CHAPEL HILL - North Carolina coach Matt Doherty has garnered a considerable amount of praise and even mention as a candidate for conference coach of the year, but yesterday the first-year coach played right into the hands of Mike Krzyzewski and No. 2 Duke.
Heading into the season-ending showdown between No. 2 Duke and No. 4 North Carolina at the Dean Smith Center, all the talk focused around how the Blue Devils would fare without center Carlos Boozer against the larger and more physical Tar Heels. But rather than play his one unquestioned trump card to his advantage, Doherty ignored his team's most dominant inside presences and instead relegated them to bench roles, enabling Duke to pull away midway through the second half for a 95-81 victory that snagged a share of the conference title away from Chapel Hill.
Forty-one seconds after an irate Doherty picked up a technical foul that put his team down by 13 points with less than 10 minutes remaining, the 31-year-old coach had a chance to let cooler heads prevail when sophomore Casey Sanders, the only active center for the Blue Devils, fouled out of the game. When Max Owens converted the three-point play, the Tar Heels only trailed by 10 and were once again in striking distance, despite the fact that both their starting center and power forward had been sitting on the bench. But Doherty did not reinsert either Brendan Haywood or Kris Lang when Sanders exited, and Krzyzewski was able to capitalize on Doherty's decision by keeping his five best players on the floor, with 220-pound Shane Battier tipping the scales as Duke's biggest player.
In the decisive final 12 minutes, Lang never came back onto the floor, and Haywood played only 2:36 during the stretch. The pair that helped the Tar Heels upset Duke in Cameron Indoor Stadium earlier in the season combined for only 15 minutes of second-half action as Haywood spent his Senior Night sitting idly on the bench while his teammates floundered.
"I don't know that I put the guys in the position they should have been in," Doherty said of his decision to keep his star players out of the game.
Although he received little credit heading into yesterday's contest, Sanders played a surprisingly significant role in minimizing the effectiveness of Haywood even when UNC's 7-foot center was in the game.
Sanders could have retreated less than a minute into the game, when Haywood electrified the capacity crowd at the Smith Center with a thundering two-handed jam and a powerful rejection on the first two possessions of the game. By the end of the game, however, those early highlight reels must have seemed like a distant memory.
Having been acclimated to the world of ACC basketball in what he called his "baptism by fire," Sanders regrouped and played the most aggressive 11 minutes of his career to help limit Haywood to only 12 points. Spelled by the assistance of forwards Matt Christensen and Reggie Love, Sanders went toe-to-toe against Haywood, a likely member of the All-ACC first team. Frequently rapped as too thin, Sanders held his own and even surprised Haywood by recording two rejections and stonewalling him on another play a couple feet away from the basket.
"A lot of weaker programs would hide behind the fact that their starting center went down," Battier said.
"Nothing was going to stop us today; size, whatever," Chris Duhon said.
Along with the 27 minutes that Sanders, Christensen and Love were able to contribute to Duke's cause, the Blue Devils utilized a trapping defense to limit UNC guards' vision into the post. UNC point guard Ronald Curry matched his seven points with seven turnovers, mainly because Battier's rotating help-defense on the perimeter enabled Duhon, Jason Williams and Nate James to confuse the Tar Heels' two-sport player.
"We knew if they could see inside, they'd see a 7-foot, 260-pound man against Reggie Love or somebody," Krzyzewski said.
But that was not always the case yesterday, as Haywood wasted away on the bench with the game on the line, giving Krzyzewski the option to only play Love, Sanders and Christensen a combined seven minutes in the second half.
Lang and Haywood both rationalized their lack of playing time by saying North Carolina did not feel it could erase Duke's advantage against the quicker Blue Devils. Lang, in fact, said he and Haywood were both told by Doherty that they would only get back in the game if Carolina was able to trim Duke's lead.
With players like Owens, Brian Morrison and Adam Boone playing in Lang's and Haywood's stead, though, there was never a chance of that happening.
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