ATLANTA — Maybe it’s just that devilish Duke defense and those evil black uniforms, but only two days after N.C. State looked as awful as a college basketball team can look on the floor of the Georgia Dome, UNC did a pretty fair impression of the woeful Wolfpack in Sunday’s ACC Tournament championship game.
The Tar Heels shot 29.2 percent, the second-worst shooting effort in the ACC Tournament’s 48-year history and the worst since “Blue Suede Shoes” was at the top of the pop charts in 1955.
It’s hard to imagine a worse day for the Tar Heels since the one in March of 1980, when a kid coach named Mike Krzyzewski made the march from West Point down to Duke. The Tar Heels weren’t just beaten by their biggest rivals in front of 40,083 people, they were embarrassed 79-53, the second-largest margin in ACC finals history. The only more lopsided ACC final came in 1968, back when Krzyzewski was still playing for Bob Knight at Army. That year the Tar Heels waxed N.C. State 87-50.
This one felt like 87-50.
Someone wondered aloud prior to the contest if it were possible for the Duke-Carolina matchup to ever produce a bad game. The answer was a resounding yes. Watching the final 25 minutes of this one was as exciting as watching someone tune a piano. There was all the suspense of an episode of Leave It To Beaver.
Duke opened a lead midway through the first half and instead of retaliating, as they did in that classic game in 1989 — the last time Duke and UNC had hooked up in an ACC title game in Georgia — the Heels waved a white flag.
“They made a run and then we fought back, we just didn’t get all the way back,” offered Tar Heel Jason
Capel.
Don’t expect Capel to follow former Tar Heel Brad Daugherty into the TV
analyst business. If the Tar Heels were doing any fighting Sunday, it was strictly among themselves.
Capel glared at Joseph Forte on a couple of occasions when Forte tried to dribble and get off a tough shot instead of tossing the ball to an open
Capel. And Forte glared back when Capel, who was 1-for-5 in the first half, bricked open jumpers.
Forte, driven nuts by the defensive pressure of Nate James and Jason Williams, was hounded into a 4-for-15 shooting day. Other Tar Heels, including
Capel, have insisted all year that they can step up and score any time teams gang up on Forte. Capel repeated that mantra again after he made six 3-pointers in UNC’s first-round win over Clemson.
Sunday, though, there was no stepping up, just stepping on one another’s toes. Capel finished 3-for-9 and reserve guard Max Owens, who had 20 points in UNC’s two tournament wins, shot 2-for-9. Big guys Brendan Haywood and Kris Lang teamed up to shoot 7-for-18 from pointblank range over smaller Duke defenders.
UNC was hammered thoroughly — inside, outside, in between.
Duke had eight steals after 14 minutes. UNC had seven for the game. Duke, which played 6-foot-4 football player Reggie Love for 16 minutes at center against Tar Heel 7-footer Haywood, outrebounded the Tar Heels 54-47 and yanked down an astonishing 20 offensive boards.
Duke fans, seated next to their tormented Tar Heel counterparts, taunted them with “Aw-ful-ly quiet” chants once Duke had doubled the score at 42-21. Heel fans, like their players and coach, had no meaningful response.
Doherty said he thought his guys took good shots, that they just didn’t make them. He and his players also insisted that Duke had shot spectacularly, although that was an illusion. Duke actually shot 37.5 percent, third-worst shooting ever in an ACC final by the winning team. Duke was 7-for-30 from 3-point range, it’s worst showing from the arc all season.
And still Duke won by 26, won going away, unchallenged. Some Tar Heel fans headed for home five minutes into the second half, when it was painfully obvious that their team had left its fire back at the hotel. They beat the traffic, while Duke beat up their team.
“I thought we tried to play hard,” said Doherty. “But Duke’s a tough team to chase. They’ve got four good
ballhandlers, four really good shooters, four guys who have really good quickness. You start double-teaming them, they break it and score. They can make it look like you’re just standing around.”
The Tar Heels did try a few half-hearted traps, but the traditional run by the boys in blue that everyone kept waiting for never materialized. Never came close to materializing. Not at the start of the second half, not even when Duke star Jason Williams left the game for good when he sprained an ankle with 13 minutes remaining. The Heels spent the entire second half trailing by at least 20 points.
A beleaguered Forte fired one pass to Brian Bersticker sitting on the Tar Heel bench and whipped another pass off the leg of hobbling Heel Kris Lang to trigger yet another Duke
fastbreak. Fittingly, Forte launched an airball over the long arms of Dunleavy just before benches were cleared by both coaches.
That led to the final humiliation. What Tar Heel fan dreamed on Saturday night that he’d have to endure the sight of Ryan Caldbeck sinking a free throw or watching Andre Buckner scoot in for a layup in the title game?
In the last seconds, Tar Heel subs Orlando Melendez and Bersticker futilely tipped rebounds at the basket until the horn mercifully sounded and said it was time to go home.
“It was a frustrating day,” said Doherty in perhaps the understatement of the year. “But Duke’s got a lot of firepower and they’ve done this sort of thing to some other pretty good teams.”
But Duke isn’t supposed to do this to Carolina. This was Coach K’s 600th win as a college coach, and 22 have been against the Tar Heels, but never had he beaten them by 26, never had he trounced them quite so thoroughly.
“I told our players that I was disappointed,” sighed Doherty. “But we’ve got to learn from this and move on.”
But how do you move on from this? Duke fans will be crowing over this one for centuries.
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Assistant sports editor Mike London covered the ACC Tournament for the Post.
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