The Duke basketball team hopes to return to the Final Four this season, with a lot of new faces on the squad. Following a Duke win on Saturday over SMU, Blue Devils head coach Jon Scheyer spoke about the reality facing his team.

Specifically, Scheyer was not impressed with his Duke squad's defensive play. SMU hit shots at a rapid pace on Saturday, finishing the game making 50 percent of their three-point attempts.

“Collectively, it’s not there at the moment,” Scheyer said, per the Athletic. “It’s hard to feel very good when they shoot 56 percent from the field all game.”

Duke also allowed SMU to score 40 second-half points.

“It’s been an issue,” Scheyer added about his team's ability to get stops.

Duke is now 15-1 on the season, following the victory. The Blue Devils are also tied for first in the ACC with a 4-0 conference record.

Duke's defense is not up to par lately

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The Blue Devils started the season red-hot in terms of their defensive play. Through their first 10 games,  Duke was top 10 in the country in several defensive categories, including 3-point defense. Duke has tumbled down the rankings since.

“There’s obviously things we’ve got to clean up and do better,” Scheyer said. “To me, it’s mentality, and then obviously there’s some X’s and O’s strategic things that we’ve gotta help them with as coaches.”

Duke players are vowing to get better as the season moves along. Against SMU, the Blue Devils had some struggles executing man-to-man defense.

“Whenever you have adjustments, you know you’re going to have mistakes,” Duke center Patrick Ngongba said of the defense. “It’s something we’ve just got to keep working on to get better.”

The Blue Devils next play California on Wednesday.