This tourney no Duke Invitational
By David Droschak
Associated Press
DURHAM, N.C. -- The can't-miss team of last season enters
this year's NCAA tournament a quiet No. 1.
|  | | Shane Battier says the Blue Devils are much more relaxed this year. |
Duke had one loss entering last year's field of 64. It had won
all its Atlantic Coast Conference games by an average of 24.3
points and was ranked in the nation's top two for 16 weeks.
Last year's NCAA runner-up is 27-4 this time. But it has won
four overtime games with three freshmen in its seven-player
rotation and isn't the only team mentioned as a pick in the East
Region, let alone in what many coaches are calling a wide-open
tourney.
The Blue Devils, the No. 1 seed in the East, open play Friday
night against 16th-seeded Lamar an hour from campus in
Winston-Salem.
"It's really weird," junior Shane Battier said Monday. "I've
never seen a tournament in recent history where people placed less
confidence in the No. 1 team at the end of the season than this
year.
"But that's all right. We can't control that. We are relaxed,
we are more confident now. We are not looking at this tournament as
something that could ruin our season."
That wasn't the case last year. The Blue Devils were stunned in
the title game most expected them to win, losing to Connecticut
77-74.
"It was tough. Even last year when if we had a 15-point win
people said we struggled," Battier said of the 1998-99 tournament.
"It was ridiculous."
Chris Carrawell says the Blue Devils are more relaxed this
season and realize several teams in their region could trip them
up.
"I like that, we're not picked. It's not the Duke
Invitational," said Carrawell, the lone senior on Duke. "All the
press we got last year was too much. It caught up to us.
"Other teams were reading that stuff and they were saying,
'When we play these guys I'm going to get them. I hate these guys.'
I would have hated us, too. I guess we were America's team last
year, you either hated us or you loved us. At the end you hated
us."
If the Blue Devils get by heavy underdog Lamar, they will face
the winner of the Kansas-DePaul game. The Blue Demons took Duke to
overtime Dec. 4 at Cameron Indoor Stadium before losing 84-83. And
a possible third-round matchup could be against Illinois, a team
Duke beat by three in late November.
"We've got to play. There is no cakewalk," said Carrawell, one
of five Duke starters averaging double figures. "When I looked at
the bracket I couldn't believe it. There are a few teams in there
that can beat us.
"I thought the committee was kind of mean to us. That's the
thing about going to Duke, you get all this success but people try
to stick it to you, too. They stuck it to us."
Duke has at least one trump card -- coach Mike Krzyzewski. His
48-13 record in the NCAA tournament is the highest among active
coaches, and his win total is second only to Dean Smith's 65.
"If we advance past Lamar, DePaul had us beat in our own gym
and Kansas has played at the highest level," Krzyzewski said. "It
is kind of an amazing second-round game." |
