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Game commentary

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Women's basketball gives Seminoles lesson in defense**

Hopefully the Florida State women's basketball team left behind a check for the Duke athletic department Wednesday night. Because instead of getting a basketball game from the Blue Devils, the Seminoles simply received a clinic on how to play defense.

"We did a great job," head coach Gail Goestenkors said. "I was shocked. I was shocked by the score. I'm shocked that we played as well as we did for as long as we did. Many times when we've had a big lead, we've lost that focus and turned the ball over and had some letdowns defensively, but today we did a great job. We played a great game of basketball. It was fun to coach--I kind of liked it."

There was little doubt from the start that this was going to be a blowout. Duke started off slowly, grabbing only 10 points in the first eight minutes of the game. However, Duke's defense set the tone as it took Florida State almost 17 minutes to put its first 10 points on the board. By that time the Blue Devil offense--jump started primarily off the nine steals and the 13 Florida State turnovers the defense caused in the first half--was rolling. Duke had five different players score 14 or more points as it coasted to a 92-30 drubbing of the Seminoles.

The victory set Duke records for the lowest amount of points ever scored by an Atlantic Coast Conference opponent and the largest margin of victory over an ACC team. While the Blue Devils get the immediate advantages of improving to 7-1 overall and earning their first ACC victory of the year, the most important thing they bring out of this game is the knowledge that for the first time this season, they achieved their goal of playing hard for an entire 40 minutes.

"Our defense was very, very good and I think that it disrupted their offense so much that they started standing and watching," Goestenkors said. "In their set offense they do a great job of running their offense and working and working and working for a great shot. Unfortunately for them we did a great job, and we got up in passing lanes and got some steals and that led to easy baskets for us."

Even when the Blue Devils weren't able to get to the ball in the passing lane, they caused plenty of trouble for whichever Florida State player was taking the shot. With some impressive help-side defense, Duke held the Seminoles to a 25.9 shooting percentage on the night, along with four blocked shots. This percentage may even have been misrepresentative of the game as FSU was able to tack on nine extra points in the last three and a half minutes of the game.

Even with the final push by Florida State, the final result was much more pleasing than last season's game against the Seminoles, when Duke squeezed by with a four-point win.

"As I've said, we're a much better team than we were last year," Goestenkors said. "I looked at the Florida State tape from last year and it was horrendous--our defense. We watched it as a team, we watched parts of that tape and the players were very disgusted with their play from last year. They understood that we have become a much better team defensively and great teams need to play great defense."

When Florida State head coach Marynell Meadors was asked how good this Duke team was, she eventually said that she thought the Blue Devils could challenge Virginia for the ACC title. This could be true, but it depends on whether or not Duke continues to play this type of defense throughout the year. Florida State is on nobody's top-25 list, but it lost to No. 18 Florida by 18 points last week. That margin is quite a bit different than 62 points. It's obvious that Duke has the offensive weapons to win quite a few games, the question is whether or not it has the defense to put it in that position. But if Wednesday night was indicative of the rest of the season, the Blue Devils will find themselves in that position quite often.