Tallahassee, Fla. - With 15.2 seconds to play, Florida State forward Andrew Wilson lay sprawled on his stomach banging the floor with his hands, his goateed lips split open in a gigantic grin.
His Seminole team led 76-72, and a raucous sell-out crowd was preparing to rush the court-the big bad Dukies were all but dead. The look on his face said it all: this win made Florida State's season.
From the start, the Seminoles played like they knew this was a must-have game-a signature victory over the Blue Devils would make their case for an NCAA Tournament bid that much stronger. Wilson spent nearly as much time skidding across the floor as he did upright, and Florida State finished the game with huge advantages in almost every hustle statistic.
They grabbed 20 offensive boards-13 in the first half-to Duke's 16. They had a 6-3 edge in steals and won the turnover battle, 17-11. On offense, they attacked the basket over and over, drawing 30 Blue Devil fouls and shooting 40 free throws. They won the game despite shooting just 35 percent-more than nine percent lower than Duke.
"They're scrappy," Blue Devil guard DeMarcus Nelson said of the Seminoles. "Any team that we play you might as well throw their record out the window because they're not going to play like their record against us.. They were definitely attacking us, putting a lot of pressure on us. They were just super-aggressive."
Florida State's extra effort was nothing new for a Duke team that has gotten used to taking every team's best shot in every single game. But the gulf in motivation for this game was striking.
For the Seminoles, it was a senior night game in front of a packed house with the potential to make or break their tournament hopes. For a Blue Devil team that had already clinched the ACC regular-season championship, the game was all but meaningless-just another road game in front of another crowd that seemingly had never wanted anything more than a win over top-ranked Duke.
"We're going to be the number one seed in the ACC Tournament regardless," guard J.J. Redick said after the game, before adding that the team still wanted to play well in every game.
That attitude-which at this point in the season is one the Blue Devils have earned the right to have-showed, especially in the first half.
"I thought, over the game, their effort was at a higher level than ours," Redick said. "Turnovers and defensive rebounding for us in the first half was very sub-par-we already had double-digit turnovers and they had double-digit offensive rebounds."
From the opening tip until 3:30 remained in the first half, Duke played about as poorly as a team can play. The Blue Devils failed to even attempt a shot on their first three possessions and wound up turning the ball over 11 times in the game's first 16:30. Redick was shooting just 2-for-10 and All-American forward Shelden Williams was just 1-for-6. As a team, Duke had made just 32 percent of its shots up to that point and had yet to make a three-pointer.
Still, they trailed just 31-19, in large part because Florida State was shooting 34.4 percent. They even closed the half on a 14-5 spurt to cut the deficit to three going into the locker room.
The way Duke played for most of the half, a three-point margin was the best the team could have hoped for, and the players knew it. If the Blue Devils had come back to win this game-and they could have if a few more shots had fallen at the end-it would have been another example of a classic Duke escape on the road against a hostile crowd and a more motivated opponent.
To suggest that a Mike Krzyzewski-coached team would give anything less than full effort in any game would be foolish. But sometimes, the old cliché about giving 110 percent can ring true. And last night, the Seminoles gave the Blue Devils more than their best shot.
More than anything else, Duke's loss was about the Seminoles rising to the occasion against a Blue Devil team that had very little to gain or lose Wednesday night.
"The respect we have for them, I think brought the best out of our players tonight," Florida State head coach Leonard Hamilton said. "We knew from the beginning that we had to play our very, very best in order to be successful tonight, and our kids stepped up."
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