Hockey assists rule as No. 6 Duke basketball, Jeremy Roach pick apart Syracuse defense in win

DURHAM – Duke basketball did its best NHL impression on Saturday.

“Some outstanding offense,” head coach Mike Krzyzewski said after the Blue Devils’ 79-59 home win over Syracuse. “It looked like how the (Carolina) Hurricanes play, you know? A lot of hockey assists.”

Indeed, with the way the entire Blue Devils roster swung and re-swung and high-posted and crisply whipped the ball around at Cameron Indoor Stadium during a 20-point win over the Orange, they were playing a little bit like their professional Storm-Surging counterparts some 20 miles down the interstate.

Duke recorded 25 assists on 30 made field goals, tied for its most in a single game this season, and that excellent ball movement proved timely for a team coming off a taxing overtime loss at Florida State.

Not only was Tuesday’s 79-78 loss to the Seminoles the second for No. 6 Duke in its last four conference games (see: Miami), but it left the Blue Devils without one of their top producers. Freshman guard Trevor Keels left the second half of that game with a right leg injury and didn’t dress on Saturday.

No matter. Sophomore guard Jeremy Roach, who’d come off the bench his last three games, returned to the starting lineup against Syracuse and delivered a career-high nine assists, his quick decision-making and lob passes to center Mark Williams setting the tone against the Orange’s tricky 2-3 zone defense.

“I just came in and accepted my role,” Roach said. “Staying sharp was a big emphasis: just staying sharp on passes and ball fakes and trying to move the defense to the middle and kicking it out for shooters.”

Duke (15-3, 5-2 ACC) also got eight assists from flourishing junior Wendell Moore Jr. and four assists from do-it-all freshman Paolo Banchero, while now-healthy forward A.J. Griffin sank a career-high five 3-pointers. Duke made 14 triples as a team, its most in ACC play this year and one off its season high.

“That’s just how we are,” Banchero said. “Everybody trusts everybody to make shots.”

Smart passing and good shooting is about as zone-beating as it gets, and Duke stuck to that formula pretty well the first half – the Blue Devils led 36-22, assisting on all 13 of their field goals and hitting seven 3-pointers – before mastering it in the second. Syracuse (9-10, 3-5 ACC) never led in the game.

“They were just better than us today,” Orange coach Jim Boeheim said.

“For a few minutes there in the second half, I thought was the best we’ve played,” Krzyzewski added.

The Blue Devils did so by pivoting a bit from their bread and butter: the bully ball style that mostly involves getting Banchero (still trending as a top five pick in this spring’s NBA Draft) or Keels or Moore driving downhill, with a shooter stationed on the wing and the 7-foot-1 Williams stationed below.

Banchero (15 points, 13 rebounds) and Williams (15 points, seven rebounds) did provide some of that muscly offense, but Duke found the majority of its success from spreading it out and letting shots fly.

The Blue Devils attempted a season-high 37 threes, and their 14 makes (at a 37.8% clip) were their most since hitting 15 in back-to-back non-conference wins against App State and South Carolina State in mid-December.

Perhaps more notably, it was their most productive game from deep in seven ACC contests and the second straight game they’ve set that mark (Duke shot 10-23 from deep in its loss at Florida State).

None of that would have happened, though, without the floor generalism of Roach and company. Duke didn’t control the ball perfectly, recording 15 turnovers, but the lead guard combination of Roach and Moore, already two of the ACC’s top assist-to-turnover ratio leaders, finished Saturday at a comfortable 17:2.

“We were just really sharp with the ball on the offensive end,” Moore said. “Everybody got touches. You didn’t know who was scoring but you knew that we were scoring together … that was the big thing.”

It cleared the way for open shots and easy buckets and 47.6% overall shooting by game’s end. Given the lack of iso ball, Banchero, Griffin, Moore and Williams led a balanced scoring effort with 15 points apiece while reserve forward Joey Baker added 11 points (unsurprisingly, all four of his makes came off assists).

For Roach, who’s up to 15 assists against just two turnovers over his last two games, Saturday’s hockey assisting wasn’t just a game plan well-executed. It was a tone resitter for the country’s No. 6 team.

“Duke never lose two games in a row,” Roach said, and so far this season he’s been right.

Boeheim reflects on Coach K

Duke plays at Syracuse on Feb. 26, but Saturday marked Boeheim’s last time coaching against Krzyzewski, his longtime friend and USA Basketball co-worker, in Cameron Indoor Stadium.

Asked postgame about their relationship, Boeheim described it as “unbelievable” and cracked a joke about their stint coaching the U.S. men’s Olympic team to gold medals in 2008, 2012 and 2016.

“We spent 300 days together in the summertime over a period of 10 years and that friendship and basketball experience during that time was special,” he said. “We have a unique bond, being able to be together for 300 days and not have an argument – that’s two people who usually get their own way except at home, where neither one of us gets our own way … it was just so many good memories.”

Krzyzewski, 74, is coaching his 42nd and final season at Duke, while Boeheim, 77, is coaching his 46th season at Syracuse. They are the two winningest Division I men’s basketball coaches in NCAA history.

Next up

Duke hosts Clemson on Tuesday, Jan. 25 at 7 p.m. The game will be broadcast on either ESPN or ESPN2. Clemson is 10-8 (2-5 ACC) ahead of its Saturday night home game against Pittsburgh.

Chapel Fowler is a recruiting reporter for The Fayetteville Observer and the USA TODAY Network. Reach him by email at cfowler@gannett.com or on Twitter at @chapelfowler.