Duke is back. Back in the Final Four, back as a national power—and back as a villain in the season’s final weekend.
Historically speaking, the idea of the Blue Devils as a Final Four villain is nothing new. Under head coach Mike Krzyzewski, Duke has been a national semifinalist 11 times, winning three championships. From Christian Laettner to J.J. Redick, Blue Devil players have been the target of championship weekend vitriol, the likes of which few other Division I athletes have experienced.
What is new, however, is Duke being cast as a bad guy in April once again. That’s not because college basketball fans around the country have warmed to the Blue Devils. Rather, Duke simply hasn’t advanced that far in the Tournament.
In 2004, the Blue Devils lost to Connecticut in a national semifinal. Since then, they have seen their nine-year Sweet 16 streak end. They narrowly escaped a loss to No. 15 Belmont. They were blown out by Villanova. And all the while, they have endured questions about why they had not made the Final Four since Chris Duhon was in uniform.
But they never stopped being hated. Time, venue—none of it mattered. Fans, whether they were cheering for the opposing team or simply casual basketball followers, wanted to see Duke crash. And when the Blue Devils lost, all parties involved rejoiced.
Rarely, though, has a team delighted so much in beating Duke as West Virginia did after the Mountaineers ended the Blue Devils’ season in 2008. No. 7 West Virginia shocked No. 2 Duke in the second round of the NCAA Tournament that year, riding Joe Alexander and Alex Ruoff to a 73-67 upset as the Washington, D.C. crowd gleefully looked on.
Two years later, the Blue Devils and Mountaineers are set to meet again, this time with even more at stake: a spot in the national championship game.
A floor-slapping, ‘mini Jason Kidd’
Over the years, one of the most iconic images of Duke’s defense is the floor slap. From Steve Wojciechowski to Greg Paulus, Blue Devil players have used the gesture at crucial moments to signal their intensity as they get into their defensive stances.
So when West Virginia guard Joe Mazzulla, then a sophomore, entered his team’s NCAA Tournament game against Duke and immediately slapped both hands to the Verizon Center floor, it wasn’t a coincidence. It wasn’t a habit of his. And it wasn’t meant to be complimentary.
Alexander had dared Mazzulla to slap the floor during pregame warmups, and the reserve guard didn’t hesitate.
And yet he backed it up on the court. Mazzulla shredded the Blue Devils’ defense, and although he was not the Mountaineers’ leading scorer that day, he may have been their most important player.
“The MVP of the game was Mazzulla,” Krzyzewski said after the game. “That kid was fabulous. He looked like a mini Jason Kidd out there, getting rebounds and assists and points and toughness.”
The sophomore finished with a near triple-double: 13 points, 11 rebounds and eight assists. He also played with the fire that Duke lacked, and in that way represented the stark difference between the two teams that afternoon.
His mock floor slap, however, did not leave much of an impression on the Blue Devils.
“Once you lose, it doesn’t make any difference what a kid says,” Krzyzewski said this week. “You lost. That’s their right to do whatever they want to do and say whatever they want to.... That’s, to me, like, so long ago that it has no bearing on what we’re doing right now.”
‘We don’t care that they’re Duke’
Once the final buzzer had sounded on Duke’s season, though, Mazzulla was far more complimentary of the Blue Devils than some of his teammates were. Fresh off a big NCAA Tournament win and tired of hearing about Duke’s tradition, the underdog Mountaineers were ready to go on the offensive.
During postgame interviews, then-freshman Cam Thoroughman was informed that Paulus was a McDonald’s All-American.
“Oh my God,” he responded. “Are you kidding?”
“We don’t have any McDonald’s All-Americans, and we don’t have any guys who were the No. 1 player in their state,” then-senior center Jamie Smalligan said. “But I think that Coach K would love to have Joe Alexander on his team right now.”
It was Alexander, in fact, who led the postgame assault on Duke. The forward, who scored 22 points and played almost the entire contest, took several shots at the Blue Devils.
“We don’t care that they’re Duke,” he said. “That doesn’t mean anything to us. People look at West Virginia like we’re this mid-major school playing all these big schools and upsetting them. That’s not the case at all.”
“We knew that coming in—that they were just going to stand around and not rebound,” Alexander also said. “So we were ready to exploit that.”
And Alexander, like Thoroughman, was unimpressed with the Blue Devils’ bevy of McDonald’s All-Americans. A reporter told him Duke had eight such players on its roster.
His retort was a single word: “Who?”
Now preparing to face West Virginia for the first time since that 2008 loss, the Blue Devils say the Mountaineers’ comments don’t matter. A team playing in the Final Four, after all, does not need extra motivation.
“You ignore that, and you just really go out there and play basketball,” Nolan Smith said this week. “The thing you think about from that game is that they played tougher than us. They did a lot of tougher things than us on that night. And as players that played in that game, that’s all we’re going to remember, is that they wanted it and played harder than us.”
A different team
The Blue Devils’ stance on West Virginia’s postgame reactions is understandable. Many of the 2008 Mountaineers, such as Alexander, have left the program. A few, like Thoroughman, remain. Others, such as senior Da’Sean Butler, have stepped into larger roles.
Duke, meanwhile, has undergone an evolution of its own. Greg Paulus and Gerald Henderson, two of the three Blue Devils who scored double-digit points that day, are gone. So are DeMarcus Nelson, David McClure and Taylor King.
With them goes the old Duke: the Duke that got out-rebounded 47-27, the Duke that missed 15 consecutive 3-pointers, the Duke that had no chance of overcoming that kind of cold shooting.
In its place stands a taller Blue Devil team, with Brian Zoubek, Lance Thomas and Miles and Mason Plumlee comprising one of the most effective frontcourts in the country. They have helped Duke become one of the nation’s leaders in offensive rebounding.
The Mountaineers dominated the 2008 Blue Devils on the boards. West Virginia remains a great rebounding team—it is second nationally in offensive rebounding percentage—but an advantage on the glass similar to two years ago would be shocking.
“That’s our plus this year,” Smith said. “We know that our defensive rebounding is going to be there. We’re not worried about that. That’s how they hurt us [in 2008], [so] it gives us a lot of confidence.”
Duke’s prowess on the offensive glass has been a big reason why it has not been victimized by poor perimeter shooting this season. Smith, Jon Scheyer and Kyle Singler struggle with their shot at times, but the forwards corral their misses and kick the ball back out to them for extra scoring opportunities.
Two years ago, those second and third chances were “the story of the game,” Krzyzewski said—for West Virginia. The Mountaineers had 19 offensive rebounds to the Blue Devils’ seven. The contrast couldn’t have been greater: While Duke clanged individual attempts off the rim, West Virginia gathered its misses and converted.
Now, the Blue Devils have an answer for the Mountaineers.
“When we have bad shooting nights, we definitely have won games with our rebounding and our toughness,” Zoubek said. “I think that is the difference this year, that when we do have bad shooting nights and stuff isn’t going well for us, the simple things—they might not be simple—but rebounding, offensive rebounding, kicking out, getting extra shots and playing defense—all those things have been working for us. And that’s what we base our game on.”
It’s a big change for Duke, replacing the 3-point-happy team of 2008 with the offensive rebounding machine of 2010.
West Virginia has also evolved, although not as drastically. Butler has become a star. Sophomores Devin Ebanks and Kevin Jones provide new scoring options.
And that point guard who terrorized the Blue Devils? He’s back in a major role after an injury to starter Truck Bryant. It is largely thanks to Mazzulla’s stellar Elite 8 performance against Kentucky, in fact, that West Virginia finds itself in the Final Four.
Now, he’s ready to lead his team against the one he once taunted with a mock floor slap—under even brighter lights than before.
“It’s not about payback or anything like that,” Scheyer said. “But the last time you play somebody, you remember what that team was like.”
Come Sunday morning, Duke hopes its last memory of West Virginia is of a team that didn’t get an opportunity to talk trash, even if it wanted to.
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.