ATLANTA -- Playing two games in three days is never easy, but the men's basketball team made it look that way.
Less than 48 hours after beating Florida State by 31 in Cameron Indoor Stadium, Duke (22-1, 10-1 in the ACC) emerged from Atlanta with a 95-63 victory over the Yellow Jackets (10-14, 3-8).
"Georgia Tech came out with incredible energy," coach Mike Krzyzewski said. "We knew we had to match that energy today, and coming off of playing on Thursday, I was really proud of how our guys did match that, and we maintained it throughout."
Last Saturday, the team had a hard time at Clemson after beating North Carolina handily two nights before. There was no such pattern this time.
"This is probably the best we've handled two games in three days," Mike Dunleavy said. "Coach really emphasized staying relaxed and staying loose the last 24 hours.
"He mentioned in the locker room after the game that he was a little worried about it. He thought we might come out and not be on top of our games, but because we were loose, we were ready to play. We handled this weekend very well."
The Yellow Jackets had won three straight ACC contests by limiting opponents to an average of 36 percent shooting and 57 points per game. Saturday, Jason Williams and Dunleavy combined to shoot 16-of-24 for 53 points. Each player hit 5-of-8 three pointers.
"[Jason and I] are pretty good players," Dunleavy said. "Leave us open and we both feel like we can knock down shots. We had some good looks and we took advantage of them."
Williams and Dunleavy both took advantage of set plays. Three times in the second half, one of the players made a wide-open three-pointer off an inbounds pass.
"For a while there we should have just thrown the ball out-of-bounds off somebody and ran some baseline out-of-bounds plays," Krzyzewski said.
For the game, Duke connected on more than half of its shots from behind the arc for the first time this season. The result was a frustrated Paul Hewitt, who watched Duke beat the Yellow Jackets for the 12th consecutive time.
"They really deflated us early in the second half the way they shot the ball," Hewitt said. "Their execution was outstanding."
Georgia Tech came out fighting. Down 28-20, the Yellow Jackets forced three turnovers and an offensive foul on four straight Duke possessions. Those Blue Devil miscues made the game 28-27 with 7:33 left on the clock in the first half.
But the Blue Devils then engineered a 13-2 run in the next four minutes, and kept the lead in double-digits the rest of the game.
The margin grew with each media timeout in the second half. A 14-point halftime deficit was extended to 24 before the first media timeout, and later to 35 with five minutes remaining in the game.
"A lot of teams try to wear us down and get us out of shape," Williams said. "But we're in great shape, and we're able to run all day long. That's what we like to do, that's our style of basketball.
"I expected they would come at us with a burst of energy, and they did that, and once we got over that we just gradually kept building the lead."
Georgia Tech is winless in the nine games their opponent shot better than 50 percent. Hewitt was hoping that pattern would be broken against Duke.
"I thought we could have played harder in stretches, despite the way they shot the ball," Hewitt said. "But then again, you just have to give Duke credit. They're an outstanding team."
On the defensive end, Chris Duhon was able to shut down Tech point guard Tony Akins. Akins was harassed into shooting 3-of-11 and committing six turnovers.
"You never want to leave him, you never want him to get his feet set," Krzyzewski said of Georgia Tech's leading scorer. "He requires 40 minutes of constant attention.
"It's kind of like when you go to Disneyland and you see a mother with one of those leashes with their kid on it--you have to stay that close to him because he can just break a game open."
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