NEW YORK, N.Y. - About two months ago, a largely untested men's basketball team faced underdog Cincinnati in the Great Alaska Shootout title game. For the first time all season, the Blue Devils faced a defense as tenacious and an offense as prolific as their own. For the first time all season they entered the locker room behind at halftime-and for the first time all season, despite a second-stanza comeback, they lost.
Yesterday Duke faced an equally ferocious opponent in St. John's. This time around, though, the Blue Devils refused to let St. John's become another Cincinnati.
"They really attacked us well," Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski said of St. John's. "I thought defensively they probably came hard at us, as hard as Cincinnati did in the first half of our game in Alaska, a long time ago."
As evidenced by its overtime victory yesterday, Duke has come a long way since then.
And this time, the Blue Devils had even more obstacles to overcome.
For one, they played most of the second half under the threatening shadow of foul trouble.
By the time the game was 10 minutes into the second half, both Will Avery and Trajan Langdon had accumulated four fouls. Avery and Elton Brand fouled out before the end of regulation, and key reserve Nate James did the same during overtime. Nevertheless, Duke managed to utilize its depth and versatility to stay in the game.
"It's a great measure of our ability to handle adversity," Shane Battier said. "No team has ever won a championship in any sport without handling adversity at one point or another. The other team was expecting us to falter under the pressure a little bit, but the whole time when we were in foul trouble, we kept positive, stayed together and played Duke basketball."
With their backcourt depleted, the Blue Devils had to turn to other players to take on some of the ballhandling duties. It was swingman Chris Carrawell who took on most of that responsibility.
Carrawell stepped up to the task admirably, but having to run the point kept Carrawell from doing another job where Duke could have used his scrappy defensive skills-that of guarding Bootsy Thornton, Duke's other formidable obstacle. Thornton almost singlehandedly kept St. John's close, netting 40 of the Red Storm's 88 points. No other player has scored that much against Duke since Joe Smith back in 1995.
"We kept getting in foul trouble, so I couldn't use him going through screens and bringing the ball up," Krzyzewski said of Carrawell. "He only has so much energy."
Carrawell wasn't the only one who helped bolster the Blue Devil backcourt, though. Corey Maggette took over the point on occasion, and even Brand brought the ball up the court once.
But the teamwork the Blue Devils demonstrated didn't just win them a game. Their play Sunday showed that they've come together as a team and overcome some of the demons that plagued them in Alaska, and perhaps even in their NCAA Regional loss to Kentucky last year.
The NCAA Tournament is fast approaching. Yesterday, the Blue Devils took a huge step toward being the kind of team they need to be if they are to make it far.
"We're mature; we're growing," Brand said. "It's games like this that are going to help us even more."
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