Louisville shoves Duke aside in ACC race
To the extent anyone can figure out anything in this crazy basketball season, the path to the No. 1 seed in the ACC tournament goes through Louisville. For now, anyway.
In the first real heavyweight battle of the conference season — and it was every bit of that — the Cardinals withstood push after push from Duke, bending but never folding, prancing off the court after the Blue Devils’ last run fell shot, all of it punctuated by a Malik Williams’ dunk upon the victimized frame of Jack White that left most of Cameron wondering where it all went wrong.
With apologies to Florida State, and the Seminoles will get their chance to make their case later on, the two best teams in the ACC showed exactly why they’re the two best teams in the ACC on Saturday. And Louisville showed why it’s the best of the two at the moment in a 79-73 win, not far behind in terms of talent but tougher and more physical than Duke, even on Duke’s home floor.
“If you want to win here, especially with them coming off a loss, you’re going to have to figure out a way to be the tougher team for 40 minutes,” Louisville coach Chris Mack said.
Louisville was the tougher team by far for 10 minutes, ready for the ACC January maelstrom off the tip while Duke was not. It was 25-10 in a blink, the Cardinals forcing seven turnovers in seven minutes and turning them into easy baskets at the rim. Then the Cardinals went a step too far, Darius Perry trying to force his way to his feet while Cassius Stanley was still awkwardly straddling the fallen player. Joey Baker, of all people, jumped in to defend Stanley’s honor.
The offsetting technicals to Perry and Baker seemed to awaken Duke, and certainly awakened Stanley, who almost single-handedly led Duke back into the game, scoring 19 of his 24 after that.
“It wasn’t any messed-up thing,” Stanley said. “I wasn’t trying to get at him, and he wasn’t trying to get at me.”
But it was representative of the contact allowed, tempers quietly flaring in the scrums. It was an old-school, bruising game. Louisville was up for it. Duke, for the second game in a row, notably, was not. Mike Krzyzewski needs his team to grow up fast, to adapt the way older teams like Louisville and Clemson can to a looser whistle. Not that he was thrilled with these circumstances, comparing the physicality to an early ‘90s Bulls-Pistons game, dancing just this side of an ACC fine.
“Freedom of movement was not alive and well tonight,” Krzyzewski said. “I hope it’s not like this the rest of the conference.”
And still, for all of that, Duke had four shots to tie in the final three minutes down three, forcing misses and turnovers at one end only to miss at the other. Tre Jones shot twice and Stanley shot twice, the last a hurried 3-point airball with 17 seconds to go.
The knockout blow was delivered early. Duke never quite got all the way back from it, although it certainly got close.
Louisville may have been the rougher team but it was also the better team, leaving Duke baffled by inserting freshman David Johnson into the lineup at point guard.
“We beat a heck of a team, a team like us that’s got a chance to do some things,” Mack said.
It’s tough to draw too many conclusions from a single game this season as chaos reigns supreme, but the stakes in this one were as high as the tempers. Louisville’s only conference loss: Florida State, which gets its own shot at Duke here in less than a month. Until then, and maybe even then, it’s Louisville’s league to lose.
This story was originally published January 18, 2020 at 9:26 PM.
