NEW YORK - It may not have been the Final Four, but it didn't feel much different.
No. 8 St. John's (16-4) fought second-ranked Duke (19-1) tooth and nail in a suspenseful battle that Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski said his team "will remember for the rest of their lives." Forty minutes of regulation and almost five minutes of overtime later, Chris Carrawell sank his last free throw, putting the game away and giving the Blue Devils a 92-88 win.
"It is an experience that they will never forget," St. John's coach Mike Jarvis said of his team. "They will remember the crowd, the excitement, Spike Lee wearing Erick Barkley's shirt, NBA star Jayson Williams sitting behind the bench and the national anthem being sung and bringing chills to our bones. The shot that Ronnie [Artest] put in to send the game into overtime and some of the plays we did not make.
"We will never, ever forget. We had a chance to play an NCAA Championship game in January. Very few people will ever know what that feels like."
With 9.3 seconds left in regulation, Nate James sank two from the charity stripe to put Duke up 81-78. The game looked as good as over, but Ron Artest had other plans. The forward drained his only three-pointer of the game with a mere 1.1 seconds remaining to send it into overtime.
"It feels like a blur right now," Shane Battier said of Artest's shot. "It seemed like we had the game in our grasp and all we had to do was inbound the ball, but I've got to give them a lot of credit, they played really tight defense in the end.... Artest made a huge play, and when he got it, got fouled, missed the free throws, but came up with the big shot at the end. He's a big-time player."
After
But the Red Storm stayed in the game, countering with five unanswered points at the end of the first stanza, sending Duke to the locker room with a paltry 39-37 halftime lead.
"We went up eight a couple of times, went up 10, and said, 'Look at that, we can put them away now,'" Carrawell said. "But they kept fighting."
After intermission, the Blue Devils came running out on all cylinders. Elton Brand hit a layup with 18:35 left in the half, and during the next five minutes, Duke hit shot after shot during a 14-3 tear.
St. John's Marvis "Bootsy" Thornton created a one-man run, though, netting eight points in a 37-second stretch to tie the game up at 60 apiece halfway through the second stanza. The Blue Devils couldn't pull away again. Thornton lit up the court all afternoon, scoring 40 points on the outing.
"I think individually we have not had a kid have the success that Thornton had against us in a few years," Krzyzewski said. "He was amazing. All I know is we tried everything. We were pushing people out there and when we thought we can get a two-possession lead and maybe play defense, boom, he hit it."
The Red Storm put the pressure on Duke right from the start, taking 12 steals total and forcing the Blue Devils to make bad passes and take wild shots. In all, St. John's forced 23 Duke turnovers, 14 of them in the first half.
Krzyzewski attributed this uncharacteristically high number more to the Red Storm's defense than to his own team's play.
"I know there were mistakes in the game, but they were forced mistakes, because someone was playing hard, not because someone was nervous or they weren't ready to play," Krzyzewski said.
To make things more difficult, the Blue Devils found themselves in foul trouble early on. Before the second half was halfway over, both Will Avery and Langdon had four fouls against them.
With both guards losing playing time as a result and Avery fouling out with 4:27 left, Carrawell spent a considerable amount of time running the point to help out Duke's depleted backcourt. Furthermore, Brand, who leads Duke in scoring with Langdon at 18.3 points per game, fouled out before the end of regulation as well, committing his fifth personal foul 10 seconds before the buzzer sounded. Sixth man Nate James fouled out three-and-a-half minutes into overtime.
Fortunately for Duke, it has a seventh and eighth man. St. John's, however, is not so fortunate. Losing top reserve Lavor Postell and starting forward Reggie Jessie to fouls during the second half, and forward Albert Richardson as well as Artest during overtime, the Red Storm had to turn to little-used reserves Collin Charles, Chudney Gray and Donald Emanuel. Between the three of them, Charles, Gray and Emanuel racked up five fouls but no points. This lack of depth played a role in the Red Storm's undoing.
With a road win against a top-10 team in a feverishly intense Madison Square Garden behind them, the Blue Devils feel they've proven they can handle the big games. But even so, not all of them were completely satisfied.
"I'd rather have had a blowout," Brand said.
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