Duke’s season comes to an abrupt end amid a painful lesson in toughness and the dangers of youth
It wasn’t even halfway through the first half here on Saturday afternoon when Duke’s players returned to their bench during a time-out, looking a little tired and beleaguered, and received a message from their coaches that became the refrain of what turned out to be their last game of the season.
“You have to be strong!” Blue Devils assistant coach Jai Lucas called out to the group in an urgent, pleading tone, as if trying to force that strength into those in front of him.
“We’ve got to be tougher,” first-year head coach Jon Scheyer said calmly – the intensity of his eyes taking over most of the conversation. Shaking his head, he repeated it again: “We have it receive be tougher.”
That was pretty much the theme of Duke’s season-ending 65-52 loss to Tennessee in the second round of the NCAA tournament. Strength. Toughness. It wasn’t as if the Blue Devils had completely lost those traits. You fought. they ground. In moments, they played with the required bite. Just not all the time, and not enough of it to rival Tennessee.
Of all the numbers that could boil down Duke’s last game of the season to a single factor — the nine 3-pointers Tennessee made, or the 15 turnovers Duke committed, or that the Blue Devils only had seven free throws in a game shot, which sometimes resembled a wrestling match – the most important were probably these: 21.8 and 19.
The first of these was the average age of Tennessee’s starting five on Saturday. The second the average of Dukes. This wasn’t exactly male vs. boy, but grown male vs. those just entering adulthood. The Volunteers had no starters younger than 20, and their starters were two 22-year-olds and Uros Plavsic, 24. Duke, meanwhile, started four teenagers and Jeremy Roach, the junior guard, who at 21 is something of the team’s senior statesman.
With age comes experience and strength, and the Volunteers punished the Blue Devils with both. Scheyer and his coaching staff felt that from the start — from the first game, when an elbow knocked back Kyle Filipowski, the Duke rookie’s forward, after a rebound. Duke’s coaches cried out for a review that didn’t come, and moments later Filipowski once again found himself on the other end of a punch that left him with a laceration under his left eye.
For a second or two, a bleeding Filipowski resembled Bloody (Eric) Montross from the 1992 Duke-North Carolina game at Chapel Hill. The difference: Montross was a junior at the time and used to the drama and intensity of college basketball on the biggest stages. Filipowski, meanwhile, is a freshman playing in his second NCAA tournament game – after throwing up a few minutes after his first on Thursday night.
“It didn’t affect me to stay with it mentally,” said a calm Filipowski without looking up. “But you just can’t take a break this whole year.”
He referenced other instances this season where he was on the other side of physicality that left him or Duke as the only ones in pain. If Mike Krzyzewski were still around, he would no doubt have talked for a while Saturday about Tennessee’s steadfastness, about the Volunteers being “grown men” — one of Krzyewski’s favorite phrases over the years. As Scheyer, his replacement, put it about the intensity, “It really felt like a Sweet 16, Elite Eight game.”
It did, with barely an empty spot at the Amway Center and with the Blue Devils and Volunteers exchanging punches, figurative and literal — though Tennessee dished out plenty more of the same. It didn’t help that Duke continued playing without Mark Mitchell, another freshman who was undoubtedly missing at 6-foot-8 while nursing a knee injury he sustained in practice Friday. Mitchell started every game and if he had started on Saturday it would have made a difference.
But The Difference? Maybe not, against a Tennessee team very similar to coach Rick Barnes’ bleeding Clemson teams of the late 1990s – those who played with all the finesse and aesthetic beauty of a dump truck. Whether you love or despise Barnes’ preferred playstyle, he’s at least committed to doing it. For decades his teams have popped up and challenged opponents to keep up with them, and the Blue Devils just couldn’t.
They were literally hit in the face early on and then ended the first half with some of their most unproductive games of the season – a nearly five-minute goal drought; four consecutive misses from the field; Possession upon possession in which they showed their youth. Duke cut Tennessee’s lead to four points three times in the second half, but never in the last nine minutes and never less than four. Meanwhile, Tennessee’s Olivier Nkamhoua mostly did what he wanted after halftime as he scored 23 of his 27 points.
You won’t see Nkamhoua, one of four seniors on the Volunteers starting lineup, at the top of the NBA draft projections. He wasn’t a one-and-done or even a two-or three-and-done. On Saturday he looked like the old guy in the Y, school kids who might have more natural talent but don’t yet have the brains of someone who’s been around a while and seen some things.
That was essentially the game: Tennessee’s experience and strength versus Duke’s talent and potential. The loss ended Scheyer’s first season, which had a lot to like.
Duke won the ACC tournament. It reached a level of defense that no Duke team had played in years. The Blue Devils came out on Saturday on a 10-game winning streak, becoming a trendy pick to make it to Houston and the Final Four, if not to win the whole thing. Over the past few days, this Duke team has felt almost an inevitability, as if destined for something greater.
And then it was over. With a speed. This is March.
One night you look almost invincible, perfectly healthy, in an easy first-round win over Oral Roberts. Two nights later, you’re suddenly missing an appetizer and wondering where it all went wrong. At least it wasn’t difficult for Duke to understand.
For programs of this caliber, the challenge in this environment is always finding the balance between talent and team building that makes the difference. Duke has been so talented for years that his best players only stay a year. The list changes essentially annually. Between the Blue Devils and Volunteers, this Duke team will undoubtedly place more players in the NBA. However, Tennessee is moving on.
It was older. Harder. Stronger.
Tennessee was en route to New York City, and the Sweet 16. Duke was en route back to Durham without peeling any memorabilia from their locker room walls, as some losing teams do to preserve a memory of March . No, these Blue Devils expected the journey to take a while. They certainly learned a few lessons from Saturday’s defeat. The question now is how many of them will stay to continue these lessons.
