Triangle rivals serve up good stuff amid dull ACC season as NC State explodes, Duke implodes
This hasn’t been the most compelling season of ACC basketball so far, maybe the least interesting in a generation, especially in these parts. Last spring was always going to be as hard an act to follow as James Taylor, but this hasn’t come close.
But in an ACC season that’s been dull if not downright stultifying at times, basketball in the Triangle retains the capability to both shock and captivate, and whatever anyone might have expected from Duke and N.C. State on Wednesday, it wasn’t this.
This was … remarkable. Improbable. Incredible, even. It was stunning in every sense, both for how well the Wolfpack played and how overwhelmed — that’s the only word — Duke looked.
Duke went almost eight minutes and 13 shots without a point. N.C. State doubled up the Blue Devils at the half. Terquavion Smith and Jarkel Joiner couldn’t miss and Duke never had an answer for D.J. Burns, especially in the second half, the Winthrop transfer putting on a clinic against the NBA prospects. N.C. State scuffled through the first couple minutes and romped through the rest, both the better and the tougher team, on its way to an 84-60 win.
“We learned a lot through losing to Clemson,” N.C. State coach Kevin Keatts said. “I would rather learn a lot through winning a game against Duke by 24.”
Jon Scheyer yelled, begged, clapped, cajoled and even burned two timeouts in the first half, all to no avail. Anything Duke could screw up, it did. At one point, Duke gave up a Smith 3-pointer, surrendered the ball before halfcourt and gave up another Smith 3-pointer. At the end of the first half, the Blue Devils fouled three times to bleed out the last State possession only to give up a Joiner circus shot falling out of bounds at the corner at the buzzer. In the second half, Kyle Filipowski got dunked on and flexed on by Ebenezer Dowuona.
A bizarro-world result like this — the new opportunities it creates for N.C. State, the searing questions it asks of Duke — is a perfect tonic for a season that’s been all club soda so far.
Because the Wolfpack, with the blue-ribbon win it lacked, now has a viable path to the NCAA tournament.
And because Scheyer, with the abjectness of this loss, faces the first crisis of his very young coaching career.
We all know how his mentor would react to a loss like this, the manner more than the score — locks changed on the locker room, Duke gear taken away, midnight practices — but Scheyer is very much his own coach, and it will be interesting to see the path he follows. But it must be a new path, because Duke was mentally and physically unequipped for this and there’s nothing less acceptable within Cameron’s old walls, no matter who the coach is.
“I think it’s hard to have great perspective right now when you’re in the moment and you’re disappointed, to say the least, with the loss,” Scheyer said. “But you know, it’s a long year. Unfortunately, and I knew this when I took the job, I knew there were going to be some moments like this when people can doubt you, they can doubt us as a team.”
And in that respect, the Blue Devils are far from alone. Duke was hoping to avoid a transition year with Scheyer’s tenure as coach-in-waiting to Mike Krzyzewski but now finds itself very much in one anyway. North Carolina is not only one of the country’s most disappointing teams but sorting through all the same issues it sorted through last season, a particularly unoriginal sequel. And N.C. State was supposed to break through this year — new day, new staff, new transfers — but has stumbled and bumbled through ACC play until Wednesday.
The rest of the league has worked its way into the exact same muddle as a year ago, losing unacceptable nonconference games and beating up on each other in ACC play to no one’s benefit. (Miami losing to Georgia Tech elsewhere Wednesday is a prime example.) There’s a lot of mediocre basketball being played in empty buildings by teams going nowhere.
Meanwhile, the force of personality that Krzyzewski and Roy Williams brought to the stage is gone — although Williams himself is still present, at North Carolina and wherever else basketball may be happening (Holy Cross at Navy?!) — and no one’s stepped in to fill the void.
There was always going to be a letdown from the unrelenting furor of last season, with everything that came with it, right to the very last game. Between the long-awaited and long-feared Final Four showdown and the Tar Heels twice having the last laugh during Krzyzewski’s last run, the stakes have rarely been higher than that.
Still, under any circumstances, this has been a hard basketball season to love, and not just at N.C. State. There’s a reason PNC Arena wasn’t half-full for a rivalry game — in years past, more people have braved an ice storm to see State host Duke — at 7 p.m. on a weeknight. Paying customers across the league have lost interest.
But this was more like it. Not the kind of thing that happens every day, but the kind of thing that can happen when these teams play: N.C. State exploding, Duke imploding, not only the final score but how they got there turning the season on its head for both teams.
Emotions, joy and disbelief, in surplus for the partisans and the same ration of entertainment for lay observers, not in March but early January, the meat of the season. That’s the good stuff.
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This story was originally published January 4, 2023 at 10:10 PM with the headline "Triangle rivals serve up good stuff amid dull ACC season as NC State explodes, Duke implodes."
