TALLAHASSEE, Fla. - Duke had been here just three days earlier: ahead by double digits midway through the second half, trying to fend off a late, desperate rally from an underwhelming yet unyielding opponent.
Except against Florida State, the No. 2 Blue Devils had to deal with the nastiest road crowd they had seen all year, one of the top defensive squads in the ACC and, perhaps most troubling, fatigue that only got worse near the end of the game. Duke led by eight points with just more than a minute left, a byproduct of missed free throws and defensive lapses.
But as it did against Davidson, Duke relied on timely defense and a strong offensive performance from one player-this time, it was Gerald Henderson, who scored a career-high 25 points-and that was enough to survive a 66-58 slugfest against the Seminoles Saturday at the Donald L. Tucker Center.
"They had all week to prepare for us and this was our third game in five and a half days," Duke head coach Mike Krzyzewski said. "We're winning the fight and it's going into the eighth, ninth and tenth rounds-we've got a chance to get knocked out, and we didn't get knocked out. That's the sign of a really great team."
Less than halfway into the second half, however, Duke (14-1, 2-0 in the ACC) was the team that had apparently delivered the finishing punch, and the only thing missing was the official counting to 10 to mercifully end the affair for Florida State (13-3, 0-1).
After a lackluster 19-14 first half in which exactly two Blue Devils, Henderson and sophomore Kyle Singler, scored from the field, the team came out as crisply and effectively as it has all season. Duke scored on its first six possessions and took less than seven minutes for it to beat its offensive output from the opening period. At that point, the score was 43-19 and the question was not whether, but by how much, the Blue Devils would win.
"They took us to the woodshed in the first few minutes [of the second half]," Seminoles head coach Leonard Hamilton said. "Once you get behind a team of this caliber, it's very difficult to fight back and put yourself in position to win the game."
Florida State's Derwin Kitchen and Toney Douglas either didn't hear their coach's words or didn't listen, refusing to lie down and quit and instead got the Seminoles back on their feet, outscoring Duke 21-7 over the next seven minutes. The two guards had 15 of those points during that run.
"You almost get that lead too early and you could see our guys got worn down," Krzyzewski said. "We got knocked back down with their height, their width and their tremendous pursuit of the ball."
So the Blue Devils turned to the two things that had kept them ahead prior to their sprint out of the intermission: stingy defense and Henderson. The junior guard drove for a bucket, hit a timely jumper and then hit an open Nolan Smith, who drew a foul and converted both free throws, in a sequence Krzyzewski called "the single most important thing to winning" at that point of the game.
Although Duke's lead only increased from nine to 13 in that span, those buckets prevented the Seminoles from being two 3-pointers away from tying the game, and with the home crowd as loud as it was all day, a tie game clearly would have favored Florida State.
After Henderson capped his career-high day with that stretch, the defense took over for the Blue Devils. In the final minute, when Florida State had cut the lead to eight and had possession of the ball, Douglas missed a shot, Chris Singleton airballed a 3-pointer and, up by eight with 23.9 seconds left, the Blue Devils' unbreakable perimeter defense forced the Seminoles to spend nearly 20 seconds before they even got a shot off. Although they did hit a layup, it came with less than three seconds left, sealing the game for Duke.
"They create a lot of problems with their defensive schemes, and they don't give you a lot of room to make adjustments," Hamilton said. "Very few people will play with the defensive intensity that Duke does."
Likewise, very few teams could have emerged victorious despite a vitriolic crowd and tired legs, but the Blue Devils found a way to do so.
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