GREENSBORO - When lecturing on leadership, men's basketball head coach Mike Krzyzewski likes to use a fist analogy. He compares a team to a fist, explaining that it takes five fingers--like the five members of a team--to get a fist working.
Krzyzewski now has an ACC ring for each one of those fingers--successfully completing the "one for the thumb" joke-as his Blue Devils won their unprecedented fifth straight ACC title Sunday afternoon.
"Of the five ACC championships, this team played with the most heart," said Krzyzewski, who appeared more excited about this title than past ones. "But of course I'm really proud of them now."
With a few seconds left on the clock, the Hall of Fame coach
"This helped us not just in the upcoming games, but in the upcoming years," Krzyzewski said. "We have a young team.... It will help us with a little more confidence being in games like this, not just the next months, but the next couple years."
The title was Duke's 14th all-time and the eighth under Krzyzewski. Duke is now second all-time to North Carolina, which has won 15 ACC tournaments.
The win also kept the Blue Devils perfect--there is not a single current Duke player that has lost in the ACC
However, both the players and coaches agreed that this was one of the sweetest victories because the Blue Devils did not come in as heavy favorites like they were the last two seasons. Duke had been seeded either first or second in its four previous wins in the streak.
And as Krzyzewski pointed out, unlike other teams, he had no problem stressing to this season's Blue Devils the difficulty of the tournament--they had lost to five of its other eight teams.
"It was better because we weren't favored," Duhon said. "People said we were too young and couldn't do it. We used it as motivation to come together as a team. We didn't have superstars... and we knew we needed to want it more."
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