Duke swats aside North Carolina's upset bid to complete historically dominant ACC season
In its storied history, Duke men’s basketball has captured two dozen ACC regular-season titles and 27 conference tournament championships.
Few, if any, of those teams bulldozed through the league quite as convincingly as this year’s Blue Devils have.
Duke’s latest victim was a North Carolina team that entered Saturday evening’s regular-season finale having won six in a row to surge back into contention for an NCAA tournament bid. The Blue Devils withstood a mid-game Tar Heels surge, steadied themselves and sent their Tobacco Road rivals tumbling back to the NCAA tournament bubble with an 82-69 road victory at the Dean Dome.
Credit North Carolina for briefly opening a seven-point early second-half lead and at least making Duke work to clinch the outright ACC title. Not many ACC teams have even pushed the Blue Devils that hard. Twelve of Duke’s 19 ACC wins this season have come by 20 or more points. Ten times, the margin was at least 25. Only Wake Forest and Notre Dame lost to the Blue Devils by nine or fewer. Only Clemson beat them.
The ACC’s switch from 18 conference games to 20 five years ago helped Duke pile up a historic plus-434-point scoring differential in league play this season. That’s the largest in ACC history and among the largest in college basketball history, according to Stathead Basketball. The last team to post a bigger scoring differential in conference play was 2016-17 Gonzaga (plus-471). The last power-conference team to do it was 1953-54 Kentucky (plus-503).
Why is the gap between Duke and the rest of the ACC so massive this season?
The explanation starts with this being the best Duke team in a decade, better than the 32-win Zion Williamson-R.J. Barrett juggernaut, better than the Paolo Banchero-led group that took Mike Krzyzewski to one last Final Four. This year’s Blue Devils (28-3) are challenging the narrative that a freshman-driven team cannot win a national title in the era of 24-year-old COVID seniors and grad transfers.
Cooper Flagg has been the rare ballyhooed teenage prospect who has exceeded reasonable expectations as a college freshman. The future No. 1 overall NBA Draft pick averages a team-high 19.6 points per game and leads Duke in every other major statistical category, from rebounding, to assists, to blocks, to steals.
While Flagg has soaked up most of the attention this season, his supporting cast features fellow projected 2025 lottery picks Kon Knueppel and Khaman Maluach and a handful of savvy, proven veterans. On Saturday, that group helped Duke extend its lead from five to as many as 15 when Flagg went to the bench with two fouls less than eight minutes into the game. Then it coughed up that lead after Flagg returned and immediately picked up a third first-half foul barreling into North Carolina’s Jae’Lyn Withers.
North Carolina led by as much as 56-49 four minutes into the second half before Duke clamped down on defense and turned stops into transition opportunities. Knueppel gave Duke the lead for good with a fast-break layup with 11 minutes to play. Flagg had four second-half blocked shots, the last of which led to a Tyrese Proctor layup that extended Duke's lead to 13 with three minutes to play.
The other factor in Duke's ACC dominance this season is that the league is down. Way down, in fact.
Louisville (25-6, 18-2) and Clemson (26-5, 18-2) are the only ACC teams certain to join Duke in the NCAA tournament. Those three teams lost a combined two conference games to the rest of the league.
Of the ACC's other 15 teams, North Carolina has the best chance to snatch one of the final at-large NCAA bids if it can bolster its résumé with a deep run in the ACC tournament. The Tar Heels played a tough non-league schedule but on Saturday fell to 1-11 in Quadrant 1 games.
A big reason for the ACC's tailspin is the retirement of some of the league's most prominent coaches. Roy Williams is no longer at North Carolina, nor is Jim Boeheim at Syracuse. Tony Bennett resigned at Virginia before the season. Jim Larrañaga called it quits at Miami a month later. Leonard Hamilton just coached his final home game at Florida State on Saturday.
It also hasn't helped the ACC that many of its programs have been slow to adjust to college basketball's changing landscape. Programs from the SEC and other power conferences have used NIL war chests to lure away top players who might have otherwise gone to ACC schools in the past.
The ACC needs to find coaches who will embrace the new era.
Otherwise, Duke will continue to make the rest of the league look overmatched.
