There was a lot to like in Duke’s in over Texas: Cam Boozer’s second half-surge comes to mind, as does Isaiah Evans’ obvious maturation and Caleb Foster’s very notable defense. In fact, the team defense in general was really, really good. Nik Khamenia’s hard-nosed play off the bench was as well and seeing Maliq Brown back on the court was wonderful.
On an individual basis there were a number of great plays. The pass to Dame Sarr in the corner for a three was quite good and it’s great to see Evans
taking it to the basket.
However, the play that was most arresting to us ended without the ball going into the hoop. How does that work?
It’s simple: basic acceleration.
Allow us to explain.
Near the beginning of the game, with 17:17 left in the first half, Sarr got a rebound and just took off. He blew past UT defender Chendall Weaver and clearly, Weaver had no idea that Sarr was that fast.
He got from one end to the other in about 3.5 seconds and he really turned on the afterburners on Weaver. He missed the shot, but the acceleration was the point: this guy has some jets.
We saw it again in the second half when he stepped in and swiped a cross-court pass and headed to the basket.
Okay, he missed that shot too, but big deal. He’ll make plenty of shots. You just cannot teach that kind of speed. It’s going to be mesmerizing.
Note – We occasionally feature clips from X.com rather than YouTube and we really wanted to look at this one again. However, we don’t want to call these clips X Gold because a) it doesn’t really sound right and b) it could mess up the algorithms. So Twitter Gold it is.
