Indiana’s defensive liability on display as Duke, Ingram take full advantage
DURHAM, N.C. — I may be putting too much faith in the progressiveness of college basketball record-book keepers, but advanced statistics are getting more mainstream by the season, enough so that I can envision an occasion, maybe a decade from now, when Duke has some brilliant offensive performance, or Indiana has some woeful defensive performance, and sportswriters turn to an official NCAA website to see where it measures up in terms of the most relevant, widely accepted metric: points per possession.
They’ll discover that whatever was done still does not surpass Dec. 2, 2015, when the Blue Devils scored 1.53 PPP in a 94–74 rout of Indiana: Duke’s most efficient game against a major-conference team in an advanced-stats era that dates back to 2002, and Indiana’s least-efficient defensive game in a Tom Crean coaching era that began in 2008. Those analytically conscious sportswriters will be curious about how this happened. How did a team that was re-tooling after a national championship deliver a historic scorching of an opponent that had least three NBA-level athletes and was ranked No. 15 in the preseason?
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So this is intended for far-in-the future readers rather than those in the present. These are paragraphs for adding meaning and context to a numerical superlative.
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Dec. 2, 2015 was the night where Brandon Ingram—you know, the guy who was drafted No. 5 by the Nuggets in 2016, plays an auxiliary scoring role to Emmanuel Mudiay and made All-Star teams in 2022 and 2023—first looked like a big-time prospect. Ingram had arrived in Durham with so much hype, a small forward in a 6'9" body that was impossibly long and skinny, and promisingly athletic; it was hard not to look at the length of his arms and circumference of his biceps and think of the noodle-like Kevin Durant that we saw in the winter of 2006 at Texas. But Ingram’s performances were hardly Durant-like in November 2015. Duke’s prize freshman was tentative, lacked a high motor and his coach, Mike Krzyzewski, said after a few games that Ingram “hasn’t adjusted yet to the physicality of [college basketball].”
Roughly four hours before No. 7 Duke was to tip off against Indiana—and just a few minutes after the Blue Devils’ team meal—assistant coach Nate James ran Ingram through a hard workout, which wasn’t standard gameday procedure. The goal was to rev up Ingram’s motor, and it worked. Rather than easing into things against the Hoosiers, Ingram roared, amassing eight points (on two threes and a dribble pull-up) over Duke’s first four possessions. He had 18 points (on 7-of-8 shooting) by halftime, when the Blue Devils held a 51–42 lead. “[Ingram] fueled us at the beginning of the game,” said senior forward Amile Jefferson. “I thought he was nothing short of amazing. There are not a lot of guys out there like him, guys that are 6'9" and can shoot it [and] put the ball on the floor.”
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Ingram, even after years in the NBA, no doubt remembers this game fondly. He finished with a career-high 24 points in the rout; he annihilated Indiana on threes, basket-attacks off the bounce, even a graceful finger-roll that, with his wingspan, only required one long step from just below the free-throw line. He was the key shooter on a night where Duke went 11-of-24 from long range and he had four of the Blue Devils’ 19 offensive boards, which were the quiet part of their offensive masterpiece: They rebounded 54.3% of their misses and converted them into 26 second-chance points. Afterward, Coach K lifted his assessment of Ingram to “a real good work in progress,” and Ingram proceeded to establish himself as Duke’s co-leading scorer, along with guard Grayson Allen, in the coming months.
But for those present at Cameron Indoor Stadium, and especially those who watched it on ESPN from homes in Bloomington, and Indianapolis, and all over the Hoosier State, the lasting memories of the 1.53 PPP scored by Duke on Dec. 2, 2015 are not that of a Brandon Ingram breakout. They are that of an Indiana defense whose many, fatal flaws were laid bare over 40 minutes, and an Indiana team that made its preseason label as a Final Four contender look like wishful thinking.
The memories are images of the Hoosiers being “destroyed,” as guard Troy Williams put it, on the glass; of failing to guard anyone off the dribble in man-to-man; of a halfcourt zone D that broke down so easily and frequently that Duke could not help but get endless looks at open threes. It is images of small pockets of Indiana fans at Cameron standing, in shock, in the second half, as Duke opened up leads of as many as 25 points. The fans stood with hands over their mouths, obscuring grimaces; they seemed to be at a loss for words. An embattled Crean was blunt about the situation afterwards. “That's not how we want to guard,” he said. “That is not how we practice guarding.”
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The problem that day, and in that still-young season, was not that Indiana had been expected to be great at defense. The Hoosiers had finished the previous year ranked 214th in adjusted defensive efficiency, and were merely expected to make gains after adding five-star freshman center Thomas Bryant and getting more experienced at the other four positions. Indiana’s best-case scenario for ‘15-16 was to be something like Duke's ‘14–15 team: an offensive juggernaut that figured out how to play D well enough to make a run at a title. All the offensive pieces were there for the Hoosiers, with super-efficient guards Yogi Ferrell and James Blackmon Jr., and sweet-shooting role players around them. If they guarded noticeably better than they did last season, they’d be the Big Ten title favorites; if they guarded significantly better than last season, they'd have an outside shot at a national title.
What happened instead was, Indiana went west for the Maui Invitational in November, and was beaten by Wake Forest, a non-NCAA tournament team, yielding 1.12 PPP to the Demon Deacons, getting gashed repeatedly on ball-screens. And then IU was beaten by another non-NCAA tournament team in Maui, UNLV, and five days after that, in a victory in Bloomington, the Hoosiers allowed one of the worst teams in Division I, Alcorn State, to score 0.99 PPP.
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Dec. 2, 2015, was Indiana’s day of reckoning for unfixed defensive issues. The only time the Hoosiers flustered Duke with pressure was when forward Max Bielfeldt accidentally bumped Mike Krzyzewski on the way to the locker room at halftime, resulting in a miffed Coach K having a conversation with Crean. Indiana’s non-presence on the defensive glass—its two frontcourt starters, Collin Hartman and Bryant, failed to grab a single rebound all game—was evident from the get-go, as Ingram’s three on the first possession came off a Jefferson offensive board. Duke rebounded 10 of its 18 misses in the first half. The Blue Devils put Bryant in ball screens, where he struggles, and there were breakdowns; they drove at will, drew over-help, exploited late recovery by knocking down jumpers. A 2–3 zone and matchup variations of it offered no relief for IU, as Jefferson racked up a surprising eight assists as a playmaker out of the post, and the ever-attacking Allen made seven shots (some of the circus variety) on the interior. There were obvious reasons why Crean kept repeating “we need to guard the ball better” in his postgame press conference.
Because the thing is, Indiana’s offense was great, scoring 1.20 PPP against a top-10 opponent, shooting 50.9% from the field to Duke's 52.9%. Ferrell and Blackmon Jr. didn’t commit a single turnover. They even held a 21–15 lead eight minutes into the first half. But whatever vigor the Hoosiers showed on offense simply was not there on the other end. “We can get by with technical errors on defense,” Ferrell said, “but we can’t get by with guys not making effort on D.”
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It took until garbage time for the Hoosiers to record a real defensive highlight. With 1:59 left and Duke up 90–68, Allen drove to the basket yet again, only to have a layup attempt swatted out of bounds, emphatically, by a weakside-rotating Williams. When Blue Devils fans saw that Williams was perhaps a bit too pleased with the play, they began chanting “SCOREBOARD,” and Allen laughed. It was Allen who held the ball in his hands, a few possessions later, as the shot clock was off and the game clock ticked down to zero. He was being guarded by Blackmon, who, in one final act of frustration, tried to swipe for a steal just before the buzzer. It was only fitting, given the previous 39 minutes and 59 seconds, that Blackmon came up empty.
Crean, with the heat on him rising as Indiana fell to 5–3, with just one more shot at a quality non-conference win left on its schedule—vs. Notre Dame, another high-powered offense, on Dec. 19 in Indianapolis—tried to find a silver lining in the blowout. What he said late that night was: “It’ll be December 3rd here in about 30 seconds. It’s early in the season. We’ve got to continue to really work hard to get better. I think we’ll get a lot better.”
For Indiana, the best thing about Dec. 2, 2015, was that it ended. That time marched on, and the Hoosiers were never again that porous in ‘15–16. Their fate, and Crean’s along with it, hinged on whether there was enough time left to fix a historically dismal defense. The Hoosiers were not in need of minor repairs. As the clock ticked past midnight and into Dec. 3, their defense was nothing short of a tear-down project.
