No matter how many homemade, “Five Straight” signs were dotted throughout the yellow cascades of Boston College Superfans behind each basket, Duke would not lose its focus. At least, that is, not long enough for BC to climb out of a 24-point hole in the second half.
A nearly heroic, second-half output by Sean Marshall (18 of his 23 points came after the break) and a 22 point-performance by BC’s battering ram, Tyrese Rice, were overshadowed by Duke’s suffocation of Jared Dudley. The Blue Devils allowed the reigning, back-to-back ACC Player of the Week just 11 points on five shots as they held on for a 78-70 win.
“They weren’t going to give him a lot of good looks,” BC coach Al Skinner said after the game. “Every time he got the ball they were running two or three guys at him.”
Such was Duke’s game plan: Neutralize the leader and the rest of the team falls apart. By putting constant pressure on Dudley and taking away what he does best, Krzyzewski said, BC was without its most dangerous offensive threat.
“We tried not to give him open threes in transition,” Coach K said after the game. “On the inside, the most important thing was not reacting to his fakes. And we had to keep him off the offensive boards.”
In the first half, Duke did just that. Dudley shot two times, scored just two points, and grabbed only one rebound (a defensive board). Rice was the only thing that kept BC afloat. His lightning-quick penetration and crafty touch around the rim earned him 13 points in the first 20 minutes. But without consistent production out of Dudley, BC couldn’t hold off the Blue Devils much longer.
The scoreboard read 65-41 with 12:53 left. The Eagles had let a close first-half get out of control in the final minutes, giving Duke an 11-point lead at the break. Too many easy buckets – alley-oops down low to Josh McRoberts, turnovers that led to fastbreaks, uncovered three-pointers – allowed the Blue Devils to outscore BC 22-7 to start the second period.
But Dudley wouldn’t stand for it. After BC called a timeout to stop the bleeding, Dudley awoke. On the next play, Dudley spun baseline out of a double-team and hit an up-and-under layup. When freshman Jon Scheyer bit on his pump-fake behind the arc the next time down the floor, Dudley leaned in to draw the foul and coolly sank all three free-throws. Then he wrestled down an offensive board and banked home a put-back that sat on the rim momentarily before dropping in.
Dudley’s seven-straight points cut the lead to 17 and nudged his point total into double-digits. With more than 10 minutes still to play, the game was far from over and Dudley’s teammates would do well to prove that it wasn’t. But hindsight can be so revealing: Dudley wouldn’t even attempt another shot for the rest of the night and his awakening in the second half turned out to be devastatingly short-lived.
By the 8:08 mark, the Eagles had chopped the lead in half, down to a dozen. The fans became wild, even irreverently aggressive at times. They exploded with cheers for a three by Sean Marshall, then erupted with anger when the officials refused to call what they thought was an offensive foul on Duke’s Greg Paulus. Marshall sent the crowd into hysterics with two more triples and a pair of free throws to get the Eagles within six points.
On the other end, Paulus threw away a pass on the baseline and it was clear that the Eagles – and their fans – had the upper hand. But Coach K calmed the entire arena by calling a 30-second timeout with 1:53 remaining. Focus was restored to Duke’s five and they allowed the Eagles no closer. When a left-handed lay-in by Blue Devils freshman Gerald Henderson made it 78-70 with :36 to go, all the crowd could do was scatter.
Ask the BC fans about the game and they’ll tell you the refs were to blame. The officials – Jamie Luckie, Sean Hull, and Jose Carrion Diaz – were booed incessantly by the home crowd throughout the night. They were booed off the court as they went into the locker room for halftime and booed onto the court when they returned.
Even Dudley expressed his thoughts on what he thought was poor officiating.
“I’ve never complained about officiating in my life,” Dudley said after the game, “you’re going to have bad calls throughout the whole period. If I were in the NBA, I’d probably get fined, so me being smart I’m not going to say anything. But it can’t happen like that, the game can’t be played like that.”
Dudley’s frustration after this loss was evident in his post-game press conference. He went on to say that the game is called differently when Duke is his opponent. The fouls that he is usually able to draw coming across the lane and curling around picks, he said, get called against every other team but Duke.
The good news for BC? Losing to Duke, in recent history, has launched the Eagles on some impressive runs. Their previous defeat to the Blue Devils (January 28th in Durham) sparked a four-game winning streak that helped them crack the top-25 for the first time in nearly three months. Last season, a February 1st loss to Duke (at Conte Forum, no less), spurred an 11-1 stretch that almost culminated in an ACC championship (they lost to Duke in the finals).
A little momentum could go a long way, as BC’s next opponent is North Carolina. The Tar Heels are ranked fourth nationally in both polls and are sitting patiently in second place in the ACC, a half-a-game behind the Eagles.
“We’ve got a tough North Carolina team, they’re just coming off a loss,” Dudley said, referring to UNC’s Tuesday night loss at home to Virginia Tech. “We have to get better in a hurry. But you look at us now, we’re still 9-3 in the conference, but we have to look at film to see what we have to improve at.”