Up one point with less than 30 seconds to play, Andre Dawkins received the ball at the top of the arc and sank a clutch 3-pointer from well beyond the arc, giving the Blue Devils a four-point lead the Bruins could not overcome.
And with that, the Blue Devils narrowly avoided an upset by the Bruins to open their season with a 77-76 win.
“It’s a game I’ve worried about since I knew we were playing them,” Duke head coach Mike Krzyzewski said. “I think they can play anybody…. Our fans need to understand we played an outstanding basketball team tonight, they are really, really good.”
Belmont (0-1), tipped to be the one of the best mid-major teams this season, pushed the Blue Devils (1-0) as far as it could. The Bruins cut what appeared to be a commanding 16-point Blue Devil lead in the second half.
“We’re no worse a team because we lost by 1, than if we had won by 1,” Belmont head coach Rick Byrd said. “If Duke’s a top-10 team and we were able to come back, we can be a top-25 team for sure.”
Duke was led by a strong first half by junior forward Mason Plumlee, who made all four of his shots in the half along with five assists. The Blue Devils led 39-30 after the first period, and after extending this lead to 41-30 it seemed that they would cruise to a victory.
The lead quickly ballooned to 16 after a well-executed possession which gave Ryan Kelly a three-point play. Duke followed that up with three-pointers by Seth Curry, Tyler Thornton and Rivers, which stretched the Blue Devils lead to a commanding 53-37 in a matter of minutes.
The Bruins, playing catch-up for the remainder of the game, pushed Duke and fought back to get in the game. After making no 3-point attempts in the first half, the threes started to fall and they hit two 3-pointers in quick succession, in addition to an athletic three-point play by Ian Clark to cut the commanding lead to six.
“Duke totally took us out of our offense in the first half,” Byrd said. “I sort of stuck with that in first half hoping they would get tired… but they were so aggressive on us we had to go more to penetration.”
Clark, Belmont’s leading returning scorer, spent much of the game heckled by the Cameron Crazies after air-balling a free throw early in the first half.
After Drew Hanlen sunk a three pointer from the top of the key, the Blue Devils’ 16 point lead was now one point. Needing a response, a strong offensive play in which Kelly completed another three-point play and a Mason Plumlee block preserved the Blue Devils’ lead.
But even with emphatic dunks from both Mason Plumlee and Rivers galvanizing the team, Belmont refused to go away. The Bruins cut the lead back to one point, courtesy of a fortuitous Clark three-point play, with under a minute remaining.
“The shot that they hit, that’s when you start thinking,"This could be it,'” Krzyzewski said.
The clear difference was Belmont’s 3-point shooting percentage in the second half. After hitting none in the first half, it made half of its 3-point attempts in the second. Krzyzewski cites the Bruin’s improved offensive rebounding as the key to this change.
“I challenged our guys, saying that they were doing things better than you guys,” Byrd said. “I was just throwing stuff out… and we were a much better team from that point onwards.”
Although the Blue Devils were led by two of the guards many expect to carry much of the scoring load—Curry and Rivers had 16 points each—it was Dawkins who supplied the killer blow against the pesky Bruins.
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