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Home > Mark Bradley > Archives > 2008 > March > 22
Saturday, March 22, 2008
Duke no longer basketball royalty
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Washington — They got tired (Kyle Singler faded badly at season’s end), and they got sick (Mike Krzyzewski had the flu and DeMarcus Nelson had something), and then the Yankees of college basketball got beat. And it didn’t feel like an upset because it really wasn’t.
The better team won. Not the team with more McDonald’s All-Americans — Duke has eight to West Virginia’s none — but the one with better players. Duke is like the Yankees in that it polarizes the electorate into either hating or loving, but it’s also like the Bronx Bombers in its penchant for signing guys who aren’t half as good as advertised.
Duke was lucky to reach Round 2, needing a late Gerald Henderson swoop to outlast Belmont. The Devils were lucky again to be leading by eight points with 17 minutes to play Saturday. Then they got unlucky. West Virginia realized Duke was, on ability if not reputation, nothing special. West Virginia, the fifth-best team in the Big East, realized it had no business losing to these guys.
And the Mountaineers didn’t. Indeed, they won handily. The team with eight McDonald’s All-Americans managed 14 baskets in the game’s first 38 minutes and got outrebounded 47-27. The better team prevailed.
“The top six or seven teams in the Big East would be on a par with Duke,” said West Virginia’s Joe Alexander, and going on this weekend you’d have to say there was scant difference between Villanova, seeded No. 12 and presumably the last at-large team in the field of 65, and Duke, which was seeded No. 2. (Villanova beat Clemson, which had beaten Duke six days earlier, Friday night.)
“I can’t say [Duke was] a bad rebounding team, but they gave a lot of offensive rebounds,” said the Mountaineers’ Da’Sean Butler. And then: “Coach [Bob Huggins] said it’s easy to offensive-rebound against them.”
Said Alexander: “Playing in the Big East tournament makes every other tournament seem like nothing.”
Such sentiments will fall heavy on the ears of those along Tobacco Road, but the ACC was a one-team league this season. North Carolina is really good. Duke was really well-coached. Everything else was a varying shade of mediocrity. (Which is why Georgia Tech’s failure to break upward will rankle for a long while.)
If you’d put other jerseys on these Blue Devils and handed them to another coach, you’d have had a 22-12 aggregation. Because Krzyzewski is the best in the business — and because the ACC was most forgiving — Duke wound up 28-6. But no team can subsist on guile and aura forever: The Devils were 22-1 on Valentine’s Day, 6-5 thereafter (and two of the six were one-point wins, and two more came against Tech).
“We had a great season,” Krzyzewski said Saturday, and nobody could deny that he’d gotten full value from a team that lacked height and heft. A few minutes earlier, someone had asked Henderson about the rebounding managed by “undersized” West Virginia, and Krzyzewski broke in: “As opposed to the oversized guys we have? Both teams were the same size.”
That has become Duke’s undoing: For all its big-name signees, too many of them are the same size and do the same things. (Sounds like the Hawks under Billy Knight, huh?) Krzyzewski insisted Friday he’s “OK with our recruiting,” but you wonder.
The program that reached the Final Four seven times over nine seasons in the ’80s and ’90s hasn’t been since 2004. This marks the second year running the Devils have been eliminated in the tournament’s first week. Duke won its last national championship in 2001. At the time, the Yankees had just begun their pursuit of a fourth consecutive World Series title. They fell short that autumn and haven’t won the Series since.
The lesson herein: Reputations can endure even after results have begun to wane. Steinbrenner’s men are no longer the gold standard in their sport, and neither are Coach K’s guys. As West Virginia proved, the Dookies are now just … guys.
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