Brian Geisinger, Pac-Pride, Devil's Den, who snapped back at me on Twitter last night.
Not Brian, I'm sure. Also, Buzzbeat Podcast, if we're talking about the Hornets. He's everywhere about basketball, my friend. How are you? I'm good, man.
How about you? And congrats on the, I guess, the Twitter beef last night. It's exciting. It's always good. Look, Twitter's a great place to have normal, calm, context-laden dialogue.
That's what I always say. Yeah, well, in a macro sense, things seem to be going very well there. Like, just in general, too.
Like, Twitter on the whole. It seems like it's in a very secure and not precarious and potentially dangerous position right now. So everything's good, you know?
Alright, let's talk a little bit about Duke, and I want to get to NC State as well. First of all, with the Blue Devils, I am zero concerned about the loss. Jeremy Roach played well. I thought we saw the first, excuse me, the first glimpses of the really good Tyrese Proctor.
What did you think? Yeah, I mean, that stretch early in the second half, around like, you know, the 18-minute mark, they really started to put the ball in Tyrese's hands. And look, he's gotten off to a slow start, and he's also dealt with some foul trouble in a couple of the games as well. But with his size and his passing vision and his ability to make decisions, to hit that skip pass, as you saw when Kansas tried to pin the ball on one side of the court, and when Derek Lively would roll to the rim, they'd have Jalen Wilson or someone else come off that far corner to help. And that left Mark Mitchell or Jeremy Roach open in the far corner. You can see Tyrese Proctor can make that pass.
And you can see him make that pass before he got to Duke. If you watched him play with Australia in FIBA action this summer, he was doing the same thing. So look, Tyrese doesn't have the incredible, you know, like explosive, you know, burst of someone like Derek Whitehead. He doesn't maybe even have the sort of like shifty, quick, decisive first step of Jeremy Roach. So he's not someone that's just going to like, you know, come off of a screen and immediately get to the rim before you can plank.
Nor is he someone that's just going to blow by people one on one. But with that pull up shooting, he can get to from a couple levels of the court with his size and that passing vision. He can be really solid in the pick and roll. And then, you know, it helps getting to run those actions with guys like Kyle Filipowski, who can roll, who can pop, who can handle in space, who you can run triple handoffs with. Or someone like Derek Lively, who can obviously roll and play above the rim, but can also pop and do some stuff in the middle of the court as well.
So good stretch for Tyrese Proctor. Yeah, the fact that Duke almost won that game, despite really struggling offensively, you know, 25% turnover rate, three of 21 shooting threes, 33% assist rate, like the fundamental stats weren't great. And yet they were still right there.
And they had some good performances from some important players. All right, so you mentioned somebody, I'm going to make this statement. You tell me if I'm crazy. He might not lead them in scoring this year, but I think there will be more games where Kyle Filipowski is Duke's scoring leader than any other player on that team. I think there's a, I mean, we'll, I mean, I think there's a very good chance of that, in part because, you know, Derek Whitehead has already missed three games, you know what I mean? So it's like, he's gonna be working off of a smaller sample. But I do think once Whitehead gets in the mix, he's obviously going to, he's an explosive scorer, he's going to get lots of uses, etc. But Filipowski is the guy that is just going to be a matchup problem, right? And because he can score from every level of the court, he's got the offensive rebound.
I looked this up this morning. It's just three games, but 6.6 second chance points per 40 minutes so far this season, which is one of the best numbers in the country. He's shown the ability to shoot off of movement, like when he comes off of screens, which is like really, really tough action for opposing post players to guard. He can pick and pop, he can handle, he's been very good getting downhill, like in grab and go or secondary situation. So, like, yes, in theory, I think there's a very good chance that because he's going to play a lot of minutes, he draws so far he's been drawing a ton of free throws too, which is another way to pick up cheat points. And he can shoot three. So I just think like the matchup component, the fact that he gets the line.
Yes, he has the ability to be a guy that leads them in scoring a lot this season. Yeah, and there would have been at least at least another bucket if the officials had any level of competence last night. They were that was bad.
I mean, just like welcome back college officials. Just I mean, I'm not even trying to go like ACC Homer here, but like the takeover mode was just like comical and predictable. We've joked about this plenty of times, but like we just got to change the sign for a charge. Jazz hands guys like they just like doing it too much. They there's just it's it seems like simple psychology. How could it not play a role into these guys wanting to make that call a disproportionate amount of the time?
Yeah, it's a let's change it to jazz hands or make them do like the first five movements of the Macarena. And that would that would be that would be a charge now quickly over to what we haven't really seen much of Derek Lively. He was sort of involved last night, but really not much. Well, we'll we have to wait and see what he looks like, what he plays, what he really starts playing minutes. And I'm sure that will come soon because they can play Lively and Filipowski together. Let me ask you about NC State. They didn't I mean, they blew out FIU and FIU maybe just death warmed over. They might just be no good at all. So I'm not I'm not looking too much into it, but they didn't get great Turquavian Smith. But whether it's Jarkel Joiner or Casey Morsell, they got, I think, good defensive work off the bench in Ernest Ross.
They got good performances last night. Yeah. Yeah.
This is not just a one man show. I mean, like, obviously, you know, Turquavian is the ultimate ceiling raiser for this team. And, you know, NC State's going to have chances to win a lot of games this season, arguably because they'll be able to put the best player on the court.
Right. You know, Turquavian Smith, like he's he's that gifted as a player. We've seen him have to handle extra defensive attention so far this season. I think there's been some some good and some bad to that.
I would say more positive than bad. There's been some bad turnovers and careless passes, but I think he's also doing a nice job making some reads, not forcing it too bad out of that. And it helps having guys like you mentioned, Joiner and Morsell that you can swing it to. And those guys can either make plays against the scramble defense or they can shoot off the catch. When Turquavian creates open shots for them with his gravity, with the basketball or those guys themselves can create their own shots like Jarkel Joiner. You know, some games when the shots not going, it may not look as well, but he had it rolling last night. And he's the guy that can create his own shot, shoot off the pick and roll and do it from deep, do it from the mid range. So, yeah, it's like nice having multiple guys like that that can give you some some creation and some spot up shooting. It probably doesn't hurt that, you know, Morsell is a fourth year guy, Jarkel Joiner. This is either his fifth or sixth season in college hoops. So like they're quality veteran guards and Morsell is just like an underrated two way player. I guess Joiner is for that matter as well, because both those guys can like heat up the basketball to the point of attack defensively, too. Yeah, I said this a few minutes ago.
I don't know. Again, they struggled with Campbell. They only won by like six points or so. They're going to play Elon in a couple of days.
And Elon might be better, too. And that might be a tough game for them to win. But what I do know about the ACC, at least right now, is that in the middle of the league, it's kind of soft. And if you have a dynamic player and can get good enough performances out of a few other guys, there's no reason why NC State can't pile up a bunch of wins against, you know, teams from seven through 15 in the league.
Yeah, I mean, I completely agree. That was the sell for them this season, right? That this was going to be this could be a top 50 offense with a top 20 pick interquavion Smith in some nice, not just like, you know, complimentary pieces that you need to play in to do everything. And those guys just play off of him. Right. But you have some other guys that you can run offense through joiner.
D.J. Burns is a guy you can you can play through in the post, which they've done some this season. Like, I actually think it's huge that they're getting some offense from the center position this season because they got none a year ago.
Right. You know, like, look, Evie DeJuana is like he plays really hard. He knows how to do is play his role offensively as like screen and dive and offensive rebound. And he's like a decent defensive center who can really block shots and close down the rim for you.
But teams just didn't have to worry about him on the roll last year. And now with mortgage and with Burns, like you've got guys that that that you can screen a role with that you can play throughout the post. And so not only do you have like threats, but there's a little bit of versatility. I mean, none of those guys are like, you know, spacing the floor out to the three point range or anything like that. But inside of 15, 16 feet, they can do a bunch of different stuff.
So I think, look, those picket roles hit a little bit different when you've got to worry about the guy that's screening and rolling downhill or slipping into space or any of that type of stuff. That's that goes a long way for guys like Joyner and Smith. Brian Geisinger at big guys underscore bird. We have him from Pack Pride Devil's Den, who beefed at me on Twitter last night, only because I said something about Duke's defense that was not to their liking.
I think it was about that. I said Duke's defense is not good. What I should have said is tonight, because I don't know, Duke's defense might end up being good, but Duke's defense last night wasn't. And I think the return of Whitehead will help on that side of the floor, too. And I think the players that they have on the court will play better defense than they did last night. They just there were, unlike Kansas, who contested a lot at the rim, Duke didn't contest a lot at the rim last night because they weren't in position to. I mean, there was just a lot of layups.
I do think this is this is something that I'm writing about or trying to write about. Like Duke right now with Derek Lively hasn't played much in just twenty three minutes so far with Lively and Filipowski on the floor together, which we're going to see a lot of this season. I think that's going to be an awesome four or five duo. But right now, Duke, for the most part, is bringing Derek Lively to the level of the screen. Right. So when he's guarding pick and roll, Lively is basically level or just below the screen, which is fine because like he's he's long and he's incredibly mobile so he can be disruptive at the point of attack there. But if you do that, you're also pulling your best shot blocking threat away from the rim and you need the activity on the backside to compensate. And I just think that's where you need the rotations and the repetition. The reps will help. The rotations will get better because Filipowski spaced out a couple of times in those situations. And I just think that stuff will tighten up and that'll allow Lively to rotate back and be in place to close down the rim.
But who knows, maybe they choose to guard some of that stuff more conservatively at some point if that continues to be an issue. Brian Geisinger, I'll talk to you very soon, my friend. I appreciate your time. Absolutely.
Whisper: medium.en / 2022-11-16 18:36:42 / 2022-11-16 18:42:26 / 6
