INTERESTING STUFF

2000-01

• RULES CHANGES

• NOTES

• SPORTING NEWS ARTICLE

RULES CHANGES

NOTES

SPORTING NEWS ARTICLE ABOUT SEASON

The bus to the national championship game would be leaving in a few minutes, and the Duke players were hustling themselves together on the way to the night of their lives. Sophomore center Casey Sanders closed the door to room 573 at the Radisson South in Bloomington, Minn. As it slammed, he was struck by a moment of clairvoyance.

"You're going to have a great game," Sanders said to his roommate.

Mike Dunleavy did not take him seriously. He quickly thought about his father, the Portland Trail Blazers coach of the same name, who would be watching from the stands at the Metrodome, 25 rows behind the Blue Devils bench. He made a joke. "Yeah, I'll need it," he said, "because my dad's going to have to draft me."

A big night for Michael Dunleavy? In the NCAA Tournament championship game against Arizona? Who would have conceived such a thing? Yes, of course. Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski. He figured on such a night when deciding to recruit Dunleavy more fervently than California shooting guard Casey Jacobsen, who was in the same class and ended up at Stanford. He cultivated it as he encouraged Dunleavy to continue firing jump shots with confidence through a shooting slump that struck at the worst possible moment and reached 3 1/2 games by halftime against Arizona.

In that stretch, dating to a Sweet 16 victory over UCLA, Dunleavy missed all but two of the 14 3-point shots he attempted. In a 44-second span early in the second half of the Arizona game, he wiped away all that futility and delivered Krzyzewski his third national title.

Shooters do not stop shooting at Duke. The Blue Devils play with a freedom granted to few other elite college teams. Krzyzewski coaches his players to trust their talent as much as he does.

The day before last Monday's title game, Dunleavy spoke with assistant Chris Collins about staying aggressive on offense despite his struggles. When his moment came, Dunleavy hit three consecutive shots from long range, the 9 points giving Duke a 10-point lead.

After the third of those shots landed, Arizona called a timeout, and Krzyzewski thought to substitute for him with senior Nate James, a defensive demon. "I looked at him and shook my head," Dunleavy said, "I said, 'No, not now.' And he put me back in."

Not all the Duke huddles at the Final Four went so smoothly. Down 17 points to Maryland in the first half of the national semifinal, the Blue Devils were the image of frustration.

During an official timeout with 7:55 left in the half, forward Shane Battier took a quick sip from a cup, then slammed it to the floor. There was a shower of water droplets, and of words he definitely did not learn in religion class. A few Blue Devils followed his lead. Krzyzewski delivered a few choice words. Momentarily, the huddle was filled with anger, frustration and self-flagellation.

Krzyzewski was furious with the Devils' defensive effort, or lack of it, and with their hopeless rebounding. They weren't battling. They were entirely out of character.

"Coach kind of got on us," Dunleavy says, "but we all just knew how bad we were playing. We were really upset with ourselves. Coach sensed he didn't need to get on us that bad."

This was not the prettiest picture of Duke basketball, but it's one that needed to be seen. The Blue Devils occasionally curse, bicker and struggle with the game or the opposition. They are not all that different from the other 318 Division I teams. Just better.

The Terps' aggression surprised and unsettled the Devils. "Maryland knocked us back," Krzyzewski says. The Devils made just seven of their first 25 shots from the field, this from a team that shot 48 percent for the season.

This sort of circumstance might convince the typical coach to tighten his control. Mounting a comeback from that sort of deficit, any tough shot appears terminal, any forced shot seems fatal. Precise execution is the customary relief -- with the best players taking high-quality shots. Krzyzewski followed a less conventional approach. He told his players to "just play."

Sophomore point guard Jason Williams later admitted he had been walking up the ball and calling sets as a crutch to deal with Maryland's oppressive defense. During that timeout, Krzyzewski crouched before his seated players and told them, "All right, settle down. We just had an out-of-body experience, and it can't get any worse than that. So let's bear down here and start playing the way we played all year." The heart of his presentation was an order that the Blue Devils cease calling set plays and stick to their free-flowing motion offense.

This was the most important moment of Duke's season. There were plenty of crucial points in the championship game, but that game would have gone on without the Blue Devils had Krzyzewski not assured them their talent and intelligence could rescue them in the time remaining against Maryland. The situation got worse after they left that huddle, with a fast-break layup from Terps forward Byron Mouton and a 3-pointer by point guard Steve Blake expanding the Devils' deficit to 22 points. But it gradually got better.

The freedom intrinsic to the Duke attack both facilitated and delayed the recovery. As Battier, Williams and freshman guard Chris Duhon excelled, Dunleavy and James misfired open shots. But the system -- or lack of -- was working.

"The first half we didn't play as smooth as we had hoped," Battier says. "We were looking to run plays to bail us out. But at that point, the best thing for us was just to play basketball and play our motion offense and just play off each other. That's why we've won so many games this year: our instincts and our ability to play off each other."

A coach cannot operate this way without gifted, unselfish, clever players -- or a strong sense of security. Krzyzewski had to trust that he taught his players well and believe any backlash would be of little consequence if his approach failed.

Not that Krzyzewski is exempt from criticism. Even two years later, his decision to employ shooting guard Trajan Langdon to create a play on the final possession of Duke's championship-game loss to Connecticut is widely perceived as an error in judgment. He has managed to win 64 of his 73 games since.

Nine Final Four appearances in 16 seasons can generate an extraordinary amount of self-confidence for a coach, but it also could be the other way around. It could be the self-confidence leading to the Final Four trips.

"I've always allowed my really good players to have -- they don't have to be perfect," Krzyzewski says. "In other words, Jason can take some bad shots. If he takes 20 shots in a game, a few of them are going to be so-called 'bad shots.' But he can hit bad shots. What I don't want to do is make him conservative. So that when the time comes for these other shots, he's thinking, 'If I miss those shots . . . '"

Williams resurrected himself from a 1-of-9 shooting start and nailed a 22-footer from the right wing that gave Duke its first lead over Maryland. Krzyzewski calls it, "one of the great moments of our season, in that Jason showed me that he has learned that in what people think is the toughest game, he is not shooting well and he still had the courage not only to take the shot but to hit it.

"I think you win with your best guys having the freedom to take those shots."

In the NCAA championship game, sometimes the lesser players need to make those shots, or else how would we remember Pete Trgovich (UCLA, '75), Harold Jensen (Villanova '85) and Billy McCaffrey (Duke '91)?

This title game is not likely to be Dunleavy's lasting legacy to the game. He has enormous potential and will, a couple years from now, be employed in the league his father has called home for more than two decades as a player and coach. If Williams, his classmate, decides to enter the NBA draft after this season or next, Dunleavy will join Duhon to form a restyled Battier-Williams combo.

Dunleavy's talent, though, did not prevent him from struggling as the championship game approached. He was shooting too quickly, off balance, with his feet not directly beneath him. This gave most of his jumpers a rightward lean that prevented them from finding their target.

"At first, we were going to make him beat us," Arizona guard Gilbert Arenas says. "But we decided not to go with that and just play him straight up. He just started making them. I knew deep down inside he was a great shooter, but for some reason he didn't have a great tournament."

Though the game has become noticeably perimeter-oriented, and these teams passionately embraced that trend through successful seasons, this final was for so long a power game. While Duke and Arizona combined to shoot 4-of-22 from 3-point range in the first half, the big men were responsible for more than half the points generated.

Then Dunleavy happened. He fired as confidently as he did when he went 2-for-8 in the semifinal and missed several jumpers that hit the pause button on the Duke comeback against Maryland. This is how Krzyzewski's approach empowers his players. There were no complaints regarding Dunleavy's errant jumpers in the Maryland game, nor any regarding his 1-of-6 first half against Arizona. So when he was open on the left wing with 17:01 left and Duhon found him after penetrating the lane, Dunleavy carefully launched a 3-point jumper that doubled the Devils' lead to 6.

He was in the same spot 24 seconds later, when Battier found him after a quick ball reversal. Dunleavy made that 3-pointer and one more from the same region when Williams found him as the ball swung from the right to the left. That trio of long-distance baskets, transacted in 44 seconds, gave Duke its first double-digit lead.

"I'm sure the rest of the guys were thinking, 'It's about time,'" Dunleavy says. "I was really feeling it. It was good timing, too, to do it at the national championship game."

Battier was irrepressible in the final five minutes, when he could feel the championship in his hands after four years of waiting. With Duke's lead cut to 73-70 -- largely because of Wildcats forward Richard Jefferson's stunning, 15-point second half -- Battier surged through the lane from the left side to follow a Dunleavy miss with a tip-in. With the lead at 3 again after another Jefferson bucket, Battier dashed along the left baseline, fielded a snap-pass from Williams and threw down a wild, one-handed dunk to make it a two-possession game again.

Jefferson ran out of answers then. His 3-pointer from the left corner fell short, and Duke was 2:12 from an 82-72 victory and its first title of the new millennium. Whether or not Williams returns for another season -- Krzyzewski insists Williams will be back -- this does not figure to be the last.

With Williams, Duhon, Dunleavy and center Carlos Boozer flush with remaining eligibility, Duke will continue recruiting outstanding players, and Krzyzewski will present them the freedom to employ their talents, to make mistakes without then being restricted from making game-breaking plays.

It is a most uncommon approach that produces the sort of results that led Krzyzewski to tightly embrace Dunleavy after the final buzzer. Krzyzewski whispered into Dunleavy's ear. "You're a national champion," he said. "Congratulations."

"Thank you, thank you," Dunleavy answered. "Thanks for recruiting me and bringing me to Duke."