Why a summer of seething helped Duke basketball advance to NCAA Tournament's Sweet 16

This, as Tyrese Proctor bluntly put it Sunday, is why he’s still a Duke basketball player.

Taking part in a blowout win in the NCAA Tournament’s second round, a 93-55 romp over James Madison at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center, allowed Proctor and four other starters who returned from last season to revel in experiencing something new.

Duke won an ACC championship in Jon Scheyer’s first season as its head coach in 2023 but the Blue Devils couldn’t get out of the NCAA Tournament’s first weekend.

In the weeks that followed, Proctor, Kyle Filipowski, Mark Mitchell and Jeremy Roach all pledged to keep playing college basketball for the Blue Devils. The sting of the 65-52 loss to Tennessee that ended last season lingered.

“Obviously we lost last year and it wasn’t what we wanted,” Proctor said. “That’s the reason why our main guys came back.”

Duke’s ultimate goal is to make the Final Four and win the program’s sixth NCAA championship. It’s why photos of State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona, which will house this year’s Final Four, were visible all over the Blue Devils’ training facilities last summer.

But to get there, the Blue Devils had to get here — past the tournament’s first weekend and into the regional semifinals. The bridge too far from a year ago has been crossed with ease.

“None of us forgot about what happened with Tennessee in the second round,” Filipowski said. “I think that just added a little bit more fire to us, to the returning guys, and we knew it was going to be a similar type of game. I think we learned our lesson playing last year. We didn’t want to repeat that at all. Just learned and moved on from that and I think that showed tonight.”

And oh did it show.

After seeing James Madison rattle Wisconsin with its pressure to take a 15-4 lead in Friday night’s first round on the way to a 72-61 win, the Blue Devils were determined to take the fight to the Dukes first.

Jared McCain, on the way to a scintillating 30-point scoring night, scored Duke’s first basket with a 3-pointer. Roach hit a pull-up jumper. Filipowski rebounded his own miss for a dunk that put Duke up 7-2.

When Proctor scored before McCain added two more 3-pointers, Duke held a 15-5 lead and James Madison would never draw closer than seven points the rest of the game.

“That’s exactly how we wanted to come out,” Filipowski said. “We did a great job on the defensive end. We did a great job staying poised and holding our own against them. That just turned into great positive vibes for us as a team.”

It was among the Blue Devils’ most dominant performances of the season. They had no let up, choosing not to coast with their comfortable lead. Instead they kept building it, leading 47-25 at halftime and pushing to 30 points with a little less than nine minutes to play.

That’s a big deal,” Duke graduate student center Ryan Young said. “Something that we were talking about the whole game, especially at halftime, you know? Because whoever loses this game, their season’s over. They’re going home. And that’s a different feeling when you’re that team.”

Duke refused to be that team on this day.

Where Wisconsin turned the ball over 19 times, Duke finished with just six. Only one came from one of the Blue Devils’ guards.

Duke limited JMU to 38% shooting as the Dukes turned the ball over 14 times. JMU hit only 4 of 18 3-pointers.

For all his impressive shooting Sunday, McCain offered this assessment about how Duke defended both against JMU and while holding Vermont 25 points below its season scoring average while blasting the Catamounts, 64-47, in Friday’s first round.

“You want to be playing your best in March,” McCain said, “and I feel like right now this is our best basketball, especially defensively. When we play defense, it’s like no one can stop us. We have too much talent.”

Thus far in the NCAA Tournament, it’s been a combination of talent, attention to detail and toughness that’s proved lethal to Duke’s opponents.

Also, toss in the motivation from a certain loss a year ago and these Blue Devils are quite formidable.

“I definitely reminded the team this morning,” Roach said, “just how we felt last year at the Tennessee game.”

That hurdle has been cleared this season, moving Duke to Dallas to face the South Region’s top seed, Houston, with a Final Four berth just two wins away.

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