Duke meets many challenges with one big win
Mar 15, 2009
Duke rose to the challenge.
The Blue Devils rose to a challenge posed to the ACC’s old guard by Florida State, a program that had never previously reached the championship game in the ACC Tournament. Duke’s 79-69 victory on Sunday afternoon at the Georgia Dome, the second time in two tries the Devils won the title in the prodigious building in downtown Atlanta, made it 12 times in 13 years that either Duke or North Carolina, the ACC's perennial powers, emerged atop the conference.
Duke rose to the challenge of trying to contain FSU senior Toney Douglas, whom Mike Krzyzewski called “as good a player as there is in the United States” and his favorite outside his own Blue Devil squad.
The Devils rose to the challenge when Florida State, favored to win by many in the media after ousting top-ranked North Carolina in the semifinals, closed to within 42-36 with 12:17 remaining in the title contest.
Duke seized control in the first half, hitting five 3-pointers in six possessions. “A basketball game is a game of streaks,” said Douglas, who scored 28 points despite the Devils’ assiduous attention. “They streaked.”
Meanwhile Duke’s defense forced FSU’s young big men out of their comfort zone, closed off access to the lane, and forced 21.7 percent shooting in the decisive first half. “Duke does a good job of bodying you up and pushing you off the block,” said Leonard Hamilton, the 2009 ACC coach of the year. “I’ve learned an awful lot from watching them defensively.”
But Hamilton’s club did not win 25 games, matching the highest victory total at the school since joining the ACC in 1992, without cultivating a fighting spirit. FSU opened the second half with a 15-7 run, forcing Krzyzewski to call a quick timeout to regroup.
The pause proved refreshing. Over the next five minutes, until Hamilton called a prophylactic timeout to staunch the damage, Duke exploded for 17 of the game’s next 23 points, sending many in the crowd toward the exits. “They made us pay every time we faltered,” Hamilton said.
The Blue Devils also rose to the challenge for supremacy posed by the absent Tar Heels, who in recent years have made a habit of gathering a greater number of heralded players, finishing in first place during the ACC regular season, and beating Duke regularly. After the Devils won seven ACC Tournaments in eight years from 1999 through 2006, UNC captured the 2007 and 2008 ACC Tournaments and twice penetrated farther in NCAA play.
Winning the ACC Tournament is currently more meaningful than it has been at any time since the days when only the winner advanced to the NCAAs.
Since growing to a dozen members in 2006, forcing adoption of an unbalanced regular-season schedule, the tournament has come to mimic its Southern Conference roots. Back in the ACC’s infancy, when its members broke away from the unwieldy, 17-member parent conference, the new league adopted a round-robin schedule to level the competitive playing field, arguably making a postseason tournament repetitive. But changed circumstances make the ACC Tournament, like the SC event years ago, the only fair way to decide a champion.
Emerging victorious in the 2009 ACC Tournament, improving their record to 28-6, allowed a new group of Duke players to meet their program’s own high standards. They could add a 17th ACC championship banner to the crowded rafters at Cameron Indoor Stadium, where salutes to past achievement can at times seem a burden to those who have not earned their share.
“Looking up in Cameron, you see a lot of conference championships, you see national championships, and you come here to be part of that,” said sophomore Kyle Singler. Not known as a shotblocker, the forward tied for the lead in tournament rejections with nine, to go along with 54 points in three games. “To be a champion you’re going to have to do tough things, and a lot of guys here, that’s on our minds, winning championships.”
Older players recalled a long road to the pinnacle. “After our freshman and sophomore year, between some of the guys who were there, I think we kind of felt entitled,” conceded David McClure, a fifth-year senior. Then All-Americans J.J. Redick and Shelden Williams graduated, leaving behind no upperclassmen to set the tone or lead the way. “We had to figure out how to do it on our own,” McClure said. “We kind of had to reinvent the wheel, in so many words.”
A program accustomed to success wilted rather than blossom come postseason. Krzyzewski especially celebrated the resolve to surmount those difficulties embodied by his junior class, led by Gerald Henderson and Jon Scheyer, the newly minted point guard who was named the tournament’s MVP.
The explosive Henderson accumulated 51 points, 27 in the finals. Scheyer scored 65 points in three games, topped by 29 against FSU, and ran the offense with aplomb. “I think he’s probably the reason why they are where they are,” Hamilton said before exhaustively enumerating the ways in which Scheyer settles and leads the Blue Devils.
Krzyzewski went on at length about his juniors, “a class that I’ll always remember in my coaching career,” and the challenges to which they rose. “I told the kids last night, there are a lot of winners but there are few champions,” Krzyzewski said.
As if to share that lesson with an even younger generation, following the game, while an orderly celebration unfolded on the court, the 62-year-old walked toward the section behind press row and beckoned to two waist-high grandsons to join him. Hesitant at first, they complied, one dressed in a white Duke jersey, the other blue, both wearing Greg Paulus’ No. 3.
When all but one strand of net had been cut from the rim, granddad ascended the stairs to a platform centered under the basket. With his children’s children in tow, he mounted a ladder and made a final snip to celebrate the occasion of another challenge met.
