Duke did not get off to a good start. The Blue Devils lost their season opener against Baylor by six points. Three games later, they made headlines for all the wrong reasons when they lost to a West Virginia team that had to finish the game with five players, including four reserves, after a string of ejections. After that, Duke lost four straight games to USF, South Carolina, UCLA, and LSU, unable to challenge some of the top teams in the country.
The one silver lining is that Kara Lawson learned something important about her team: her roster is close and can survive adversity.
“You test your strength of your relationship and your connectivity in adversity,” Lawson said after Duke’s 71-51 win over Syracuse. “Think about it. Think about any relationship that you have, whether it’s a family relationship, a romantic relationship, a teammate. Whatever it is, you don’t find out the strength of your connection if everything’s easy, everything’s going well. Everybody’s great when it’s going well. How you build the strength of your connection is through adversity…We’re super close because we’ve been through it. When you go through it, if you’re not close, it will drop out of the bottom.”
Duke strung together four consecutive wins
After a 93-77 loss to LSU, Duke’s schedule eased up significantly. Lawson’s team faced Virginia Tech, South Dakota State, Belmont, and Syracuse and won all four games by a significant margin. While stringing together some wins is good for players’ confidence going into conference play, Duke still has to prove that it can win against strong opponents. Its next big test will be in early January against Notre Dame.
Even after four consecutive wins, this season has been disappointing so far. In the preseason, Duke was ranked seventh, trailing only UConn, South Carolina, UCLA, Texas, LSU, and Oklahoma. It has not lived up to those expectations despite a pretty strong second season from Toby Fournier. By week three, Duke fell out of the top 25. Meanwhile, the teams ranked ahead of Duke in the preseason are still in the top ten eight weeks in, and North Carolina State University is the only other top-ten preseason team to fall out of the top 25 entirely.
While it may be too late for Duke to climb back to the top of the rankings, where it was expected to be, there is still plenty of time to avoid racking up more ugly losses and finish the season with a winning record.