Archives » Sunday, March 23, 2008
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Devin Gordon
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Mar 23, 2008 04:38 PM
Now that my self-imposed 24-hour exile from the
tournament is over, I think I can safely revisit Duke's loss yesterday
to West Virginia without breaking any furniture. We lost for two
reasons that won't be a surprise to anyone who's been reading what
we've written about Duke over the past week: 1) we had a ghastly
shooting game, missing 15 straight three-pointers during a cold stretch
that covered the middle 30 minutes of the game, and 2) DeMarcus Nelson,
our senior captain, had another disastrous performance. All things
considered, we're lucky it wasn't a blowout.
I watched the game with my closest friend from Duke, the one who called
me out for not backing up my verbal assault on Nelson early Friday
morning with raw data. He thought I was overreacting, until he looked
at Nelson's numbers and they were worse than either of us thought.
Well, my pal thought that if anything, DeMarcus was even worse on
Saturday.
Its a mystery to me what happened to this team down the stretch. This
will sound like the grumblings of a sore loser, but West Virginia is
not a particularly great team. They played an excellent game yesterday,
but still only scratched past us, despite a Duke shooting performance
that was about as bad as I've ever seen. Maybe it was just bad luck,
and as I've said all along, Duke is a team without a Plan B so when the
shots don't fall, we're bound to lose. But I think Duke's tourney
meltdown was also a failure of leadership. The captain is supposed to
set the tone for his team, and Nelson did just that. When you see your
leader lose all semblance of control, it can't help but have a ripple
effect on the troops. Plus, its not like you can just bench your
captain or stop giving him the ball. You gotta dance with who brung ya.
And for us, every offensive possession yesterday that went through
Nelson, almost without exception, was a squandered possession.
Duke fans are looking forward next year to a team that runs through
different players--Gerald Henderson, the silver lining to one awfully
dark cloud; Jon Scheyer, who was the headiest player on the court for
us and should've gotten more touches that he did; and Kyle Singler, who
vanished in the tournament and will have to do better next time.
We're also looking forward to having our coach back on the job full
time. Its one of the least covered, and most logical, explanations for
Duke's recent swoon. College hoops is a murderous job for even the best
coaches, but for two years now Mike Krzyzewski is dividing his time
between Duke and Team USA, which will play for gold medals in Beijing
this summer, and his college team seems less prepared as a result
during crunch time. Personally, I'm still fine with K's decision--he's
earned the right, and its a worthy cause. All the same, I think most
Duke fans, like me, are starting to wonder how much longer we can
survive his divided attention.
UCLA would seem to have a clear path to the Final Four now, but a word
of caution to Bruins fans, who are probably still sweating from that
A&M game: there's no such thing as a clear path. Play just lousy
enough, and anyone halfway decent will send you home.
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