CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — Duke could have spent the final five minutes running the Four Corners in Mike Krzyzewski’s final tribute to Dean Smith, a bitter rival who became a compatriot, the titan of the ACC that Krzyzewski spent years trying to dethrone only to, eventually, become.
Krzyzewski openly mused this week that it would be a shame if North Carolina ever slapped a corporate name on the Smith Center, which in today’s world of college athletics isn’t quite the leap of logic it once might have been.
Then again, Krzyzewski exited the floor for the last time Saturday, having all but stamped his own name on the building somewhere.
It’s difficult, in the 256th edition of anything, to do something — anything — new, but Duke managed to deliver a performance worthy of the moment, commemorating the coach’s final game in Chapel Hill with one of Duke’s biggest wins in the series, an 87-67 drubbing. At one point, Duke led by 28, approaching Duke’s record 29-point win in Chapel Hill in North Carolina’s disastrous 2002 season.
“Anytime you get a win of this magnitude in this rivalry, it means a lot for us,” Duke’s Wendell Moore Jr. said. “It was about more than Duke and Carolina. This was coach’s last time coming to North Carolina. We wanted to send him out with a win.”
It wasn’t quite Duke’s 104-69 win in Woollen Gym in 1964 — Vic Bubas was on the bench for that one — but it’s hard to imagine Krzyzewski exiting this particular patch of real estate more authoritatively than this, with his 50th win over North Carolina and second-biggest win in the building.
To sum it up: A.J. Griffin, goodness.
Leaky Black all but shut down Paolo Banchero for long stretches of the game but Griffin was too good, the best player on the court by far on his way to 27 points, whether launching from the outside or driving the lane for dunks.
As embarrassing as it was for North Carolina, which fell behind 31-8 early and cut the Duke lead to 11 before Griffin went on a personal 10-0 run to start the second half, it would have been worse without Brady Manek, whose outside shooting and 21 points was all that kept the Heels afloat at times.
Armando Bacot was in early foul trouble, Caleb Love was a mess and a crowd primed to party right from the first profane chant directed at Krzyzewski was left alternately stunned and angry before a trickle of fans toward the exits with five minutes to go became a flood.
“You could tell everyone on the team, including coach, wanted to do something special for him in his last game,” Griffin said. “Coming into this environment, the older guys knew what to expect, and the younger guys were hungry to win.”
It was all so jarring and unexpected, because even in the most unbalanced years the pendulum never seems to swing too far one way or the other. And even when it does, it swings back quickly. The gap between these teams has rarely been as large as it was Saturday.
“They’re better than us,” Krzyzewski said in 2009, with the Tar Heels seemingly ascendant, only for Duke to answer with a national title a year later. Hubert Davis had his version of that Saturday.
“There are times when you tip your hat to a certain player or team with regard to the way they played,” Davis said.
With a minute to go, Krzyzewski called timeout to send his grandson, Michael Savarino, into the game. Krzyzewski and Savarino and the other four Duke players on the court huddled and locked arms for a moment.
“It wasn’t that I wanted to get my grandson in my last game. He was the next guy to go in,” Krzyzewski said. “But the fact that we won at the end fairly convincingly was big.”
Then Savarino dribbled out the final seconds of his grandfather’s final win at the Smith Center, a family affair, beckoning to the crowd to bring on the boos, also a family affair.
But by the time Krzyzewski left the court and walked into the tunnel, the noise was gone. All that was left was one of the biggest wins in the history of this rivalry, a final statement on this most hostile of floors.
