I was called in to work for an hour so I missed the last three minutes of the first half . What happened, when I left Duke has a seven point lead and then I see they were down by 3 at half. How in the world did Duke allow that to happen?
On to the ACC Tourney Championship Game! Go Duke!
I was called in to work for an hour so I missed the last three minutes of the first half . What happened, when I left Duke has a seven point lead and then I see they were down by 3 at half. How in the world did Duke allow that to happen?
Showed heart to shrug off the first half officiating. Kyle again was the man. And the Plumlee's provided some valuable minutes, points, rebounds, and blocks. But Jon looks exhausted.
Kyle Singler phew!
I'll repost this from the in-game thread since I posted it right before it was closed. RE: another poster's comment that Duke isn't feared.
People don't fear us because we don't blow teams away like we're capable of doing. Less fear means teams play harder against us, which leads to closer games, which leads to even less fear. It's circular. We need to stop letting the air out of the ball.
I would LOVE a rematch with NC State.
The Plumlees gave us some great minutes!
How money is Kyle Singler playing right now? WOW.
Will someone tell Miami to play like the worst team in the conference in the regular season?
On to yet another ACC Championship game!
LET'S GO DUKE.
CANNOT continue to build large leads and let the opposition come back due to sitting on the ball. Steve Winwood said it best years ago--when you see a chance you take it. When a scoring opportunity presents itself and there's more than 6 minutes in the game, even if we're up by more than 15 points you go for the score. I don't mean attempting to run a score up. I mean preserve a lead by not shooting ourself in the collective foot. I hope we play better tomorrow so we've something more positive to go on for the NCAA's--an impressive performance and another ACC title.
Two beautiful stretches of basketball: one that got us the 30-18 lead, the other that built the 58-42 lead after being down at the half. Very nice play from the Plumlees, their best in a while. Kyle, as always, is a stud.
Otherwise, pretty hideous. Three shot clock violations, mixups on defense that allowed Miami to come back, no touches for Singler as the lead was being relinquished, just a lot of stagnant ball movement and other ugliness. But credit to Miami for continually putting on the pressure.
I feel like I should have something constructive to say, but all I really want to do is harp about stall ball almost giving away another game. I really hate it when I hear the argument "look at our results" because, I'm sorry, but you cannot go back in time and replay the same game without stall ball and see how it would have ended. No one can know what would have happened, but what I see is that we lose our momentum at a point when we dominating the game and they were falling apart. It's hard not to think we were more likely to run up the score even further and remove any doubt of the outcome. (I know the intent of reducing the number of opportunities for the other team to quickly catch up.) We had the momentum. They didn't. They were on their 3rd game in 3 days and starting to fall off when we gave them a chance to calm down. With a little luck, they absolutely could have beaten us and I just feel that the game should have never been in that place.
And geez was it early still when we pulled it out for this game. We really, really had emotions on our side at that point.
Man do I want N.C. State in the finals. That game in Raleigh was the worst of the season. No better way to wrap up another ACC championship than with a win over that team, in front of a building full of people cheering for them.
Sorry, this is not 1999 or 2001. We have a very narrow margin for winning most games. It has been that way all year once you remove the large benefit we get from playing in Cameron. Like today, we have to defend well every play, and minimize turnovers, then hope that we shoot well enough to win. I don't see that changing- this team is not built to get turnovers or easy baskets and we don't get to the line much either. Today was a good win - Miami is good and getting better (they will be tough next year!).
And, yes, I will defend running the slow-down game- we needed to reduce the number of possessions at the end, and we did that. Of course, we need to execute better, but we are going to be in the same place again (if not tomorrow, then in the round of 32 or 16).
In any case, on to the finals. We will need everyone to dig deep to win and cut down the nets. Hopefully, we can get good minutes from the bench - we looked tired in the second half today.
You couldn't ask for a better offensive performance in the 2nd half... until the 6 minute mark.
But when we absolutely needed a stop we got one and Zoubek's ft's were huge. Nice contributions from the Pllumlee's especially Mason's 6 boards and 2 blocks. Gotta really love that!.
Kyle is playing himself into the draft with his string of stellar performances. This is of course both good and not so great.
You didn't miss anything. The officials basically put on Sebastian's headpiece and hideous green uniforms for a few minutes. K got a technical after Nolan got called for travelling when he was bumped off his dribble by one of the Miami players.
I watched the first half with my uncle, an indifferent sports fan, who said to me during that stretch, "Do the officials know they can call fouls on both teams?"