Duke ...............

[theprofessor]

I only caught the last 5 minutes of the game but I thought that Duke looked terrible on defense. Did the starters play the entire game because they looked totally exhausted the last 3-5 minutes? Why didn't Coach K substitute defensively to put some pressure on VCU's guards? Paulas played horrible on defense. The VCU point guard penetrated at will. Every shot they had the last two minutes was basically uncontested.

 

Then with 11.2 seconds left and VCU inbounding the ball at the other end of the floor Coach K puts no pressure on the ball and let's VCU's guards bring the ball up court with no pressure. What's that? I know Duke was "down" this year but I was really disappointed in Coach K and how they finished.

 

And yes ........ I picked them to win the 1st round but I had them losing the next round to Pittsburgh! First loss in my bracket.

Edited March 16, 2007 by theprofessor

[billay]

Duke never really had much depth this year, and both Pocious and Thomas played more minutes tonight than usual.

 

From the outside looking in, I'd say one of the biggest problems is McRoberts. The guy just doesn't want to be the go-to guy when the game is on the line. Paulus had a great night. He's not spectacular, just a hard nose kid that doesn't give up. He just doesn't get any help.

 

McRoberts should've gone pro last year. He'll go now because he is pissed at K for talking him into staying for the worst Duke team in a decade.

[billay]

Actually, looking at the box score, it was Nelson who didn't help out tonight. 8 pts. for the senior in his final game.

[justin]

dook sux

[Timmypg]

Nelson is only a Junior.

[billay]

Nelson is only a Junior.

 

Really? I would have sworn he was a senior.

[wildcat2334]

Dook is what they is for 2006/2007- an ok 6 to 8 seed that got beat by a good, if not better team.

 

Give VCU credit- they would have beaten alot of teams tonight. That PG is a playmaker and stone cold baller

[theprofessor]

Dook is what they is for 2006/2007- an ok 6 to 8 seed that got beat by a good, if not better team.

 

Give VCU credit- they would have beaten alot of teams tonight. That PG is a playmaker and stone cold baller

 

 

Duke is weak. They're a 9 or 10 seed, at best. I thought Coach K was just as bad as his team the last 4 minutes of that game.

[Timmypg]

DeMarcus Nelson

# 21

Guard - G

Height: 6-4 Weight: 200

Junior

Previous Affiliations

Sheldon

Elk Grove, Calif.

[jackshi17]

Duke was pathetic tonight from the 3:56 point until the end of the game.

They looked lost..... without leadership. Coaching didn't help with a strategic time out or substution.

Not coach K's best game.

There is only one way to go next season.

Edited March 16, 2007 by jackshi17

[PantherDave]

Dook is now the third best team on Tobacco Rd and while it wll be competitive I'm sure, the reign is over as Kings of the ACC. Next season will be very interesting around the ACC for sure and if the Heels young players stay and Coach VaLowe keeps bringing in 4 and 5 star recruits-well then the competition is definently going to be there, but I will say this, as the competition has gotten tougher it seems Coach K has become somewhat complacent and for lack of a better word disenchanted.

Edited March 16, 2007 by PantherDave

[billay]

Dook is now the third best team on Tobacco Rd and while it wll be competitive I'm sure, the reign is over as Kings of the ACC. Next season will be very interesting around the ACC for sure and if the Heels young players stay and Coach VaLowe keeps bringing in 4 and 5 star recruits-well then the competition is definently going to be there, but I will say this, as the competition has gotten tougher it seems Coach K has become somewhat complacent and for lack of a better word disenchanted.

 

I'm starting to wonder if K has lost a little of his coaching chops over the last few years. After all, when you have an ace like JJ Redick, you don't have to win games by good coaching.

[Rockerbraves]

I'm starting to wonder if K has lost a little of his coaching chops over the last few years. After all, when you have an ace like JJ Redick, you don't have to win games by good coaching.

 

 

Not sure how many people could work at one place same job for 26 years and remain enthusiastic especially maintaining a successful program that requires alot more than a 40 hour work week & extensive traveling. Maybe he needs something like a Coach Knight gig to get him fired up again.

[billay]

Not sure how many people could work at one place same job for 26 years and remain enthusiastic especially maintaining a successful program that requires alot more than a 40 hour work week & extensive traveling. Maybe he needs something like a Coach Knight gig to get him fired up again.

 

Or back surgery?

[billay]

Duke Loses, and Everyone Cheers

 

Virginia Commonwealth University is a public college based in Richmond. It is most famous for its medical school - it has America's oldest organ transplant center - and its arts school branch, which, bizarrely, is located in Education City, Qatar. (It also offers a degree in "Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness," so this is where the next Jack Bauer is coming from, for better or worse.) The trash metal costume band GWAR was formed there. It's a modest university of 30,000 students, and most of the time, it's nestled comfortably outside the public consciousness.

 

Last night, though, Virginia Commonwealth might have been the most popular public institution on Earth, with the possible exception of Hogwarts. The 11th-seeded Rams, thanks to 22 points and a cold-blooded clutch jumper from guard Eric Maynor with 1.8 seconds left, took down Duke 79-77 last night, and a sports nation collectively smiled, laughed, cheered, hugged their spouses a little tighter, began to recognize the simple beauty of the world that surrounds them. There's an old sports adage that when you win, food tastes better, your wife is prettier, the sun shines brighter. The average sports fan understands that feeling this morning.

 

It was the first first-round loss for the Blue Devils since 1996, and the schadenfreude of the sports world is palpable. Duke has become the team that no one feels guilty about hating; you can accuse Mike Krzyzewski of eating children, and not only does no one seem to mind, no one disagrees. Last year, Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez, tone-deaf as always, showed up at Cameron Indoor Stadium wearing a Duke T-shirt, and he couldn't have hurt his reputation more with sports fans had he been sporting a half-mustache. The Web site The Truth About Duke is only the poisonous epicenter of the Duke hatred maelstrom, though it's difficult to deny they're the best at it. You don't even have to be a sports fan to hate Duke.

 

For whatever reason, Duke - in a way that, say, Stanford or Northwestern or Vanderbilt doesn't - represents a certain snotty, privileged, sweater-draped-over-the-shoulder elitism that we love to see taken down a few pegs. I've met many nice people who attended Duke but, well, I'll just say I've learned not to make it the first fact about them I mention when introducing them to other friends. I was talking yesterday to a woman who knows nothing about sports and doesn't care to. I mentioned that I was busy writing about the N.C.A.A. tournament, and she responded with, "When does Duke play? God, I hope they lose. I can't stand those guys. Oh, and their coach ... what's his name? He's the worst!"

 

It seems strange to think now, but at one point Duke was the scrappy underdog everyone was rooting for. No, really. In the late '70s, the once-proud basketball powerhouse was fledgling, until Krzyzewski - and, to a lesser extent, the unfairly forgotten Bill Foster - took over and turned it into the all-American factory it is today. In 1991, after four unsuccessful trips to the Final Four in the previous five years, Coach K's troops upset heavily favored U.N.L.V. in the Final Four and edged Kansas in the national title game. People forget this now, but Duke's victory was cheered by most; U.N.L.V. had won the year before - beating Duke by 30 points in the championship game - and we had grown tired of Jerry Tarkanian's shady antics. Duke seemed like a team winning the right way, with a focus on academics and, presumably, clean living (as long as no one could hear the venom Coach K regularly spewed on the sideline).

 

The mistake Duke made was winning the championship again the next year. That made them the establishment, and the die was cast. The franchise's continued success fostered more and more enmity, and Krzyzewski's smugness - remember, he's just a leader who happens to coach basketball - helped about as much as an endless stream of preppy-looking white guys and an obsessive fan base fond of Skull and Bones-style fraternalism did, which is to say, not much. Nobody likes a winner, not really, not when they keep doing it, and we really don't like it when they're so entitled about it. Duke became the Yankees wrapped up in Notre Dame and divided by the Lakers; without the cuddly presence of Dean Smith at North Carolina and with the decline of Bob Knight at Indiana, playing Duke became the game every player, fan and coach circled on their schedule.

 

There are signs that the Duke dynasty is abating. The Blue Devils lost more games this year than they've lost in a decade, and they had a tendency to fold in pressure situations, hardly a Krzyzewski trademark. Coach K himself turned 60 this year, and one has to wonder how much longer Duke can remain entrenched at the top of its sport. No one can remain the hated conquerors forever; this is, after all, why lovable underdogs exist.

 

Not that the recent struggles have served to stem the flow of hate much. In this way, the Blue Devils serve a valuable public service. Sports exist in black and white - if my team wins, I'm happy; if they lose, I'm sad - and need a villain as sorely as any Western. Duke has served this purpose for more than a decade, and it has served it with considerable skill.

 

In his book "To Hate Like This Is To Be Happy Forever" - which is of course about hating Duke - author Will Blythe quotes from a work by 19th-century essayist William Hazlitt called "On The Pleasure Of Hating."

 

Nature seems made of antipathies. Without something to hate, we should lose the very spring of thought and action. ... Pure good soon grows insipid, wants variety and spirit. Pain is a bittersweet, which never surfeits. Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust: Hatred alone is immortal.

 

Blythe hates Duke because he is a Tar Heel. But today, the sports fan needs no such excuse. Duke is the team it's O.K. to hate; something is wrong with you if you don't. But perhaps we should all enjoy this while we can. The more Duke loses, the more mortal and harmless they become, and the less pleasure we will take from their foibles. Then we will move on, and find someone else to be the target of our sacred rage. Perhaps it will be Virginia Commonwealth, and we will all look back on March 15, 2007, and wonder how we could have ever considered the Rams a team worth rooting for.

[PantherDave]

..and that article pretty much describes my ACC history lesson to Wildcat. Good find B.

[tbimm]

I'm starting to wonder if K has lost a little of his coaching chops over the last few years. After all, when you have an ace like JJ Redick, you don't have to win games by good coaching.

 

I think this started when Coaches players started leaving early a few years back. He had always graduated his players and that isnt the case anymore! He is now dealing with what the rest of the coaches have been dealing with for years. You recruit and develop a player with 4 years in mind and he bolts after 2.

[HowboutthemCowboys]

Duke is weak. They're a 9 or 10 seed, at best. I thought Coach K was just as bad as his team the last 4 minutes of that game.

 

Blame the coaching all you want but if Duke can make a couple free throws down the stretch this thread does'nt exist.

[gilthorp]

I think this started when Coaches players started leaving early a few years back. He had always graduated his players and that isnt the case anymore! He is now dealing with what the rest of the coaches have been dealing with for years. You recruit and develop a player with 4 years in mind and he bolts after 2.

 

 

They had Shaun Livingston signed up and he snubbed them last minute, so that's one example for this team...but you're right. Theoretically, with him on this team in his second year, things are different.

 

Coach K is going to struggle to find the 4 year guys that can make a difference year in and year out.

[theprofessor]

Blame the coaching all you want but if Duke can make a couple free throws down the stretch this thread does'nt exist.

 

 

Tough to beat quality teams with a below average defense.

[Kid Cid]

Ms Cid and I cheered and did shots to celebrate Duke's demise. They can never lose enough to make me happy.

[broncosn05]

Villanova hurt me but not too bad.

Edited March 17, 2007 by broncosn05

[Chavez]

Duke is weak. They're a 9 or 10 seed, at best.

 

True enough - Duke was mediocre this season; they may have only gotten as high as a 6 due to their brand name. And would have been soundly trounced by Pitt next game anyway.