BLACKSBURG, Va. - With under 90 seconds to play Saturday afternoon and the Cassell Coliseum crowd uproarious after Virginia Tech's seventh offensive foul of the afternoon, Duke serenely positioned itself into the same 1-4 set in which it had spent much of the second half.
Gerald Henderson made the same jaunt to the foul line extended, received the same soft pass from Jon Scheyer and made the same hard dribble right toward a screen about to be set by Kyle Singler. But, just as two Hokies jumped out in anticipation of the pick, Singler slipped to the hoop and Henderson threaded a pass to his wide open teammate for a layup.
The lead was six, and the crowd was silent.
"That might have been the biggest play of the game," Henderson said. "They anticipated me coming off a ballscreen, which we had been running all game. Kyle made a great read-he told me before to watch the slip-and I just hit him."
"It was Gerald's best pass of the year," head coach Mike Krzyzewski said. "Kyle made a really nice move, but that was a big-time pass."
Indeed, the play was symbolic of the game's own rhythm, with Henderson passing the offensive reins to his sophomore teammate in the second half.
After scoring just two points in a foul-plagued first half, Singler came alive with 19 after the intermission, compensating for the second-half struggles of Henderson and Scheyer.
"I was in foul trouble for most of the first half, so I knew I had to do something productive for the team to win," Singler said. "I knew I needed to assert myself."
Singler's fingerprints were all over the second half from its onset. The forward showcased his versatility in scoring eight of Duke's first 10 points in the half-three from the line, three from beyond the arc and two on a baseline reverse.
Later in the half, with A.D. Vassallo shooting the Hokies back into the game, Singler supplied the Blue Devils' only three field goals over an 11-minute stretch. Again, his all-around game was on display, with a tough putback in the lane, a drive off a pump fake for a layup and the slipped screen for the game's biggest deuce.
"You always want a lead of two or three possessions late during a close game, especially when you have a team that shoots the three-ball as well as they do," Singler said of his last bucket. "That was big."
The forward's rejuvenated aggressiveness led to more attempts from the charity stripe and fewer from beyond the arc. Instead of settling for 3-pointers-he had just two attempts after hoisting 32 threes in the previous six games-the forward took the ball to the basket and helped get Virginia Tech's Jeff Allen in second-half foul trouble.
The resulting 10 free throw attempts were Singler's most since Duke's third game of the ACC season, when he had 11 at Georgia Tech. His eight makes were his most since the Blue Devils' second contest of the regular season against Georgia Southern.
"Kyle's such a great player, such a gutsy player," Scheyer said. "When he came out in the second half, he just gave us a huge spark. He's just showing again why I call him one of the toughest players I've ever played with."
The strong second-half performance comes on the heels of some quieter games for the Blue Devils' second-leading scorer, who averaged just 13 points per contest during the team's modest three-game winning streak entering Saturday.
One season after Singler's numbers lulled down the stretch, his performance Saturday helped assuage doubts that the sophomore could once again be fatigued.
Just as importantly, Duke is alleviating talk that it, too, was headed for another late-season lull. And the Blue Devils did it by executing down the stretch in the halfcourt for the third consecutive game-something that haunted Duke in losses to North Carolina and Boston College.
"To see how our guys don't turn the ball over, get a stop, get a free throw, execute-you need to win a couple possessions to win a ballgame," Krzyzewski said. "We were able to do that, and we were able to do that at Maryland and against Wake. These are three huge wins for us."
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