Twitter Gold: Nightmare On Whitford Drive

Duke has had some brilliant defenders over the decades. If you go back to the 1960’s, Jeff Mullins and Steve Vacendak were both very, very tough defenders.

In the Foster years, Mike Gminski was terrific around the basket. It was very difficult to score inside on Duke in the late 1970’s.

In the Krzyzewski era, we saw brilliant defenders like Tommy Amaker, Billy King, Grant Hill, Bobby Hurley, Steve Wojciechowski, Shane Battier – we could go on.

In the Scheyer era, we’ve already seen some great defenders like Dereck Lively, Tyrese Proctor, Sion James and Dame Sarr, to name a few.

But in this era, no one is better than Maliq Brown because Brown, in many ways, is a prodigy.

Take a look at this video and see how he affects the opposing team. If he’s not poking the ball loose, he’s forcing someone to reset. We would argue that King is the best defender Duke’s ever had, but you could certainly argue that Brown is the most unique and certainly the most creative. No one sees the court quite the way that he does. He just changes things from top to bottom.