Duke’s March to Madness
Can we stop with the “ACC is the toughest conference in the nation” nonsense? Can we throw the conference and team “Ratings Percentage Index” nonsense out the window, please?
Belmont, “RPI” 79, took #2-seed in the West Region, Duke and its gaudy RPI of 6 to the brink of extinction. This was a first round matchup that wasn’t even discussed by the nation’s punditry. Duke-Belmont? ACC vs. Atlantic Sun? No contest.
Number 15-seed Belmont was served up as a lamb du sacrifice for #2 Duke but by midway through the second half the little team from Nashville removed its woolen shroud befitting the proudest sheep, tore off its mask and revealed glistening pearly-whites and the sharpest fangs that had the Dukies running from Blue Devils.
Who cares if the Briuns lost 71-70? So what they bungled the final inbounds play because they froze right at the wrong time when Duke’s DeMarcus Nelson did what any senior on a top team would do - recognize the plan, slash through a screen that would have left younger Dukies confused and aghast as they watched a Bruin float over them and quietly score the loudest basket of this year’s March Madness affair. Nelson, though, blew up that inbounds play and put himself at center stage on the opposite foul line.
It was in DeMarcus Nelson’s missed front end of what would have been a game-sealing one-and-one that NCAA Basketball-loving America - not to say the general Duke hating sporting populace - saw the difference in Mike Krzyzewski’s program from the days of Christian Laettner and Grant Hill to that of Elton Brand and Jason Williams to what we see today.
Laettner, Hill, Brand, and Williams sink that first free throw - and then the second. They were collegiate players who, in times of stress, removed all doubt as to their status as basketball royalty.
They were never — boys.
For the past four years, Krzyzewski’s program has been filled with immature young men who displayed that immaturity on the basketball court. For these recent Blue Devils, one gets the feeling that they believed it is they who are the makers of Coach K Court; that strolling past the floral circle and onto campus is their birthright. They seemed to feel they had less to learn and therefore less to give of themselves.
It began with Shavlik Randolph and J.J. Redick and Sean Dockery, and it continued with Josh McRoberts.
Even Cherokee Parks had a long NBA career.
For Dockery there is no Lig and for Randolph and Redick and McRoberts, their hold on a job in NBA is tenuous, at best. Yet there they were in Durham, Golden Dukies, loved and lauded, their shortcomings glossed over in yet another in a long line of Dick Vitale pro-Blue Devils diatribes. Meantime, players who were also part of that beginning of the fall series of recruits like DeMarcus Nelson, had no mentors. Nelson, like his backcourt partner Greg Paulus, has the requisite respect for the legend of Duke Basketball, but unlike players before them, Nelson and Paulus are genetically-altered sperm bank Blue Devils; perfect specimens but without true parents who share their legacy, who can show them the way.
The result of this Blue Devils’ team’s detachment from their past was clear tonight in Nelson’s miss from the charity stripe and the fact that Duke had to wait one extra play for a win that exposed their weaknesses to the point where another win in this year’s tourney will be an accomplishment. They were exposed last year by a university from the “lowly” Colonial Athletic conference; exposed this time by a team from the equally lowly Atlantic Sun Conference.
No matter the distaste in some corners of the public for Duke it is a little sad to see them play so poorly on the end of the floor where Krzyzewski made his name: the defensive end of the court. Belmont is not an ACC team that is as predictable on offense as is the sun’s rising. NCAA Tournament opponents require constant communication while playing defense. It requires that the team move, five-as-one so gaps are closed quickly, so the simplest screen and roll or staggered pick plays do not result in wide open jump shots for extended stretches of the game.
But this is the new Duke and perhaps a new NCAA with which Coach K is unfamiliar. And it seems that he compensates for his inability to grasp its players - his players - by attempting to create more and more exciting schemes to produce points, or at least give his players the feeling of freedom on the “score the basketball” end of the court.
Mike Krzyzewski’s offenses were never predicated on raining three-point shots. The pre-Shaquille O’Neal Steve Nash Phoenix Suns are no team to mimic. There is no Larry O’Brien trophy in the Suns front office display case.
And, from all accounts, there were no smiles in the Duke locker room after their narrow escape against Belmont. A team with an RPI of 79 was this close to ending the Blue Devils 2007-2008 season. All that, going through the ACC grind that is supposed to prepare that conference’s teams for any out-of-conference circumstance, is a fallacy. Just look to the opposite coast at the top teams from the Pac 10. Look at their yeoman dismantling of the low-seeded teams they faced.
Duke presently is a shell of its former self, yet it is still treated like royalty. The team has no inside game, not even an inside presence. Yet is has a supra-inflated RPI and a conflated strength of schedule (SOS) rating, and a beauty in the one eye of its national spokesman, the eyes of national pollsters, and the eyes tournament seeding committee that belies its reality.
Duke needs something deeper than a pretty RPI.
Perhaps if Krzyzewski’s team receives a proper beating from Bob Huggins’ West Virginia Mountaineers, Coach K will once again seek to recruit more traditional role players, like centers and power forwards; and some potential historians who will be more than willing to reconnect the team with its basketball past.
Heck, it’s no fun hating an also-ran.
Photo Credit: ICON SMI
This article was written by:
Ryan McNeill - who has written 198 posts on Hoops Addict.
Ryan McNeill is the editor for Hoops Addict and has appeared on NBA XL and WSRQ 1220. Ryan has covered the NBA with media credentials since the 2007 season.