Sion James couldn’t believe it.
Cooper Flagg stole the basketball from Pittsburgh’s Jaland Lowe and raced down the court in transition. In a play that could have registered on the seismic counters in Durham — both for its result and crowd response — Flagg slammed the ball down over Guillermo Diaz Graham for a season highlight, drawing a roar from the audience at Cameron Indoor Stadium. As teammates Kon Kneuppel, Khaman Maluach and Tyrese Proctor rushed over to celebrate with him, James’ mouth gaped open in utter disbelief.
“I’ve never seen a dunk like that while I’m on the court … I almost lost my mind when I was out there,” Malauch said.
“That’s the best in-game dunk I’ve ever seen,” Proctor added.
“We’ve had a few guys through the years make plays that just spark everybody in the building, and there was one of those moments tonight,” head coach Jon Scheyer said.
While no play from the Blue Devils’ 76-47 win over the Panthers was as commanding as Flagg’s poster over Diaz Graham, the end result — cold-blooded, relentless basketball — was the same through all 40 minutes. Some of that might be thanks to old-fashioned revenge, as Pittsburgh upset Duke at Cameron Indoor last season for the first time in 45 years. Forward Blake Hinson, who had gone 7-of-7 from outside the arc, taunted the Cameron Crazies at the press table after the win.
But can revenge alone explain the 29-point dismantling of Pittsburgh? The Panthers, one of the ACC’s top squads, were the first team out of the Jan. 6 AP Poll and rank 22nd nationally in offensive efficiency per KenPom.
“I think it’s crazy they’re not ranked with what they’ve done this season,” Scheyer said of the Panthers.
The goal of any top-ranked college basketball team is, of course, to win a national championship, something Duke is well-equipped to do this season. However, it seems this year’s Blue Devils have enacted a separate goal — to impose their will on the rest of the ACC. In five conference games, Duke has outscored its opponents by an average of 23.2 points per game, which is 2.4 points better than its margin for nonconference games.
Why is that point differential so wide? Well, this Blue Devil squad is an embarrassment of riches. Take Knueppel, for instance. The freshman finished with a healthy 17 points, and shot 4-of-5 from deep in the last 27 minutes of the game following a pair of early misses from outside the arc.
“It’s funny how that works, because I felt the two best looks of the night were the first two that didn’t go [in],” Knueppel said. “Shooting is a fickle thing. Sometimes it goes in and sometimes it doesn’t, [you] just gotta keep putting them up.”
Knueppel’s impact stretches far beyond shooting in ways that traditional box score statistics fail to reflect. Pittsburgh’s guards attempted to drive against him for much of the game, but the Milwaukee native remained unfazed, forcing tough shots to help lead to a poor 31% shooting clip for the Panthers.
Proctor, the longest-tenured starter on the Blue Devils, also played a dynamic game, as his outstanding plus-minus of plus-42 reflects. The junior scored Duke’s last 10 points of the contest, which included a rare five-point play after a flagrant-2 foul on the Panthers’ Damian Dunn. In addition, the Sydney native assisted four 3-pointers in the first half, which included back-to-back feeds for Knueppel.
“Me and [Knueppel], we’re both elite 3-point shooters, so a lot of teams when we get downhill are gonna collapse,” Proctor said. “It’s just being able to read and trust each other that we’re going to make the right reads.”
Duke’s starting five each scored in double figures, their first time doing so since the Blue Devils’ Nov. 8 victory against Army. With how deep Duke’s roster is, it may come as a surprise that, in the second half, the bench combined for no points and just 12 minutes. Sophomore guard Caleb Foster, who started the first seven games of the 2024-25 campaign, was limited to just nine minutes, a career-low. While that fact may reflect an underachieving season from the Harrisburg, N.C., native, it also shows just how dominant the Blue Devils’ win truly was.
The lineup of James, Proctor, Knueppel, Flagg and Maluach, plus a strong supporting cast, can contend with any title-hungry team. But “contending” cannot describe what has occurred when Duke has met its ACC rivals thus far. The Blue Devils seem to be fighting against mere mortals in conference play.
Granted, the ACC is having a down year, with just five of its teams projected to make the dance in Joe Lunardi’s most recent Bracketology. And Duke could very well have its work cut out for it in a road contest against Clemson Feb. 8, as well as its two matchups against archrival North Carolina. But if Duke continues to execute as well as it did against Pittsburgh, even those challenges may feel less like obstacles and more like opportunities to assert its supremacy.
Right now, the rest of the ACC is simply trying to keep up.
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