Duke picked a pretty good time to play its best game of the season.
Behind a scintillating offensive performance, Duke crushed West Virginia Saturday night, 78-57, in the second national semifinal game. The Blue Devils earned a trip to their first national championship game since 2001 where the story of the 2010 tournament, Butler, awaits Monday evening. Here’s how the Blue Devils did it.
– Duke just couldn’t be stopped from behind the arc. The Blue Devils knocked down 13 of their 25 attempts from 3. They did what they do best: Hit the deep shot. The combination of Jon Scheyer, Kyle Singler and Nolan Smith couldn’t be stopped by West Virginia’s defense. The trio hit 12 of the team’s 13 3s, Scheyer himself knocked down 5, finishing with a game-high 23 points. Singler went for 21 while Smith added 19. Comically, the contributions of those three was all the scoring Duke needed. West Virginia just had no answer for Duke defensively. The Blue Devils scored 16 2-point field goals, more than half of their game total. That’s worth nothing because most of Duke’s scoring comes from behind the arc – they’re not a great 2-point field goal scoring team. The efficiency ratings bore that out this season. But it didn’t matter Saturday. The Blue Devils did just about everything right offensively. Duke’s 78 points were the fourth most allowed by the Mountaineers this season.
– Duke killed West Virginia on the offensive boards. While the margin doesn’t reveal that the Blue Devils had some absurd edge on the offensive glass (11-9 in favor of Duke), it only seemed that way. You’d have to dig a little deeper in the box score to realize how badly the Blue Devils abused the Mountaineers underneath. Duke finished with a 19-7 advantage in second chance points, a 12-0 difference in the first half. We knew coming into this one that Duke was a very good offensive rebounding team and boy did it show Saturday.
– West Virginia was pretty brutal offensively. The Mountaineers just couldn’t get much going as Da’Sean Butler failed to be a big factor in the first half before going down with what appeared to be a serious knee injury late in the second half. Butler, West Virginia’s leading scorer this season, finished with just 10 points while Wellington Smith and Devin Ebanks went for 12 and 11, respectively. Duke’s defense held West Virginia to just 41 percent shooting from the field and the hot hands that carried them over Kentucky last week in the Elite Eight were nowhere to be found Saturday. West Virginia hit just 5 3-pointers. And considering their offense is predicated on grinding games out and executing on the half court, once the Mountaineers found themselves in a 10-point hole you knew it was going to be very difficult for them to climb back. They needed this to be a close game all the way and hopefully steal it at the end. Duke features one of the best defenses in school history and while West Virginia pulled off more than a few comebacks from big deficits this season, they weren’t going to do it against what statistically has been one of the premier defensive units in the country this season.
