Color By Number
Statistically speaking, the Blue Devils are building an impressive body of work
Barry Jacobs, GoDuke The Magazine
There are color-by-number books for adults and for children, color-by-number mosaics and landscapes, color-by-number “brain games,” Harry Potter color-by-number books and “Stress Relieving” color-by-number books specifically for adults. There are Disney Villain color-by-number books, color-by-number mandalas, Zen and Happy color-by-number apps, color-by-number products that hyphenate their name and those that don’t.
You can also color by numbers to view a basketball team, creating a picture with stats that reveals peculiarities, strengths and weaknesses. Given the Blue Devils’ performance so far in 2025, measuring the present squad against fellow ACC members, not to mention against past aggregations both at Duke and throughout recent history, is entertaining and, frankly, impressive no matter what you think of the rest of the league.
Let’s start with scoring margin, often overlooked even though it’s arguably more revealing than most statistical measures. Certainly dominance can be gauged by wins and losses but also by how thoroughly and consistently a squad prospers against the opposition.
There is nothing esoteric or open to interpretation about the gap between how many points a team scores and how much it yields against quality competition. The balance achieved by imposing a group’s will, enforcing a standard of play, relentlessly defining the terms of engagement internally and externally, is mirrored in scoring margin.
With an average advantage of 20.3 points through their first 21 games, the ’25 Blue Devils are staking a claim among the elite in ACC history.
Across 71 previous seasons that yielded 14 national champions, 44 straight years with at least one team in the Sweet 16, and a parade of great players and coaches, until now only four squads led the ACC with a scoring margin of 20 points or more. That group included the undefeated but probation-limited N.C. State unit of 1973 and three Mike Krzyzewski teams of the 3-point, shot-clock era.
In 1998, 1999 and 2001 the Blue Devils relied on a core of Trajan Langdon, Elton Brand, Shane Battier, Chris Carrawell, Jason Williams, Will Avery, Carlos Boozer and Nate James to build overpowering margins that each year were the best in Division I. Three of those stalwarts — Brand, Carrawell and Battier — won ACC Player of the Year awards in 1999, 2000 and 2001.
The ’99 squad, which reached the NCAA title game and is perhaps the best ACC team to fall short of winning a national championship, set an enduring conference standard with a +24.7 scoring margin.
How the current crew builds its edge is instructive. To date they’ve been the league leaders in a variety of key areas: scoring defense and rebound margin, field goal percentage and field goal percentage defense, made 3-pointers, assists and ratio of assists to turnovers.
Some of those stats have only been recorded officially, like 3-pointers and assists, since the mid-80s when Krzyzewski’s program began making habitual marches to the NCAA Tournament.
This year’s 17-plus assists per game marks only the fourth time Duke has led the ACC in that measure, the second straight season under Jon Scheyer, who himself paced the Blue Devils twice in assists as a player.
Effective passing is a trait ordinarily associated with a veteran unit whose members understand their coach’s vision and each other’s court predilections and skills. But Scheyer, like Coach K in 2021 and 2022, has conjured adept passing squads with a mix of veterans and freshman starters. The ’25 group also minimizes coloring outside the lines, leading the ACC in assist-to-turnover ratio.
The 2025 Devils are sixth in the ACC in 3-point accuracy (.368) and second in suppressing opponents’ proficiency from afar (.313). And, at a time when NBA champions such as Golden State and Boston with Duke product Jayson Tatum set a winning example by gorging on threes (the Celtics averaged 49 tries through their first 41 games this season), the ’25 Devils have edged in that direction by averaging one more long-range basket than anyone else in the ACC except Louisville (as February began the Blue Devils were making 10 a game, the Cards 9.9).
Emphasizing threes is having an effect. Louisville, emerging from the ashes of three miserable seasons, has risen to the ACC’s upper echelon with a revamped roster, a new coach in Pat Kelsey and a reliance on 3-pointers for the majority of its field goal attempts. Duke is not far behind, trying 47 percent of its shots from beyond the arc.
Duke, version 2025, accounts for more of its points from 3-point range, 36.2 percent, than in any season since the turn of the century, including the 2001 NCAA championship team (34.5 percent) that set the school record for most threes in a season.
There are other significant factors that make Scheyer’s third team “special.”
The Blue Devils are the ACC’s best in scoring defense, lately the province of Tony Bennett’s stifling, slow-paced Virginia clubs. Duke leads in that statistical category for only the sixth time as an ACC member, most recently in 2007. Along those lines the Devils also stand atop the ACC in field goal defense for only the fifth time ever and the sole season since 2005.
Beyond that, in a divergence from past practice, the ’25 contingent is tops in the league in rebound margin despite relying on the outside-in scoring of Cooper Flagg, Kon Knueppel and Tyrese Proctor. During Krzyzewski’s 42 years at the helm, Duke had the ACC’s best rebound margin only twice, most recently in 1989.
All these numbers, and the pictures they conjure, are of course first and foremost products of a dedicated group of gifted, well-guided players who’ve consistently risen to most every occasion. Too often fixation on stats fails to credit the hard work and improving skills of individuals, especially when one of them is as polished, poised and proficient as Flagg.
“I think his unselfishness and feel for the game has spread and become contagious with our entire team, where our guys are not consumed with a statistic or a number,” Scheyer said of Flagg, his star pupil. “They’re consumed with what’s the right basketball play and how do we win.”
Finally, another set of numbers vividly illustrate the quality of Duke’s season. The Devils won 19 of their first 21 games and stood alone in the league standings with 11 wins in their first 11 ACC contests. At midseason they also were the only ACC team ranked among the top 25 (since joined by Louisville) in the admittedly subjective national polls, where Duke remains a familiar representative of a proud but harmfully bloated league.
This story originally appeared in the 16.6 issue of GoDuke The Magazine – February 2025. Dedicated to sharing the stories of Duke student-athletes, present and past, GoDuke The Magazine is published for Duke Athletics by LEARFIELD with editorial offices at 3100 Tower Blvd., Suite 404, Durham, NC 27707. To subscribe, join the Iron Dukes or call (336) 831-0767.