Carlos Boozer, the most valuable player of the preseason NIT tournament, deplaned in Raleigh-Durham International Airport with his teammates at nearly 4 a.m. Saturday morning, only five hours after the sophomore center had finished pounding home 26 points to rally Duke over Temple in the tournament championship game.
A short night's rest and a few hours later, Boozer was right back at it, scoring at will against a smaller Army squad in a 91-48 laugher Saturday evening in Cameron Indoor Stadium. Boozer scored a game-high 22 points, all of which came in the first half, despite only playing 16 minutes, the least of Duke's regular rotation.
"I was really pleased with Carlos because he built on [Friday] night," Mike Krzyzewski said. "He should come out and dominate in a game like this and he did. He came ready to play tonight and it was obvious our guys were looking for him."
Three Blue Devils made impressive feeds to Boozer in the game's opening two minutes. On a night when it did not take long for the top-ranked Blue Devils (5-0) to pounce on the Black Knights (2-1), it took Boozer even less time to pocket his first seven points, as he scored on three of the team's first four possessions.
Boozer took a pass from Jason Williams to convert a layup on the opening possession, then hauled in a lob from Shane Battier a minute later. The next trip down the court, Nate James spotted a breaking Boozer, who took James' pass and ran right over Army's Chris Spatola for an old-fashioned three-point play that brought the house down.
"Carlos is such a big guy, it's kind of hard to miss him," said Williams, who dished out four of Duke's 18 assists. "He is always open. Why not just hit him and get an easy basket?"
The humbling loss for Black Knights coach Pat Harris, who played for Krzyzewski at Army in the late '70s, was at least as much the result of a ferocious defensive effort by the Blue Devils as it was the offensive production of Boozer. Without a single player taller than 6-foot-6 on his roster, Harris could not have expected his team to stop Boozer, a 6-9, 270-pound man-child from Juneau, Alaska.
However, Harris probably expected his team to shoot better than 30 percent for the game, a troubling statistic for Army that can be attributed nearly entirely to Duke's defensive effort.
"When you go into some of these games, you just hope it will be the worst game of their life," said Harris, who was accompanied on the bench by Army assistant and former Duke standout Robert Brickey.
After the Blue Devils went into halftime with a 67-26 advantage-marking the third-largest margin and scoring total in one half in program history-an opportunity for a second-half letdown was there. But it never happened.
Despite halftime adjustments, the Black Knights only managed 22 points in the second half as Duke held them to lower field-goal and three-point percentages. When the carnage was at an end, the Blue Devils had stolen the ball from Army 14 times, compared to only 13 total turnovers on their end of the floor.
"Our kids played really well tonight," Krzyzewski said. "They were diving for loose balls and they were really attentive on defense. The effort was there the whole night."
Lost in the 43-point victory was the breakout performance by freshman Andre Sweet, who played for much of the second half and saw 18 minutes of action. In that time, the freshman forward contributed a game-high three steals to go along with eight points and five rebounds, giving him the most productive outing of his young career.
"Coach wanted me to get out there hard and play the passing lanes," Sweet said. "It was just exciting to be out there helping the team."
Notes: Casey Sanders pulled his hamstring and details on the extent of his injury are still forthcoming.... Walk-on freshman Reggie Love, who missed the preseason while playing wide receiver for the football team, would have played Saturday, but he was ruled ineligible to compete for the basketball team because of unspecified complications with his paperwork....
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