DURHAM, N.C. — Perhaps not since 1992, when Duke went to Minneapolis with a chance to be the first repeat champion since UCLA, have the Blue Devils played a game like Saturday where the consequences of losing so vastly outweighed the rewards of winning.
That team already had a national championship to its credit, and played the entire season facing expectations rarely seen in college basketball, but had survived the season to reach the Final Four with history within its grasp.
By the time the Blue Devils reached the title game, they had survived one of the greatest games ever played with one of the greatest shots ever made — Christian Laettner against Kentucky in the regional final — and dispatched Mike Krzyzewski’s mentor Bobby Knight in the first game at the Metrodome.
One last hurdle remained: Michigan’s Fab Five, representing the new wave of college basketball that Duke would eventually, some two decades later, fully adopt. A win would cement the Blue Devils’ place in the college basketball pantheon. A loss would not only deprive them of their season-long quest at the final moment, but wipe them from the public consciousness as Chris Webber and Jalen Rose and Juwan Howard celebrated their ascension not only as champions but trendsetters.
The pressure not to lose was stifling.
“Duke could be its own biggest opponent right now,” Billy Packer said.
Duke won by 20.
Duke has played plenty of games with high stakes since then, but this one stands out. The ACC regular-season title and No. 1 seed in Brooklyn are already secured, but who wants to be the team that ruins Krzyzewski’s final home game by doing the unthinkable … and losing?
There are going to be plenty of emotions afterward, but anger isn’t supposed to be one of them.
“I don’t want them to feel — there’s so much about me, the moment is about us,” Krzyzewski said Thursday. “And so I want them to understand it’s our moment. It just happens to be in this situation. And for them not to play because it’s coach’s last game but to play because we should want to win. So I’ll try to get that message across to them.”
Pressure is nothing novel at Duke, a program that enters every season thinking about national championships and plays in the glare of a spotlight few schools ever even see. Expectations are always high, regardless of circumstances, especially against North Carolina, especially at Cameron.
But even the 2018 and 2019 teams, which each missed the Final Four by a single possession, did not face the same historical ignominy that losing Saturday would (although there are certainly UNC fans who never miss a chance to remind anyone that Duke didn’t make the Final Four with Zion Williamson on the roster).
The thing is, North Carolina is as capable as it is mercurial. It’s not out of the realm of possibility to imagine Caleb Love and R.J. Davis getting hot from outside, of Armando Bacot pounding Mark Williams and Paolo Banchero into foul trouble, of the Tar Heels taking the air out of the building and keeping it that way.
It’s also easy to imagine the Tar Heels missing their first six 3-pointers, Bacot picking up two early fouls and Duke going up 30-4, which would make for a much different atmosphere.
“Obviously we have motivation,” Duke’s Joey Baker said. “We want to send him out the right way. We still have to stay focused and play for each other and stick to what got us where we are now. It’s a balance, because obviously we want to play for him and send him out on that high note, but we’ve got to stuck to what got us here.”
There may be some thin evidence that Duke has felt this pressure at times during the season. With the caveat that these are very small sample sizes and differences between home and road performance have not historically been predictive of future results, Duke has been both subjectively and objectively better on the road than at home this year.
Duke, judged on road games alone, would be behind only Gonzaga — home and road — in terms of efficiency margin nationally, while Duke only at home would be 14th. That’s a huge discrepancy for a team that’s fifth overall in all games, according to stats guru Ken Pomeroy, who provided Duke’s home/road splits.
In terms of raw scoring margin, it was Duke’s second-best season on the road in the entire Krzyzewski era, per ESPN. The Blue Devils opened with a road loss at Ohio State in their only true nonconference road game, then went 9-1 in the ACC, winning eight straight to close out the season including wins over the No. 2, No. 3, No. 5, No. 7 and No. 9 teams in the standings. (Duke did not play at Miami or Virginia Tech.)
Then again, when it comes to dealing with pressure, this team has already surmounted the first hurdle. Duke had not been the No. 1 seed in the ACC tournament since 2010 or won the outright regular-season title since 2006. Think about the teams and players that have come through in the past 12 years without doing that: One national and three ACC champions, two No. 1 overall NBA draft picks, a procession of lottery picks.
This team’s five potential first-round picks may have been knocked back at times — to use a favorite Krzyzewski expression — but they still managed to accomplish something their predecessors had not while facing internal and external pressure no Duke team has faced in probably 30 years, and did it while talking openly about it.
On the other hand, they’ve done it against one of the weakest fields of ACC competition in that period of time, the league’s backhanded farewell gift to Krzyzewski. Only 2009, 2012, 2013 and last season even really compare. Nevertheless, Duke didn’t win the regular season in any of those four years either, finishing second in all three other than last season’s debacle.
“It’s different than playing for a championship or anything like that,” former Duke player and ESPN analyst Jay Bilas said. “It’s a standalone game that has significance beyond the game itself. I don’t know that 50 years from now people are going to necessarily remember the result as much as they remember the significance around the game.”
But should UNC win, Krzyzewski would remember. These players would remember. And Tar Heels fans would certainly remember. They’d never let Duke ever forget.
