‘Disrespected’ Duke will play in ACC championship, but battle with Miami felt like it
Where was the confetti? It’s supposed to come from the ceiling after a championship, falling into an ongoing celebration like soft, gentle hail, or exploding from the scoreboard. As Duke and Miami shook hands, you could feel its absence.
No matter which team won, Friday night’s ACC semifinal felt like the kind of game worthy of deciding a title. Worthy of a confetti shower.
Alas, Virginia awaits Duke on Saturday, in a game that will make up in high stakes what it is likely to lack in this kind of beauty. But this much is already apparent: NCAA tournament seeding aside — and Virginia’s still likely to claim the prime spot back in Greensboro next week — the two best teams in the ACC played Friday night, a team that earned the No. 1 seed and one that’s grown into being worthy of it.
Duke won, 85-78, but it could have gone either way, and no one would have blinked.
That doesn’t guarantee anything Saturday — Virginia’s really good, too — but it certainly looks like these two teams have the best chance of carrying the ACC banner forward into March, of pursuing a repeat of last spring’s postseason redemption, even if they have to do it from seeds in the 5-6-7 range. There are going to be some very angry higher-seeded teams when Duke or Miami pop up in their bracket, especially if Miami power forward Norchad Omier recovers from the sprained (but not broken) ankle that knocked him out of Friday’s game.
Miami’s better than it gets credit for defensively — even after losing Omier — the Hurricanes’ quickness and aggressiveness gave Duke fits. And Duke’s become better than it gets credit for offensively, with Dereck Lively unveiling new post moves nightly — it was a hook shot Friday — and Dariq Whitehead adding 16 points off the bench.
Duke, clearly, is better than it gets credit for in general, which continues to fuel the strange dynamic of a blue-blooded powerhouse playing the lack-of-respect card like, say, Wichita State. It’s truly jarring to hear Duke players talk about the chips on their shoulders, and not only because it’s the only thing on their person that doesn’t have a Nike logo on it.
“We’ve just realized through the course of the season that people don’t respect us,” Duke forward Kyle Filipowski said. “They disrespect us. They don’t know that we’re that good. We’re just a bunch of freshmen and sophomores living by the name on our chest. But I mean, we’ve come together and we’re starting to represent the four letters on our chest.
“And we’re just going to keep doing that because no matter how much we win, people still aren’t going to respect us. They’re just waiting for us to lose. So we’re going to make sure that doesn’t happen.”
That was how it went Friday. It took everything Duke had to beat a Miami team that, for a while, couldn’t miss, ACC player of the year Isaiah Wong especially, until Jeremy Roach’s dagger 3-pointer to put Duke up seven late. The teams went back and forth for so long in the first half they played through the under-8 television timeout and the under-4 timeout.
“It was supposed to be the under-8, and it never happened? That was crazy,” Duke forward Mark Mitchell said. “I was on the court. … We were just running back and forth for four minutes. I didn’t even realize we were trading baskets like that. Obviously, that’s something you don’t want to do with a high-powered offensive team like Miami. We were able to score with them too, though. That was a crazy sequence.”
It was great basketball, in a great atmosphere, and it rose to a level far beyond the usual ACC semifinal, even without the confetti. Maybe Saturday can live up to that. Even if not, maybe this March has a chance to live up to last March.
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This story was originally published March 10, 2023 at 10:39 PM with the headline "‘Disrespected’ Duke will play in ACC championship, but battle with Miami felt like it."
