NCAA Basketball

No Virginian Letdown for the Blue Devils

Balance. One team had it, the other didn’t and in the end, that was the deciding factor. On paper, you probably couldn’t tell. Duke had five players score double figures, while Virginia had four, but two Cavaliers took 31 of the teams 58 shots.

With this one in the bag, all the attention turns to Duke/North Carolina fighting it out for the ACC Regular season crown (and maybe the #1 seed). Before we move on though, let’s take a quick look at tonight’s game.

QUICK HITS

We already talked about balance in the scoring department, but two more things. First, not only did they score, they shot well. Six players shot 50% or better. Second, ten players got on the court tonight, all of them got playing time in the first half. I keep worrying Coach K will shorten the bench, but he didn’t tonight. Zoubek especially got solid minutes in the first half.

Singler’s mini-slump had me worried coming into the game (1-10 from behind the stripe). Tonight he didn’t really break that slump. He went 8-21 from the floor (2-9 from three). However, it was nice to see coach continue to give him the green light. The kid needs to break this slump and the only way out is being aggressive. One way he could improve this coming weekend is to get back to driving to the lane. He either shot a long three (7 of his 12 misses) or by living under the rim and scoring by either receiving a solid pass or grabbing an offensive rebound. Against Hansbrough, he’s going to have to take advantage of his quickness and force Tyler to cover him away from the basket.

It looks like Coach K has decided that Nolan Smith will only get about 10-15 minutes per game now. He’s only broken 20 minutes once in the last month (and that was in an ass-kicking). In fact, Scheyer was running the point for a little while tonight. This has been a bit of a disappointment, since I thought he was doing better. However, he is a point and he needs to play like one to be on the floor. Back in January he had four straight games of four assists. Since then he’s played in 13 games. Take away his five-assist game against St. Johns and Smith has only produced a total of three assists.

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