A full 25 feet away from the basket, Nolan Smith began his drive. Splitting the defense, the senior barreled through four Blazers and threw down a violent slam dunk, giving the Blue Devils a 76-56 lead with 5:55 left in the contest.
The dunk, an exclamation point on a brilliant performance, gave Smith the 30th and 31st points of his career-high 33 point game. The senior led Duke to an 85-64 win over Alabama-Birmingham last night.
"He's just unstoppable, really," Kyle Singler said of Smith. "When he has the ball, coming off screens it's really tough to guard him, especially for 40 minutes. He has high energy and getting to the cup, he's really tough to guard."
Added head coach Mike Krzyzewski: "I think Nolan is probably playing as well as anyone in the country right now."
Smith has now scored at least 22 points in five straight games. He's shooting 62 percent during that stretch and is the reigning ACC player of the week.
“When he’s making shots," Alabama-Birmingham head coach Mike Davis said, "he’s almost impossible to guard."
Yet while Smith is firmly in the spotlight for his recent performances, his senior counterpart attained a major career-long milestone last night.
Singler scored the 2,000th point of his career, putting him at a mark shared by just 10 other Blue Devils in history. He scored the bucket, a 3-pointer, with 14:04 left in the first half.
His milestone came during a dominant 26-4 Duke run to open the game. The stretch, in which the Blue Devils went 12-for-16 from the field, visibly demoralized the Blazers. The team wouldn't recover, failing to cut the lead to less than 14 in the game.
Another key cog in the Duke victory came from an unlikely source: Mason Plumlee. Plumlee, who has struggled lately, finished with 14 points and eight rebounds while staying on the court longer than any game since Dec. 1.
"That was Mason Plumlee's best game I think at Duke," Krzyzewski said. "He was talking, he played with a presence, getting 14 points and nine rebounds and four blocks, he didn't play tired either."
Next up for Duke is Maryland, which, incidentally, is the last team to beat the Blue Devils. 24 games ago, the Terrapins won in memorable fashion, with Greivis Vasquez hitting a last-minute shot, causing his fans to later storm the court and then riot in College Park.
The Blue Devils now have a chance to attain revenge for that loss. Smith, for one, is ready.
"They were the last team to beat us, they stormed the court on us," he said. "[Now] they don't have Greivis Vasquez, but Coach Williams always gets his team ready to play us and we have a lot of time to prepare now."
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