From 1999 through 2013 Duke had four freshmen leave for the NBA, the so-called One and Done. All of Corey Maggette, Luol Deng, Kyrie Irving and Austin had/are having solid NBA careers, with Deng and Irving being multiple all-stars.
From 2014 to the present Duke has had 19. The trend has accelerated with 14 OADs over the last five seasons, with the hopefully unlikely possibility that someone else could enter that list this spring.
For the record, whenever Roy Williams was asked about OADs at North Carolina his response was something along the line of “we recruited these guys, we just didn’t get them.” And he did have Marvin Williams, Brandan Wright, Tony Bradley, Nassir Little, Coby White and Cole Anthony leave after one year.
So, Williams wasn’t immune.
Then again six in 18 seasons pales besides Duke’s annual tsunami.
Which suggests that we can add a difference in recruiting philosophy to the earlier differences we’ve discussed between Krzyzewski and Williams, rebounding, 3-point shooting, depth and so forth.
But from a non-partisan, historical perspective, this philosophical difference doesn’t seem to have moved the needle very much in either direction. Sure Duke won the 2015 NCAA title starting three freshmen, one sophomore and a senior,. But North Carolina captured the 2017 NCAA title starting two seniors and three juniors. Duke took freshman-dominated teams to within a silly centimeter of the Final Four in 2018 and 2019 but a veteran North Carolina team lost to Villanova at the buzzer in the 2016.
That’s the macro view. The micro view is just as murky.
We left off with Duke and Carolina splitting two games in 2016, each winning on the road.
The next two seasons the rivalry approached what should have been normalcy but actually was a long way from normal.
Let me explain. We all know that Cameron Indoor Stadium is a brutally difficult place for a visiting team. Florida State’s Sam Cassell famously characterized the denizens of the Dean E. Smith Center as a “wine and cheese” crowd but no one ever said that about that when Duke was the visiting team.
In other words, it makes sense that we should have had lots of seasons when Duke and North Carolina split the regular season, each team winning at home.
That is very much not the case. In fact, in Mike Krzyzewski’s 41 years at the helm, this has only happened 12 times, less than a third of the time. For the record, it happened against Dean Smith in 1981, 1986, 1992, 1993 and 1997. It happened in 1998 against Bill Guthridge and in 2003 against Matt Doherty. It happened against Roy Williams in 2005, 2011, 2014, 2017 and 2018.
Why? Darned if I know. Perhaps the pressure of Senior Day or maybe the two programs are just so closely matched that home court doesn’t mean all that much.
As compelling as these four games in 2017 and 2018 seemed at the time, none of them really entered the canon of truly great Duke-Carolina games, admittedly a high bar.
Grayson Allen (25 points), Luke Kennard (20) and Jayson Tatum (19) led Duke to an 86-78 win in Cameron in the February 2017 match best remembered for Tatum’s highlight-reel dunk over Kennedy Meeks.
A few weeks later the Tar Heels took down Duke 90-83 at home. Kennard and UNC’s Joel Berry each scored 28 points. But Isaiah Hicks’ 21 points and 9 rebounds turned out to be the key.
Carolina won the 2018 match in Chapel Hill 82-78. Duke led 49-45 at the half but could only muster 29 points after intermission. Gary Trent had 16 points, Marvin Bagley 15 points and 16 rebounds for Duke, while Berry paced the Tar Heels with 21 points.
The rematch was Grayson Allen’s Senior Day, a lone senior starting alongside four freshmen.
Duke trailed 35-25 at the half but dominated the second half, pretty much the opposite of the first meeting. Allen had a decent finale, with 15 points. But Bagley keyed the comeback, scoring 18 of his 21 points after intermission. He added 15 rebounds.
Duke still trailed as late as 55-54, with 7:31. Allen hit a 3, Theo Pinson answered with a 2 and it was tied at 60, with 6:34 left.
At that point Duke found another gear, one that the visitors could not match. Trevon Duval hit a short jumper, Gary Trent hit a 3, Bagley dunked off a Duval assist and Wendell Carter hit a 3.
That made it 70-62 and Carolina never got closer than six.
The final was 74-64.
The real fireworks in the 2017 and 2018 seasons took place in the ACC Tournament. Duke and Carolina meeting in the tournament used to be a regular thing. They once met four times in five years, all in the championship game. Duke won in 1988 and 1992, North Carolina in 1989 and 1991. North Carolina beat Duke in the finals in 1998 and Duke returned the favor in 1999. Duke defeated North Carolina in 2001, 2002 and 2003. But that 2011 Duke win in the title game was the only time Krzyzewski and Williams squared off in the tournament durimng Williams’ first 13 seasons back in Chapel Hill.
An injury-plagued Duke team finished fifth in the 2017 ACC regular-season, meaning they would have to win four times to capture the title. No ACC team had ever accomplished that.
Duke opened with wins over Clemson and Louisville, while the top-seeded Tar Heels defeated Miami.
Duke freshman Jayson Tatum had missed the first eight games of the season with a foot injury and took some time to round into form. He was voted third-team All-ACC and lost the freshman of the year award to NC State’s Dennis Smith. But by March the future NBA all-star had emerged as perhaps the ACC’s best player.
North Carolina dominated inside and led the entire first half, 46-33 at one point. Tatum got an old-fashioned three-point play to make it 48-42 and the teams went into the locker room at 49-42.
Duke’s deficit stayed in the 7-to-13-point range until a 9-0 Duke run tied the game at 63.
Allen had five of those nine points.
Duke took the lead for good on a Frank Jackson layup, that made it 72-70, with 6:16 left. Kennard hit a 3. Harry Giles and Tatum extended the lead with dunks and Duke closed out the 93-83 win from the foul line.
Tatum led everyone with 24 points, while adding seven rebounds. Kennard scored 20 points, Jackson 15. Duke overcame a 43-32 rebounding deficit by shooting 50 percent from the field and 33-for-37 (89 percent) from the line.
Duke had enough left to defeat Notre Dame 75-69 for the championship. Tatum led Duke with 19 points and eight rebounds but Kennard was named the tournament’s outstanding player.
This was the first of two ACC Tournaments held in Brooklyn’s Barclay Center.
The second was in 2018. Duke entered that tournament as the second seed. North Carolina was seeded sixth. Duke advanced to the semifinals with a win over Notre Dame, while Carolina defeated Syracuse and Miami to set up another rubber match.
This time it would be the Tar Heels who pulled off the upset. North Carolina placed five scorers in double figures and led practically the entire game. Duke used a late 13-0 run to cut the deficit to three but came up empty on consecutive possessions and fell 74-69.
Trent led Duke with 20 points. Bagley had 19 points and 13 rebounds.
Virginia defeated North Carolina for the championship.
The following season saw the most epic anti-climax in Duke-Carolina history when freshman phenom Zion Williamson injured his left knee moments after the tipoff in Cameron. Duke lost that game 88-72 and the Zion-less rematch in Chapel Hill, 79-70, the latter loss closer than the final score suggests.
Williamson was back a week later in Charlotte for the tournament and made a spectacular return against Syracuse, converting all 13 of his field goal attempts in a 29-point, 14-rebound masterpiece. Duke won 84-72.
That brought on a semifinal match against North Carolina, one in which Williamson showed the Tar Heels what they had been missing and one in which Duke needed every one of Williamson’s 31 points and 11 rebounds.
Duke found itself down 29-17 in the first half but clawed back to a 44-44 tie at the half, Williamson hitting a 3 to end the scoring.
The second-half was see-saw all the way.
Carolina led 71-67, when Williamson converted a three-point play, with 2:30 left.
The Tar Heels still led 73-72, when Williamson converted his own miss to give Duke a 74-73 lead, with 31 seconds left. Duke got two stops, sandwiched around two missed foul shots by R.J. Barrett and held on for the win.
Duke defeated Florida State the next night for the title.
Three of the four games in 2020 and 2021 can be dismissed pretty quickly. Duke defeated North Carolina 89-76 In 2020 to complete the sweep but lost both games in 2021.
But that fourth game was a doozy.
The double-buzzer-beater game in 2020 still lingers strong in the memory, at least for Duke fans. Duke went into Chapel Hill 19-3, ranked seventh In the AP poll. The slumping Tar Heels were 10-12 and apparently overmatched.
But for once all the cliches about great rivals meeting and throwing away record books actually were valid. North Carolina led 44-35 at the half and led by 13 points with just over four minutes left. The Tar Heels aided the Duke comeback with some missed foul shots but their turnovers were forced. Tre Jones scored nine points in the final 50 seconds, the last two when he rebounded his intentionally missed foul shot and tied the game at 84 with a 17-foot jumper at the buzzer.
On a rivalry with legendary buzzer-beaters by galore, this might have been the best.
Or it might not have even been the best of the game.
After that almost surreal ending to regulation, Duke fell behind by five with less than 30 seconds left in overtime and had to do it all over again.
Jones made a layup and it was 96-93, with 16 seconds left.
He also drew a foul. This time his missed foul shot was not on purpose. But Wendell Moore converted the offensive rebound and it was 96-95.
Duke forced a turnover on the inbounds and Jones drew another foul. He hit the first, missed the second but Moore tipped the rebound out to Jordan Goldwire, who got it to Jones, who missed but Moore got the stick-back at the buzzer, at such an awkward angle he wasn’t sure he had made the shot until his delirious teammates mobbed him.
Whew. You cannot make this stuff up.
Lost in the myriad subplots is the fact that a Duke team that had so often lost to Carolina on the boards pulled this one out with a series of huge offensive rebounds, including three in the final 16 seconds of overtime.
If only a masterpiece like this had ended the Krzyzewski-Williams rivalry. Instead it ended with a desultory Duke team getting run out of the Smith Center in a 91-73 loss.
But end it did, with Williams’ surprise retirement last month.
And what a rivalry it was.
Krzyzewski and Williams squared off 44 times. Krzyzewski won three-of-four when Williams was at Kansas and was 21-19 when Williams was at Carolina, giving Krzyzewski a 24-20 edge. Krzyzewski was 11-8 in Cameron, including that 1989 game against Kansas. He was 8-10 in the Smith Center. Krzyzewski won three of four matchups in the ACC Tournament and all three games when the rivals went into overtime. They played 16 games decided by five or fewer points, splitting a pair when Williams was at Kansas, with Krzyzewski going 9-5 against Williams when he was at North Carolina. Krzyzewski’s longest winning streak was four games, Williams’ three games.
And no, they never did get to play that epic NCAA Tournament Duke-Carolina death match.
Still waiting for that one.
But without question Mike Krzyzewski and Roy Williams maintained and at times elevated what most consider to be college basketball’s greatest rivalry.