Duke’s next opponent is Western Carolina, and there’s just not a lot to go on right now when it comes to the Catamounts.
WCU opened against Cincinnati and lost, 94-63. Wes Miller is an adequate coach, but the Bearcats aren’t exactly in a golden era.
Duke is going to be heavily favored, but the one thing that intrigues us here is size. Usually schools like Western Carolina aren’t that big, but that’s not the case here: WCU has four guys over 6-9 and six that are at least 6-8.
The talent though leans heavily in Duke’s direction.
WCU head coach Tim Craft is in his second season after coaching at Gardner-Webb for nine seasons. While there, he notched wins over Wake Forest, Georgia Tech, Clemson and Purdue and at one point had his Bulldogs ranked in the Top 25. That’s very impressive.
Given that history, we’re pretty sure that the Duke staff will mention the scare that Bethune-Cookman put into Auburn on Monday night.
We’re just one game in, but against Cincinnati, junior Cord Stansberry had 23 points. He’s a 6-4 guard and looks like he could play a Stasi tower guard in a Tom Clancy movie.
Julien Soumaoro, a 5-11 grad student, added 13 in his first game at Western. Marcus Kell, a 6-8 junior, racked up 12 points and nine boards and 6-2 freshman Tahlan Pettway had three assists.
Against Cincinnati, Craft went fairly deep into his bench, with nine guys getting double digit minutes and one more, 6-4 grad student Tidjiane Dioumassi, getting eight.
The starters were Stansberry, Kell, Soumaoro, Abdulai Fanta Kabba, a 7-0 sophomore, and CJ Hyland, a 6-1 sophomore.
Western shot 35.9 percent and 33.3 on their threes (9-27).
They also had 22 turnovers but impressively out rebounded the Bearcats, 36-37 and doubled them up on the offensive boards, 14-7. Of course, they missed 41 shots, so that was a lot of opportunities for second chance shots.
The turnovers are a problem for the Catamounts obviously and we’re sure they’ve been working on those this week.
We don’t know enough about Western Carolina to be able to say a lot but their coach was successful at Gardner-Webb and it’s not easy to sustain success at that level. We’re pretty sure that his team will be well-coached and competitive, but Duke is going to be a problem.
It’s never easy for visitors playing at Cameron and in three games so far, we’ve seen that Duke is playing a very impressive defense. We’ve also seen early signs suggesting that Cameron Boozer is going to be a star. We’ve seen that Isaiah Evans has improved tremendously since his freshman year. Caleb Foster is playing with real grit. Patrick Ngongba has been uneven but he’s capable of greatness. Maliq Brown and Dame Sarr are both healthy and they’re only going to get better. Nik Khamenia, Darren Harris are all contributing and they’ll get better too.
In short, winning at Duke would be a tall order for Western Carolina. Can you rule it out? Well, no, of course not. Things happen. We saw some of that weirdness at Auburn earlier this week when Bethune-Cookman almost pulled off a stunner.
A lot would have to go right for the Catamounts to pull off the biggest upset in a long time, and they’d have to get a lot of help from Duke to do it. But stranger things have happened, like Chaminade beating Virginia back in the day. You have to be ready. As long as Duke is, things should go well. All that said, we think that Craft is a good coach and that’s extremely important.
As usual, we’ll add links as we find them.
Go to the DBR Boards to find Blue Healer Auctions |
Drop us a line
