Forget about Duke and focus on North Carolina

By Jerry Ratcliffe

Pete Gillen said it simply more than 20 years ago. Duke is Duke, and certainly No. 3 Duke was that and more on Monday night when the Blue Devils completely overwhelmed host Virginia, 80-62.

Too long, too talented, too many scorers, too athletic, too deep.

The Cavaliers, recently on an offensive tear during a three-game winning streak, managed to hang with the Blue Devils for about the first 10 minutes of the game before Duke connected on three consecutive 3-pointers in taking a 27-14 lead. From there, it was just a matter of time before the talent mismatch took over.

By halftime, Duke was in total control, 43-29, and it didn’t get any better (for a nuts-and-bolts account of the game, full box score, team and player notebooks, see related story on this site).

Virtually no one, especially the oddsmakers, gave UVA a snowball’s chance of pulling off an upset. For the Cavaliers, the best thing is to put this one in the rearview and focus on the remaining five games.

Interim coach Ron Sanchez went immediately into damage control after the shellacking, which was the smart thing to do.

“I think messaging is important,” Sanchez said after watching his Wahoos drop to 13-13 overall, 6-9 in the ACC. “The power of the tongue is what you need in this space and I’ve got to make sure that I deliver the right message to the guys.”

The right message is, “fuhgeddaboudit.”

You played a potential Final Four team that features at least six players that rank among the top 50 draftable players, including the likely national player of the year in Cooper Flagg, who had a double-double by halftime (Flagg finished with 17 points and 14 rebounds in 29 minutes).

Duke slaughtered the Cavaliers on the boards (41-21), in the paint (42-18) and in second-chance points (16-7).

It didn’t matter how much UVA prepared since Saturday for the quick turnaround. Nothing could have prepared the Wahoos for the rolling ball of butcher knives that carved them up Monday night.

“You know, you can practice all you want against our Green Team (reserves) and stuff, but it’s hard to simulate [Duke’s] athleticism and everything,” said Virginia guard Andrew Rohde.

The Blue Devils’ length was also a problem, as Rohde would elaborate on.

“It has a big effect, especially when they’re switching up, it’s really hard to get what we want versus teams like that.”

Sanchez, whose team has faced more than its share of top-25 teams this season, said the Hoos haven’t seen that kind of length all year.

Still, Sanchez knows that prior to facing the Devils, his Cavaliers were playing some pretty good basketball over the last few weeks, particularly offensively, where, as Isaac McKneely (14 points) pointed out, “Coach Sanchez is letting us play a little bit. The bigs are doing a great job screening and we’ve been making shots for the most part recently.”

Now, it’s up to the interim coach to get his team’s minds right and refocused on playing at North Carolina on Saturday.

“No, we did not play our best basketball tonight,” Sanchez said. “That does not take away from the good basketball that we are playing. We have to recognize the things that we did well, celebrate those, identify things that we did poorly, attack those immediately, so we can prepare for the next opponent and move forward.

“Our journey was not about beating Duke. Our journey is about being the best team that we can be. This is one game and we just have to move forward.”