Duke basketball coach Jon Scheyer during the college basketball exhibition game against Tennessee on October 26, 2025, in Knoxville, Tenn. Saul Young/News Sentinel / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images

The Key Area Duke Basketball Must Improve This Season

Originally posted on Duke Blue Devils on SI
By Michael Canelo | Last updated Oct 28, 2025 8:00 AM ET

The Duke Blue Devils basketball team wants to get the job done this season. The job of winning a National Championship and bringing it to the Duke Basketball program. This season, they will have another great team that can win it all.

They will have to do a lot of different things, great if they want to be the team that is standing at the end of the season. They know that it is going to take everyone on this team to achieve the ultimate goal.

This Duke team will be led by head coach Jon Scheyer once again. Scheyer has done a great job in his first few seasons as the head coach, getting these players in the best position to be successful both on and off the court. That is something they always want to do.

They also want to make sure their team has the time to make they build chemistry both on and off the court. He will lead the way, the best way he knows how, and that is by effort.

The Key Area

If Duke has any chance of winning it all this season, they will have to be a great defensive team. They have the size, length, and speed to do that. In their last tune-up game before their regular season starts, they took on the Tennessee Volunteers. On the defense side, it was a bit shaky, but that is something that they could fix.

"Duke, again playing without injured forward Maliq Brown, showed late-game toughness to lock down the victory after a first half when, Scheyer said, the Devils were “all over the place” on defense. The Blue Devils’ interior defense came off too soft against in the opening half. Ngongba picked up two early fouls and took a seat."

"And when the 6-11 sophomore returned later in the first half, he was called for a reaching foul some 30 feet from the basket. It was back to the bench again. “Once Pat got fouls in the first half, we don’t have replacements,” Scheyer said in a postgame press conference.

“In the first half we were playing on our heels,” Scheyer said. “In the second half, I thought we did a great job of having great physicality in the paint. Pat, whether he blocked shots or not, did a great job of protecting for us. And as a team, we just played really hard. “It was a great lesson for us, that we can build off our defense and the offense will come.”

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This article first appeared on Duke Blue Devils on SI and was syndicated with permission.

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