With 9:30 remaining in the men's basketball team's 82-60 victory over Xavier of Ohio, senior All-American Grant Hill served notice to the Musketeers exactly who was paying the rent on Cameron Indoor Stadium Saturday night.
Xavier's Tyrice Walker was headed for an easy dunk that would have cut Duke's lead to seven points. The 6-8 Hill came streaking down the left side, got between Walker and the basket, and then stuffed him. As Hill was falling to the floor, he basically explained to Walker that such behavior would be unacceptable in his "house."
"I can't say those words to the press," Hill said. "[Walker] and I were talking. Gentry and I were going at it bad, pretty tough. I just wanted to let [Xavier] know that I wasn't going to back down from them. I'm here to play. I was talking trash. They were talking trash. In a way, it was kind of like a pick-up game."
Hill had his best game of the young season, scoring 21 points, grabbing seven rebounds and handing out a career-high nine assists.
Duke led by 10 points, 59-49, after Hill canned a long baseline jumper with 9:01 left in the contest. Jeff Massey then scored five points on a three-pointer and a dunk to draw the Musketeers to within five points of the Blue Devils, 59-54.
But for the next six minutes, the game was all Duke. The nation's sixth-ranked team went on a 15-0 run, exploding to a 74-54 lead. During that stretch, Duke got scoring from four different players, including six points by senior Antonio Lang and five by freshman Jeff Capel.
"We just said, `We're going to put them away now,"' Hill said. "That's what we have to do against good teams. We did. We took good shots. We got every ball. I think Cherokee [Parks] got 40 or 50 rebounds. It just made our job a little bit easier.
"There was a lot of enthusiasm out there. It looked like the Duke team that I'm accustomed to playing on, and I think people are accustomed to seeing. We need to have that type of effort every game."
The Musketeers kept the game close until the last eight minutes of the game. Head coach Pete Gillen's team managed to apply enough pressure defensively to force Duke into several turnovers.
"We didn't capitalize," Gillen said. "We caused 27 turnovers. We were working defensively. We just couldn't execute offensively. We got a little tired. They turned up the juice defensively. We fought them. Thirty-two minutes, as poorly as we played, we're in the game. [But] it's a 40 minute game. We just ran out of gas and let it slip away."
Duke head coach Mike Krzyzewski said that he was pleased with the atmosphere in Cameron created by the student body. The win over Xavier was Duke's 83rd consecutive win over a non-conference opponent on its home floor, dating back to 1983.
"It was a great Cameron night," Krzyzewski said. "Our kids responded with a sensational effort. Enthusiasm and hard work and desire, we were terrific tonight. We got better tonight. I thought our team was going to play real hard tonight.
"We brought them along a little bit different with the two days of preparation. We just tried to be very enthusiastic. My feeling was that we didn't really go out and attack the last couple of games."
The Blue Devils gave the Musketeers several different looks on offense and defense, experimenting with some zone defenses to keep Xavier off-balance.
"Coach K mixed up the zone and the man-to-man," Hill said. "I doubled down a lot on Brian Grant. It kind of confused them. We made it difficult for them to execute their offense, and that's something that we hadn't been doing in the last couple of games. We just played good defense. We finished the defensive plays by getting rebounds."
Junior center Cherokee Parks was usually the man pulling down those rebounds. Parks' 20 boards were a big reason for Duke's lopsided 59-26 advantage in that statistical category. While Parks was definitely asserting himself on the glass, he said that his success was the result of strong play for Duke at the guard and swing positions.
"Collectively, our team played really well," Parks said. "Our perimeter [players] did a great job of attacking the bucket. It just opened up a lot of things. [Xavier] is a very big team. They're very quick. For us to come out and play the way we did, especially with our past two performances, was something we really needed to do."
According to the players and Krzyzewski, the team had been practicing well, but before Saturday, it had experienced some problems translating good practices into good performances.
"We had been practicing really well the whole season," Parks said. "We just haven't been able to come out and do the things that we've been doing in practice. The past couple of days [in practice] we went really hard, a lot of five-on-five stuff, and just concentrated really on playing together."
Lang, who was second on the team in scoring with 15 points, said that he thought that the key to Duke's win was its ability to play team defense.
"We played well as a unit," Lang said. "We hadn't done that in the first two games. We had a lot of opportunities. We got loose balls tonight. We got a lot of rebounds and a lot of stuff we just haven't been getting. I think that's because we concentrated on going out there and playing defense."
Hill said that as a senior and a team co-captain he took a lot of the blame for the Blue Devils' difficulties in their first two games of the season against Northeastern and The Citadel. He said that his approach to Saturday's game with Xavier, a team that has been receiving votes to be nationally ranked, was very different.
"It's just a mental approach to the game," Hill said. "I was kind of uptight [before tonight]. I've been putting too much pressure on myself this year. I just relaxed and went out there and had fun. I was very stressed [last week]. I wasn't sleeping. I wasn't eating. I was putting too much pressure on me."
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