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ACC QUESTION of the WEEK : What did we learn from the Duke-Virginia rematch?
Good questions generally require complex answers, and I have had to answer a lot of good questions over the past several months in both football and basketball.
This week’s ACC question is also a good question… but this time, the answer isn’t terribly complicated.
What did we learn from Duke’s 81-71 win in Charlottesville against Virginia, which significantly reduces the Cavaliers’ chances of winning the ACC regular-season championship and solidifies Duke’s position as a 1 seed?
Duke is better. Duke has better players. Duke has a higher ceiling than any other team in the country.
I could try to be clever or cute or coy or co-directional in my answer, but why beat around the bush? It’s that simple. Sometimes, the truth doesn’t have to be six-dimensional in nature.
This was like a Michigan-Ohio State football game. Michigan thought it had the plan and the personnel, but Ohio State had the bigger, better, stronger, faster dudes. Virginia was Michigan. (Interestingly enough, Virginia and Michigan are extremely similar in basketball, but that’s a side note and a digression from the matter at hand.) Duke was Ohio State. The dudes won.
The reality of the situation is that while Duke doesn’t need to shoot spectacularly well to win the NCAA Tournament, merely avoiding a bad 3-point-shooting night could be enough for the Blue Devils. If they hit merely 35 percent of threes, an opponent will have to play its very best game to beat Coach K’s crew. The margins for error will be very small, the paths to victory hard to map out.
So many different Duke players played really well on Saturday — and Zion Williamson was not one of the three best Duke players on the floor, either. As long as three or four guys are playing well for this team, and the 3-point shooting is not terrible, Duke will remain a hard puzzle to solve. Everyone can see that.
The Virginia side is more complicated, but let’s realize that had Mamadi Diakite not gotten injured with what appeared to be a concussion during this game, the Cavaliers might have gotten to more loose balls and might have displayed a little more staying power in this game. Virginia could lose at North Carolina on Monday night and still have no real reason to worry, provided that Diakite becomes fully healthy and this team has a clean bill of health going into the NCAA Tournament, which it lacked a year ago due to the De’Andre Hunter injury.
Virginia won’t be in Duke’s NCAA Tournament region, so the Hoos know that if they enter March 20 or 21 with a healthy roster, they still have a great shot at their goal: the Final Four.
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