BOLT FROM THE BLUE
Devils' late magic sends Tar Heels packing
If you closed your eyes, you could have been convinced Tobacco Road intersected with Atlantic Avenue. If you never closed your eyes, you saw the best of college basketball — in talent, passion and magnitude.
North Carolina and Duke were roughly 500 miles from home and right at home, transporting their hatred and brilliance to Brooklyn in a captivating and exhilarating rubber match for a spot in the ACC Championship.
In the 245th round of the sport’s best bout, Duke delivered one of the rivalry’s most stunning knockouts, overcoming a double-digit second-half deficit for the second straight day to beat top-seeded North Carolina 93-83 in Friday night’s ACC Tournament semifinal.
The fifth-seeded Blue Devils (25-8) will face Notre Dame in Saturday’s championship game at Barclays Center, looking to win their 20th conference tournament title — and first since 2011 — while becoming the first team in conference history to win four games in four days.
“Our team’s getting better,” Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski said. “I think they’re getting to know each other really well, and it’s a good time.”
Meeting for just the fifth time outside of their home state — and for the first time in a conference tournament in six years — North Carolina (27-7) spent most of the night making its neighbor appear incapable of returning anything but weak jabs that couldn’t connect.
The Tar Heels took control by pounding the ball inside with Kennedy Meeks (19 points, 12 rebounds) and scoring 32 points in the paint to take a 49-42 halftime lead, though Jayson Tatum (24 points) and a red-hot Grayson Allen (18 points, five assists), who made his f irst four 3-pointers, kept the margin manageable.
“If [Allen] doesn’t do what he did in the first half, we’re down by 20, and we could be getting blown out,” Krzyzewski said. “They were playing a lot better than us than the score indicated. … It was almost a third-round knockout without him playing the way he did.”
With less than 14 minutes remaining, Duke trailed 61-48, nearly identical to the deficit and amount of time remaining when the Blue Devils flipped the switch against Louisville the previous night and became the best team in the country, turn- ing into the juggernaut they were expected to be from the start of the season and appear to be morphing into just before the brackets are released.
As the Tar Heels stopped throwing the ball inside — and star guard Joel Berry II sat with four fouls — Duke was devastating its rival from outside, trimming an 11-point margin on Luke Kennard’s (20 points) 4-point play, then taking its first lead of the game, 66-65, on a Frank Jackson 3-pointer with 9:02 remaining. The Blue Devils shot better than 59 percent in the second half — making 10-of-17 3-pointers — while the Tar Heels were held under 29 percent shooting.
“We have learned and we’ve grown up because of so many different things we’ve been through this season,” Kennard said. “We’ve had so much adversity. I think we’ve grown in a sense that when we are down in games and we want to make a charge, we continue to stay poised. We continue to stay calm. We don’t let anything affect the way that we’re playing as a group. We stay ourselves.”
With the score tied at 70, an- other classic ending looked like it was six minutes and change away, but a Kennard 3-pointer and an Allen-to-Harry Giles alley-oop capped a game-sealing 7-0 run, part of a 28-9 Duke avalanche.
“It was a big-time game for a while, and then it got so it was not a big-time game,” North Carolina coach Roy Williams said. “I think the most disciplined, the best coached team, the most focused team is the one that won the game.”
The one that suddenly looks capable of winning it all.