Two hours before tip-off last night, Nolan Smith warmed up in a nearly empty Cameron Indoor Stadium. As he shot jumpers, the speakers suddenly came on—Jay Z’s “A Star Is Born.”
If you’re inclined to believe in that sort of thing, it may just have been prophetic.
In a thrilling come-from-behind win, Smith scored a career-high 34 points to lead No. 5 Duke (22-2, 9-1 in the ACC), which trailed by as much as 16 and didn’t lead the game until there were only nine minutes left, to a 79-73 win over No. 20 North Carolina. Smith had 22 of his 34 in the contest’s crucial second half. He was helped by Seth Curry, who had a season-high 22 points including several huge shots to help push the Blue Devils to their first lead.
“You talk about vintage Duke and North Carolina games, that was one of them,” head coach Mike Krzyzewski said afterward.
“The championship was great, but if someone asks me what was the biggest game of my career, I’m going to say my last home game against Carolina, this comeback win,” Smith said. “I don’t think anything can be better than this.”
It seemed initially, though, that the Tar Heels (17-6, 7-2) would spoil Smith’s last home matchup with his team’s most hated rival.
North Carolina scored eight unanswered points to open the game, and its lead grew to 14 at halftime. John Henson and Tyler Zeller looked unstoppable, going a combined 10-for-15 from the floor in the first half en route to 23 points. The Tar Heels manhandled the Blue Devil frontcourt, outrebounding Duke’s bigs by nine and scoring 16 more points in the paint than they could muster.
“They were just so fast in that first half I thought they knocked us back,” Krzyzewski said. “We seemed scattered.”
Something needed to change. So Krzyzewski delivered a long halftime speech—not punctuated with broken clipboards or unprintable phrases, but instead with pleas for his team to relax.
“We didn’t yell or anything like that. It was just telling them to settle down and play,” Krzyzewski said. “They were just nuts [in the first half]. We were like, ‘What are you guys doing?’”
An entirely different team appeared to come out in the second half. This team was more ferocious on defense, forcing two straight traveling calls on Henson and Harrison Barnes. It was finally taking advantage of second-chance opportunities on offense, too: Smith hit a 3-pointer off a Kyle Singler offensive board, and Curry knocked down a trey of his own off another Singler offensive rebound to cut the 14-point halftime deficit to six.
The game’s most pivotal stretch, though, didn’t come in Duke’s initial second-half blitz. It came around five minutes later at the 10:51 mark, when Curry finally lived up to his promise shown at the beginning of the year and put Duke on his back.
The sophomore hit a 3-pointer to cut the lead to four, drilled a jumper to cut it to two, then, on the next Duke possession, pump-faked his defender, causing him to fly past and leave Curry open to nonchalantly hit another jumper. It marked seven straight points for the guard, and he reveled in his incredible accomplishment.
“Let’s go!” he screamed to his teammates, with the game tied at 54 and 9:45 remaining.
“He’s pretty damn good,” Krzyzewski said of Curry. “The thing he’s learned to do is get his shot off quicker. He was really coming off screens well, and when he was he took his shot.”
North Carolina began to look rattled in the wake of Curry’s outburst. Kendall Marshall—who was neutralized in the contest, scoring nine on 3-for-11 from the floor—was fouled, and he went to the line and bricked his first attempt. On Duke’s next trip down the court, Smith drove in the paint and dished the ball to Ryan Kelly, who knocked down a 3-pointer to give Duke its first lead of the night with 9:14 left.
A minute later, Smith hit a layup in transition and picked up the foul, running to the student section and beating his chest at the fans, then lining up his free throw attempt and making it. The Blue Devils now had a 60-55 lead.
“Those guys [Smith and Curry], they keep coming at you, keep coming at you, keep coming at you,” North Carolina head coach Roy Williams said.
Smith scored nine more points after that and-one. With 15 seconds left in the contest, he caught a perfect inbounds pass from Singler and threw down a game-clinching dunk to put Duke up six.
Just a few seconds later, with the Blue Devils’ win in the books, the senior jumped up and down back to the Duke bench. He said later that he realized his team was “a part of history.”
“Nolan’s performance was off-the-charts,” Krzyzewski said. “That was one heck of a performance by that kid.”
Duke-North Carolina is a rivalry that contains among its storied history a collection of many memorable moments, many classic individual performances.
Add last night to that group.
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.