DURHAM, N.C. -- Kendall Marshall
felt dissed by Duke. The Blue Devils played the highlights of their
last-second win over North Carolina on the video scoreboard and Marshall
didn't like it, so he brought his Tar Heels into a quick huddle.
"I told my teammates I thought that was disrespectful, and we need to go out here and prove a point," Marshall said.
Did they ever.
North Carolina never trailed in an 88-70 rout of
Duke (No. 3 ESPN/USA Today, No. 4 AP) on Saturday night, claiming the
Atlantic Coast Conference regular-season title behind 20 points and 10
assists from its motivated point guard."It left a bad taste in our mouths," Marshall said, "and we wanted to be able to come out and play well today."Tyler Zeller had 19 points and 10 rebounds, and Harrison Barnes
added 16 points for the Tar Heels (27-4, 14-2). For the second straight
year, they rolled in a winner-take-all season finale with the ACC
tournament's top seed -- and possibly one in the NCAA tournament, too --
on the line."My team's had some bounce-back to them all year
long," North Carolina coach Roy Williams said. "We go down to Florida
State and lose by 3 million and everybody's jumping off the bandwagon
... but our team kept playing. We lose to Duke and everybody's got a
great opinion of how stupid we are ... (and) my team kept playing."North
Carolina shot 54.5 percent, built a 45-28 rebounding advantage and sent
Duke to its deepest halftime deficit ever at Cameron Indoor Stadium --
24 points -- while winning its seventh straight since last month's loss
to the Blue Devils.
Mason Plumlee had 17 points, and brother Miles Plumlee added 16 points and 11 rebounds in his final home game for the Blue Devils (26-5, 13-3). Freshman guard Austin Rivers -- the hero of that last meeting -- had 15 points.
But
Duke -- which erased a 10-point deficit in the final 2½ minutes to win
the first matchup, then rallied from 20 down in the second half to beat
North Carolina State -- couldn't come up with another improbable escape
and instead had its seven-game winning streak snapped."Throughout
the year, we've been immature. We always want to see how little we have
to do to win," Miles Plumlee said. "You give a team like that a
20-point lead, it's nearly impossible to win. We need to fight, like we
did at times, for a whole game."Duke was trying for its second
regular-season sweep of North Carolina in three years, after the Blue
Devils won the dramatic first meeting in Chapel Hill. They hit 14
3-pointers in that game -- none bigger than Rivers' buzzer-beater that
punctuated the 85-84 win.For too long in this one, those shots didn't fall.The
perimeter-reliant Blue Devils finished 6 of 21 from 3-point range. They
missed 15 consecutive shots, including their first seven 3s, and had
two 7-minute field goal droughts in the opening half. That left them
down 48-24 at the break -- their largest halftime deficit anywhere since
the 1990 team trailed the Tar Heels by 24 in Chapel Hill."When
you base, like we do, a lot of our offense on 3-point shooting ... some
will say, 'Don't.' That's who we are, man," Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski
said. "And if we're not hitting them, we have a much greater chance to
lose."The closest they got in the second half was 75-64 on Miles Plumlee's free throw with 6:01 left. But Seth Curry missed an open 3-pointer roughly 30 seconds later that would have brought down the house.Instead, Marshall hit a 19-footer with 4 minutes left, James Michael McAdoo added a layup and Barnes swished a deep 3 to stretch it to 82-64 with 2 minutes to play.For
Zeller, it was a welcome catharsis after his late-game struggles in the
previous meeting. Back then, he accidentally batted a ball into the
Duke basket and missed two free throws in the final minute before Rivers
hit that last 3 over him.Those noisy Cameron Crazies persistently reminded him of it, chanting "Tyler Zeller, MVP" at him during pregame warmups."Yeah, I heard it all," Zeller said.And
the North Carolina big man got the last laugh, making his final trip to
Cameron one to remember by hitting nine of his 11 shots before fouling
out in the final minute. Only when he and John Henson got in foul trouble did the Tar Heels' offense really bog down.Henson
had 13 points and 10 rebounds, giving the Tar Heels three players with
double-doubles -- the first time they've done that since 2003 -- while Reggie Bullock added 12 points.Curry finished with 12 points on 3-of-13 shooting for Duke.Among the famous faces in the crowd was NFL player Peyton Manning
-- who has been throwing on campus under the tutelage of his college
offensive coordinator, Duke coach David Cutcliffe. Manning sat next to
Cutcliffe in a courtside seat under the basket the Blue Devils defended
in the first half.Those two saw plenty of early action -- all by the Tar Heels.North
Carolina once again raced out to a quick double-figure lead, this time
riding an 18-1 run in which it converted nearly every shot it took in
the paint. That lead grew throughout the half, with Marshall's jumper
with 3 seconds left stretching it to 48-24 at the break."We were
just kind of overwhelmed, by them and the situation," Krzyzewski said.
"It's like a surprise gift, you know? You open it up, and for the most
part, it's been a nice surprise. I never have any idea of what's inside
the present. And today there was nothing. It was an empty box."
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