Brooklyn setting added more to Duke vs. North Carolina rivalry

A classic Tobacco Road showdown was the ACC Tournament matchup the borough of Brooklyn and Barclays Center deserved

There isn’t much that remains of Brooklyn’s Flatbush Avenue from a decade ago. The days of going to the Silver Spoon Diner, which every kid in the borough went for western omelets following a cavity filling at the Williamsburg Saving Bank Tower, are long gone, as are hitting up Triangle Sports on a spring weekend to pick up a box of little league uniforms. And it isn’t just that the avenue has changed — Brooklyn has grown up, and the neighborhoods that constitute its 2.6 million resident can attest that the borough has become NYC’s cultural and economic hub.

Barclays Center is a testament to that explosion. Brooklyn has never had any sort of athletic complex that resembles the hulking, rust-colored structure that looms over its ‘skyline’. The arena, which cost an astounding $1 billion to build, is the epitome of big business, which is why the ACC tournament — the best postseason tournament for the nation’s best conference — would essentially punt the Atlantic 10 to Pittsburgh and lay claim to Barclays for the past week.

“Why do you think the Big Ten is coming into New York?” asked Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim after his team lost its first round game to Miami on Tuesday. “It’s business, good business sense. They all say it’s a business. Well, then, let’s start acting like it’s a business.”

The ACC can rest on the laurels of its future draft picks and Hall-of-Fame head coaches, but optics matter. Fortunately for the ACC, its two most storied teams — Duke and North Carolina — advanced to the tournament semifinals and met on Friday night for just the fourth time outside of Tobacco Road. That is a big business matchup; hours before the game’s 7 p.m. ET tipoff, more than a dozen scalpers loitered around Barclays’ subway exit, both buying and selling tickets that had ballooned in price, according to TicketIQ (an event ticket aggregator), to an average of $514 (up from $254 for ACC tournaments not held in Brooklyn).

A sellout crowd packed Barclays to witness this season’s third meeting of college basketball’s most storied rivalry. It certainly didn’t underwhelm. The Tar Heels led 49-42 at halftime, and had hit Duke with what coach Mike Krzyzewski called “almost a third round knockout,” but thanks to a second-half offensive tsunami — the Blue Devils scores 1.42 PPP over the final twenty minute –Duke finished with a 93-83 win.

“It was a big time game for a while, and then it got so it was not a big time game,” said UNC coach Roy Williams at the post-game podium, a resigned weariness to his voice as he contemplated whether to unleash his backwoods Carolina anger and slam the foul disparity between the two teams (Duke’s free throw attempts rate was 74 percent, while UNC’s was 23 percent). “It’s my job to make sure that we’re more disciplined than we were,” he simply said.

This is not how he game-planned for the semifinal, he thought. North Carolina’s strategy was elegant in its simplicity — shock and awe via incessant post touches and attempts at the rim. And so the Tar Heels connected on ten field goals in the paint during the first half (just six attempts were from 15’ or beyond), the majority converted by Kennedy Meeks, UNC’s senior hulking big who often doubles as the team’s key. “[We try] to milk as much time out of him as we can,” said Williams.

The game would have turned into a rout if it weren’t for Grayson Allen, whose four 3-point field goals — each unfurled as the decidedly non-partisan crowd rained boos on him as soon as he touched the ball — kept the lead from ballooning to double-digits by halftime. During much of this season, Jayson Tatum, Duke’s own lottery pick, would have risen to the moment, but the freshman played for stretches with a hesitant tunnel vision (even though he finished with 24 points).

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Rather, Tatum’s fellow newcomers filled the gap. Frank Jackson scored five points within a two minute span, including a three in the left corner with nine minutes remaining to give Duke its first lead of the game. And then Harry Giles, a center who was expected to only stay on campus for one season but whose progress has been hamstrung by injury, played the most impactful 15 minutes of his season, blocking a UNC shot and then skying for a halfcourt alley-oop pass from Jackson that pushed Duke’s lead to five points.

During the post-game press conference, Krzyzewski admitted he has been cajoling Giles for weeks to bring the same enthusiasm to his play that he had before his two ACL tears: “Just be enthusiastic and see what happens, and I think he’s done that. Instead of being methodical and trying to think about everything, he’s been more athletic. It’s great.”

Williams conceded, “[Duke shot] 59 percent [in the second half] because they got better movement, better screens, better shots than we did.”

Much will be made in the preceding week about Joel Berry’s fourth foul, and Williams’ peculiar decision to bench him for ten minutes, which constituted the entirety of Duke’s 29-14 run, but the angle worth examining is how the Blue Devils were able to essentially lean on its role players to carry the squad until its stars found their footing. Williams was succinct in his assessment, saying, “Our whole defense was bad. We’d run off a guy and leave a wide open three-point shooter in the corner a couple of times.”

It’s a bit more nuanced. Though Luke Kennard dropped 20 points, UNC’s length was a hindrance, and while Duke tried several varieties of Horns sets and screens to free its highly-efficient guard, it wasn’t until Jackson and Allen began to penetrate off the dribble and connect from deep that Kennard, and Duke as a whole, began to hum.

During one of the timeouts, Desiigner’s Panda blared out of Barclays’ speakers. Born and raised in Bed-Stuy, Desiigner represents a new breed of New York rapper, a sui generis blend of Brooklyn bravado and Atlanta flow. Rap is never stagnant; it undulates, just like a conference trying to bridge the gap between small-roots nostalgia and big money. UNC versus Duke would have been a perfectly fine semifinal if held in Greensboro, NC or Washington DC, but it is only in Brooklyn that a game can morph and take on a whole different meaning.

As for Duke, Krzyzewski was coy, but even he knows uprooting the tournament to Brooklyn was the best possible outcome for his squad: “We’ve gotten better here. That’s the main thing. We’ve gotten to know each other better … we’ve got a chance if we can keep winning with a chance to play against the best in the conference. It’s been the best.”