ACC champion Duke turns attention to NCAA tournament: ‘We’re going to be real dangerous’
The winning streak is nine. A new banner is coming to Cameron Indoor Stadium. And the Duke Blue Devils have their eyes set on so much more for the rest of March, and perhaps beyond.
Amid the ACC championship celebration at Greensboro Coliseum on Saturday night, with confetti covering the hardwood, trophies on display and the nets cut down, Duke’s Kyle Filipowski had a message for whomever draws Duke in the NCAA tournament.
“Oh, we’re going to be real dangerous coming into the tournament,” the freshman center said. “We’re on a hot streak. We just put our mindset to it. Coming into every game with something to achieve and a chip on our shoulder. That’s how we’re going to keep approaching it.”
With Filipowski scoring 20 points, grabbing 10 rebounds and winning the Everett Case Award as the ACC tournament’s top player, Duke beat Virginia, 59-49, on Saturday night and will enter the NCAA tournament playing as well as anyone.
The nine-game winning streak gives the Blue Devils (26-8) 12 wins in its past 14 games. There’s hope around the program they’ve played well enough of late to earn a high enough seed that when the NCAA tournament brackets are announced Sunday night, they’ll be slotted right back in Greensboro for opening weekend.
The thousands of blue-clad Duke fans among the 19,116 who watched the title game gave the building a Cameron West feeling.
Though this was Duke’s ACC record 22nd league tournament title, there was nothing routine about it as those fans yelled and screamed during — and after — the game.
They likely share the same confidence that exists in Duke’s locker room, that the ACC championship is just the first major accomplishment in this team’s destiny. The same passion the Blue Devils played with to win three games in three days at the ACC tournament will continue in the NCAA tournament, they said.
“Keep playing with an edge,” Duke freshman forward Mark Mitchell said. “Keep competing.”
Part of that passion was the revenge tour Duke embarked on over the past two weeks. Regular-season wins over Virginia Tech and N.C. State to close February and ACC tournament wins over Miami and Virginia avenged four losses to teams that beat the Blue Devils earlier this season.
In the NCAA tournament, the Blue Devils need to run across Purdue and Kansas, which both toppled Duke back in November, to continue that run. Both those teams figure to be No. 1 seeds, though, so those matchups aren’t likely to happen in the tournament’s first weekend.
No matter when — or if — those games materialize, the Blue Devils are playing with far more confidence and sharpness now than they were in the season’s first three months.
Junior guard Jeremy Roach and freshmen Dereck Lively and Dariq Whitehead saw injuries render them unavailable for different stretches in November, December, January and February. With everyone healthy, Duke has started the same lineup for 14 consecutive games, winning 12 of them.
The Blue Devils welcome whomever comes their way, confident they have the answers.
“We’re a deep team that can throw a lot of options at you,” Duke graduate student center Ryan Young said. “Different lineups. To go deep in the NCAA tournament we have to be able to play different teams so these last three days were huge to learn how to play different types of teams in different ways.”
In beating Pittsburgh (96-69), Miami (85-78) and then Virginia, Duke only trailed for four minutes, 32 seconds — and all during the Miami game, when the Blue Devils’ largest deficit was all of two points.
Back in November, Scheyer set up a prep for this when Duke played in the Phil Knight Legacy tournament in Portland, Oregon. The Blue Devils beat Oregon State, 54-51, and Xavier, 71-64, on consecutive days before Purdue hammered them, 75-56, in the tournament title game.
“Obviously we didn’t finish the way we wanted to at PK,” Roach said. “But that definitely stuck with us, and we learned from that. I mean, that’s why we had the full energy to play these three games in three days. I’m just so happy for these guys, and we’ve just got to keep it going and stay locked in.”
The Blue Devils are certainly locked in and playing their best basketball. More banners are out there to be won over the next three weeks. They can’t wait to battle for them.
“I just like the togetherness that we have,” Roach said. “We stick together. That’s our motto. We hang our hats on that, sticking together.”
This story was originally published March 12, 2023 at 9:26 AM.