A Closer Look At Duke Basketball’s 2019 Defense

During the 2019 season we wondered how to measure what seemed an extraordinarily good Duke team defense, especially by the standards of the one-and-done era.

So we compared the ’19 squad to other Blue Devils units of this century in their ability to force opponents into making turnovers.

No Mike Krzyzewski squad in a decade generated turnovers at a more handsome rate than the 14.4 achieved in the season just concluded. This was in keeping with teams in the first part of the century, when four of the initial years saw Duke force at least 17.2 turnovers per game.

Note that relatively few turnovers were created in each of the last two underclass-reliant seasons prior to 2019.