Duke coach Kara Lawson looks over a stat sheet after a blowout loss to South Carolina during the Players Era Championship in November. Next to her, Taina Mair does the same.
A point guard is supposed to be an extension of the coach, and Mair fits that to an extreme. She mirrors her coach’s expressions and emotions, and even speaks with the same cadence.
Duke was in a tough spot. The Blue Devils had started the season ranked No. 8 in The Associated Press poll, then opened the season with a loss to Baylor, then one to USF, then another to a West Virginia team that only had five players in the second half.
Then, after losing to South Carolina and UCLA by 20 and 30 points, respectively, in the Players Era event, panic mode should have been settling in. Those are teams Duke should be competing with.
But Mair wasn’t panicked. She wasn’t even phased.
“We’re just going to continue to put time in the gym, continue to work,” she said then. “Everything for us is going to click eventually.”
That may have seemed like perhaps a coping mechanism or wishful thinking, the very definition of projecting positivity. But Mair was right: Her Blue Devils were on the right track. They did stay the course.
“Every team is going to go through adversity,” sophomore Riley Thomas said. “We’re going to respond to it by giving our all every single game and go from there.”
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Fast forward to Friday, where No. 3-seeded Duke rolled over No. 14 Charleston 81-64 in an NCAA Tournament first-round game in Durham. The method to Lawson’s madness is clear.
The Blue Devils never were playing for an AP rank. They weren’t playing to win games in November. They were playing to prepare for this moment. For March. And though the outside noise was swirling, the Blue Devils never listened. They were building something, even if the foundations weren’t visible to anyone but those in the locker room.
Lawson challenged her team in every way possible. The Blue Devils played those top teams to start the season. They sought out opponents with different styles of play, like West Virginia’s manic defense, and the kind of mid-major teams they could face in March, like Belmont and South Dakota State.
“I think Coach Kara was very strategic in the nonconference schedule she gave us,” sophomore Toby Fournier said. “She wanted to test us early so we were able to take all of that and apply it to the games that really mattered at the end of the year, especially in March.”
No one has been more important to Duke’s development than Fournier.
The 6-foot-2 sophomore forward, recently named a Naismith Defensive Player of the Year semifinalist, has been a commanding force in the post. She’s averaging 17.3 points, 8.2 rebounds and 2.3 blocks per game, leading Duke in each of those categories. Assists and steals belong to Mair, though, who averages 5.5 and 2.4, respectively.
Both are following the team’s trajectory, playing their best basketball when it matters the most. Mair led Duke in scoring in the ACC Tournament semifinals and championship game, finishing with a double-double in the title-game victory over Louisville, with 19 points, 12 rebounds, 3 assists and 3 steals.
In Friday’s win against Charleston, it was Fournier’s turn to show out, taking advantage of the Cougars’ smaller frontcourt for 24 points.
“As we got through the season, we started getting better and better and better, ” Mair said. “I feel like we’re playing our best basketball now.”
Lawson agrees. Kind of.
Duke didn’t get to this point by being satisfied. After starting the season 3-6, Duke went 21-2 because the foundation that was being built is never finished.
Charleston went to the line 25 times Friday. The Cougars had 22 points off turnovers. Guard Taryn Barbot had 36 points. All of those are points of improvement, and Lawson certainly will let her team know that it needs to be better.
Perfection isn’t possible, but Lawson wants her team to get close.
“It’s a gradual growth toward having a higher percentage of adherence to the scheme,” she said. “We’re going to have mess-ups, right? We want to lower the amount of them.
“It’s about shrinking those moments down where we have poor possessions. We want to have as few as possible. But these teams are good, so you’re going to have some of them. So, it’s not having zero tolerance for mistakes but having a low tolerance for them because you know that they’re going to make some mistakes.”
Duke made plenty of mistakes in November, all in the name of making fewer in March.
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