Fortunately for Duke’s bench players, however, there have been plenty of opportunities for that this season.
Victory cigar
As a Blue Devil win gets out of hand, the crowd will begin its chant, calling for Spencer Hubbard to get into the game. Coach Jon Scheyer has joked that the starters are jealous, because the 5-foot-8 walk-on gets a bigger ovation than any of them.
“It’s something you may not think about all the time, but we’ve been really blessed with having an amazing scout team and having a guy like Spencer who, truly, you can ask our players, nobody likes to guard Spencer in practice,” Scheyer said. “He gives us quickness, toughness. Then when he comes in the game, he’s the best points per possession than anybody on our team, the way he scores and does all that. His attitude, he’s been so unselfish. He came during a hard time where it was COVID, so we didn’t add anybody to the roster. So he was a practice player, and then he made it pretty clear he had to be on the team. He was just too impactful with what he did. But he’s had an amazing attitude.”
The music man
The media crowded into Duke’s locker room prior to the Sweet 16 game against Arizona. They packed into a semicircle three deep at Kon Knueppel’s locker. A slightly smaller group huddled around Sion James. A few interviewers, planning ahead, posted up at Cooper Flagg’s stall for when the freshman returned from speaking at the podium in the press conference room.
Meanwhile, in a corner, Stanley Borden hunched his seven-foot frame over a computer and tried to get his new keyboard to work. Frowning while wearing headphones, he would play a sequence of notes, then mess with the file, trying to get it to compress.
Borden was already well-known for his musical versatility. He taught himself to play piano over YouTube during the pandemic. In 2022, at the season-opening Countdown to Craziness, while most teammates used their introduction to the crowd to dance to their favorite song, Borden, instead, brought a saxophone and played his own walk-out music.
Veterans on the practice team
Between them, Neal Begovich and Cameron Sheffield have seven years of experience at schools other than Duke. Begovich played four years with Stanford, although he got into just 17 games. He’s spent the last two years at Duke.
This season, Begovich appeared in a career-high 11 games. The highlight of his season, undoubtedly, was a late-game dunk against his old team, helping to welcome Stanford to the ACC in a Duke blowout win.
Sheffield averaged 5.7 points per game in three years at Rice—and missed all of a fourth season last year due to injury—before coming to Duke. He’s seen the floor in 13 games this year with the Blue Devils.
