Wins And Losses When Duke Coughs It Up

Frankly it’s not the kind of record basketball programs are eager to advertise.

Before our current era of all-kinds-of-stats-circulated-all-the-time, some coaches and sport information directors actually worked to suppress sharing how many turnovers their teams or players committed. A negative stat, don’t you know? These days turnover totals are routinely available, just part of the picture we all can see.

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But that picture grew unexpectedly ugly in Durham a week or so ago when the Blue Devils hosted and beat Lipscomb, a modest team from Nashville, Tenn. The matchup was Duke’s only home game over a span of four weeks in December and immediately followed scholastic exams, a necessary formality when being paid to play for an American university.

The overmatched Bisons came not only to collect a healthy appearance fee, but clearly determined to beat the vaunted Devils on their venerated home floor. Duke had to rally to eke out a three point advantage at halftime after committing a glaring 16 turnovers in the opening 20 minutes. The tone was reset in the second half as Duke had only six more miscues handling the ball en route to a 97-73 Duke win.

The turnovers, many unforced, were wholly uncharacteristic of a Jon Scheyer team, ordinarily notable for intelligent ballhandling and handsome ratios of assists to turnovers. The 16 turnovers in the first half were more than Duke committed in any other entire contest this season, five more than the Blue Devils averaged across their first 10 games.

The interlude of inexactitude against Lipscomb marked only the third time since at least 2010, when Scheyer was the Devils’ eminently steady point guard, that Duke had 22 turnovers. A Duke team coached by Mike Krzyzewski had most recently incurred 22 turnovers in its opening game of the Covid-marred 2020-21 season, a forgettable home win over Coppin State.

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Last season’s high was 16 turnovers in a November loss to Kansas, repeated in a late-January win at Wake.

Counting this month’s Lipscomb game, and including each time a season high was reached, Duke is 12-9 in turnover-rich outings since capturing the 2010 NCAA championship.

The modern Duke record for turnovers committed in a game is 36, set in a December 1974 home win against East Carolina. (The stat wasn’t officially kept in earlier years.) In three of the five seasons Duke had its most turnovers it advanced to a Final Four – 34 in 1989 at Harvard, where Bobby Ferry, older brother of two-time ACC Player Of The Year Danny Ferry, had played; 33 in 1991 at home against Maryland; and 31 at Wake in 1978.

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