Suddenly, for Duke, it is looking like 1995 again.
Can it be déjà blue for Duke Basketball? The team was nationally ranked with a good start to the season. Now it is in tatters after Mike Krzyzewski went out with back surgery. The Blue Devils lost at home to N.C. State, perhaps the worst-coached team in the ACC. The last time that happened was 1995, when the Wolfpack’s Les Robinson was perhaps the worst COACH in the ACC.
Duke is currently under interim Jeff Capel, stumbling to 2-3 start in Coach K’s most recent sabbatical and looking like a plumper version of Pete Gaudet, who took 15 losses as acting head coach in ’95 and was banished when K returned. Worse, Capel could be failing his real-time audition to permanently succeed Krzyzewski whenever that day comes.
Assuming with K’s blessing, Capel did not start stars Grayson Allen and Luke Kennard, two of the best players in the ACC, because he benched them to start the second half against Miami Saturday and it worked. It did not work this time, as Duke never got it all together after Allen and Kennard entered to game. Allen clanged 8 of his 9 three-pointers and Duke went scoreless for 2½ minutes, letting a late second-half lead slip away and only kept it close because Pack star Dennis Smith, Jr. missed 4 free throws in the last 50 seconds as Duke was hoisting up three-pointers and not making any.
The Blue Devils had a chance to tie the game before star freshman Jayson Tatum tried to go behind his back while speed-dribbling up the court. He got stripped and State got the win that could save Coach Mark Gottfried’s job after his team lost at Miami, lost at Carolina by 51 points and lost at BC, plus fell at home to Georgia Tech and Wake Forest, teams with the same 3-4 ACC record as Duke.
State won despite so much foul trouble that it put in Beejay Anya, who as confirmed by his own media profile returned to school 59 pounds over his listed weight last season, when he played in all 33 games and started 17. How this happened to Duke couldn’t happen, but it did – just the way the déjà Blue Devils started losing games 22 seasons ago when Coach K never did come back from a bad back.
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