Record: 26-5, 13-1 (1st place)
ACC Tournament: Won
NCAA Tournament: Lost in national final
Final AP Ranking: 3
All-ACC Players: Jeff Mullins (ACC POY), Buzz Harrison (2nd), Hack Tison (2nd), Jay Buckley (2nd)
All-Americans: Jeff Mullins (2nd)
OK, I just got done writing about 1963 Duke. What am I going to say different about 1964 Duke? Well, it was a different team. National Player of the Year Art Heyman was gone. Jeff Mullins was now the leader. Veterans Jay Buckley, Hack Tison, and Buzz Harrison were back. But what really put this team over the top were the additions of Jack Marin and Steve Vacendak from the freshman team.
The ACC in 1964 was pretty terrible. The distance between the first and second-place teams was never so great. Wake Forest, who finished second, probably wasn’t one of the 40 best teams in the country. The rest of the league was just plain bad. Duke had one close game in the ACC all year. They won their ACC Tournament games by 31, 16, and 21.
But Vic Bubas was smart. He knew his team needed to be tested against good competition, and he knew he wasn’t going to get it in the ACC. So he scheduled a really challenging non-conference slate:
- Beat #7 Ohio State 76-75 on a neutral court
- Beat West Virginia 86-81 on the road
- Lost to Vanderbilt 97-92 in overtime, on the road
- Lost to #3 Michigan, 83-67, on the road
- Lost to #1 Kentucky, 81-79, on a neutral court
- Beat Tennessee 67-65 in double OT, in Greensboro
- Beat #4 Davidson 82-75 at home
Every one of those opponents was probably better than the second-best team in the ACC. Notice that only one of the games was at Cameron. If you like analogies, Duke in 1964 was like a modern-day Gonzaga. They dominated a relatively weak league and played a brutal non-conference schedule to test themselves against the best. So when the NCAA Tournament came, they were ready.
Duke received a bye to the regionals, which were conveniently held at Reynolds Coliseum. They dominated #7 Villanova behind 43 points and 12 boards from Mullins. In the regional final, they annihilated UConn 101-54 in a game the Blue Devils led by 35 at halftime.
The Final Four brought a rematch with #2 Michigan, who had beaten Duke handily earlier in the season on their homecourt. The Wolverines featured two All-Americans in Cazzie Russell and Bill Buntin. This time, behind a balanced scoring effort led by Buckley’s 25, the Blue Devils triumphed to advance to the national championship game. Where they had the misfortune to meet undefeated UCLA. Starting this very year, the Bruins put a stranglehold on the national championship which they would not relinquish until John Wooden’s retirement after the 1975 season.
Teams to Place Four Players on First or Second Team All-ACC:
- 1964 Duke: Mullins (1), Harrison (2), Tison (2), Buckley (2)
- 1972 UNC: McAdoo (1), Wuycik (1), Chamberlain (2), Karl (2)
- 1975 Maryland: Lucas (1), Davis (2), Howard (2), Brown (2)
- 2012 UNC: Zeller (1), Henson (1), Barnes (1), Marshall (2)
A Rabbit Trail on Style of Play
I commented in an earlier post on late 1960s North Carolina about what we can infer about style of play for long-ago teams from the scant statistical record. This team is interesting in that regard as well.
We have field goal percentages both offensively and defensively, so we know that part. We can see from FG/FT attempts and opponents’ FG/FT attempts which teams took more shots than their opponents. What we lack is the detail behind why that is that case. If a team takes more shots than their opponents, either they are winning on the glass or they are winning on turnover margin. But for teams from the 1960s, we have no data at all on turnovers. We have total rebounds, but we don’t have offensive vs. defensive rebound breakdown. So how do we know what they were good at, exactly?
Raw rebound margin is not as useful as you might think as to whether a team is truly good at rebounding. To understand why, imagine a game between a very good shooting team (Team A) and a very poor shooting team (Team B). Team A goes 40-for-60, missing 20 shots. Team B goes 20-for-60, missing 40 shots. Team A gets 40 rebounds to Team B’s 20. Team A is the better rebounding team, right?
Not necessarily. Remember that the defense has an inherent advantage over the offense in getting rebounds. So when Team B misses, Team A should get the rebound, and vice versa. In this case, Team B missed many more shots, so Team A had many more defensive rebound opportunities. In actuality, Team A’s 40-20 advantage on the boards is exactly what we would expect if Team A and Team B are equally good at rebounding. Team A’s apparent advantage is only because Team B missed so many more shots.
I came up with the concept of Expected Rebounds to account for this. It’s based on the fact that the defense gets the rebound on a missed field goal about 2/3 of the time on average. Free throws are a different story; offensive rebounds on free throw attempts are very rare.
So a crude, quick-and-dirty formula for calculating Expected Rebounds is:
(2/3 * opponents’ field goal misses) + (1/3 * own field goal misses) + opponents’ free throw misses
This isn’t perfect, of course; offensive rebounds on free throws are rare but not zero, and not every missed free throw even results in a rebound, unless you’re counting deadball rebounds, etc. But as a rough indicative measure, it will do. The idea is that if a team has more rebounds than its expected rebounds, it must be a good rebounding team.
Let’s look at an example. 1963 Duke had the following stat lines:
| Team | FG | FGA | FT | FTA | Reb |
| Duke | 984 | 1926 | 528 | 784 | 1468 |
| Opponents | 819 | 2037 | 431 | 611 | 1127 |
Using my formula from above, Duke’s Expected Rebounds would be:
2/3 * (2037 – 819) + 1/3 * (1926 – 984) + (611 – 431) = 1,306
Doing the same calculation for Duke’s opponents:
2/3 * (1926 – 984) + 1/3 * (2037 – 819) + (784-528) = 1,290
Since Duke got 1,468 rebounds, well above their expected 1,306 rebounds, this supports that they were, in fact, an outstanding rebounding team. We’ll call the difference between actual rebounds and expected rebounds (1,468 – 1,306 = +162) the True Rebounding Margin.
When you compare the 1964 team to the 1963 team, something interesting jumps out at you. The 1963 team shot 51.1% from the field compared to 40.2% for its opponents – a huge 10.9% advantage in FG%. The 1964 team, however, had only a 4.1% advantage in FG%, and yet their average scoring margin was actually greater than the 1963 team (+15.0 vs. +14.2). What does that tell you? It tells you that the ’64 team made up for the relative decline in FG% margin by getting more shots than their opponents, which means they were either a great rebounding team or great at turnover margin or both.
What does Expected Rebounds tell us for 1964?
| Team | FG | FGA | FT | FGA | Reb |
| Duke | 1028 | 2163 | 551 | 771 | 1426 |
| Opponents | 872 | 2009 | 399 | 612 | 1279 |
Duke Expected Rebounds: 2/3 * (2009 – 872) + 1/3 * (2163 – 1028) + (612 – 399) = 1,349
Opponents’ Expected Rebounds: 2/3 * (2163 – 1028) + 1/3 * (2009 – 872) + (771 – 551) = 1,356
Duke’s True Rebounding Margin = Actual Rebounds – Expected Rebounds = 1,426 – 1,349 = +77. Good, but not nearly as good as 1963 Duke’s +162.
Let’s summarize what we’ve learned. 1964 Duke had a slightly larger scoring margin than 1963 Duke. And yet 1963 Duke had a higher FG%, a lower FG% allowed, and was a better rebounding team. How is this possible? There is only one way: 1964 Duke must have had an exceptional turnover margin, much better than 1963 Duke. That is literally the only way that all those things can be true. (I’m fudging a little bit by ignoring the impact of free throws, which is the other factor we haven’t considered. 1964 Duke was a little better than 1963 Duke in that regard, but not nearly enough to explain the scoring margin.)
It still doesn’t tell us everything we’d like to know. There are two sides to turnover margin: forcing turnovers, and avoiding turnovers of your own. Was 1964 Duke exceptional at forcing turnovers, or exceptional at taking care of the ball, or both? There is no data to tell us that. We could perhaps conjecture that the addition of Vacendak, an outstanding point guard, helped the turnover margin, and that perhaps the subtraction of Heyman may have hurt their rebounding, but helped their turnover margin. But we’re just guessing.