WASHINGTON, D.C. -In the second half of its NCAA Tournament game versus West Virginia, the Blue Devils forgot who they were. They forgot that they were beating a Mountaineer team by five at halftime. They forgot that they were a 28-win team once ranked No. 2 in the nation.
And when the final buzzer at the Verizon Center sealed a 73-67 upset win for West Virginia Saturday, the team that slowly walked off the court for the final time this season seemed to forget that it was Duke.
"We felt like we should be in the next round, and I don't think we deserve to be," guard Jon Scheyer said. "Throughout the year, we were a really tough team. We played a really fun style, and I think we kind of forgot who we were. You could see it a little bit, where we just didn't have the same confidence."
Despite holding a 34-29 halftime lead, Duke was unable to stem the tide as West Virginia went on a 18-4 run after the break to build a lead that the Blue Devils were not able to challenge.
Although the second period began in Duke's favor with an emphatic dunk by Gerald Henderson, things soon began to spiral out of control.
Freshman Kyle Singler missed the Blue Devils' first free throw of the game at the 17:04 mark after Duke made its first 13 of the game. Then, a series of quick West Virginia buckets cut the Duke lead to three.
But the coup de grace of the Mountaineers' second-half resurgence was delivered moments later by shooting guard Alex Ruoff. With the shot clock dwindling down to zero, Ruoff launched a high-arching, fadeaway 3-pointer that improbably found the net. Drawing the score even at 37-37 with 14:53 to go, the buzzer beater gave West Virginia a tremendous momentum boost and tied the game for the first time since the its opening moments.
"That three at the buzzer was a big shot for them," senior DeMarcus Nelson said. "It was just one of those things where that shot just completely turned the momentum, turned the tide. We were in complete control of the game at that moment, until he hit that shot."
As if a switch had been flipped, the Mountaineers were reinvigorated after Ruoff's tying shot. They denied Duke players quality looks at the basket, and their tenacity on defense prevented Duke from converting on putbacks and missed opportunities. The West Virginia lead grew to as much as 14 points in the second half before a futile late push by Duke narrowed the final margin to six.
"No matter how well or how hard you're playing, you've got to put the ball in the basket, and we didn't do that today," head coach Mike Krzyzewski said. "We had, I think, good looks, good things right around the basket. We didn't have real good finishes."
But even before Duke lost control of the scoreboard in the second, the team had difficulties controlling the boards and knocking down 3-pointers. Although the Blue Devils' lead was five points at halftime, that score belied the fact that they had given up 10 offensive rebounds and only hit 2-of-11 3-pointers in the first. As the Mountaineers continued to distance themselves from Duke in the game's closing minutes, these concealed deficiencies metastasized into obvious flaws.
For the game, the Blue Devils struggled to grab rebounds on either end. Duke was outrebounded 47-27, surrendering 19 offensive boards to the Mountaineers and giving them plenty of second-chance opportunities. The Mountaineers finished with 17 second-chance points, in contrast to the Blue Devils' five.
"It's not like they're bigger," Scheyer said. "They wanted it, and we wanted it too, but they really showed it on the glass. That's a really big part of the game, and they outfought us."
But perhaps the most telling shortfall for Duke on Saturday was its dreadful outside shooting performance. Beginning with Greg Paulus' 3-pointer at the 16:04 mark of the first half, Duke went on a 34-minute stretch where they missed 15 consecutive long-range attempts. For a team that averages more than nine 3-pointers per game, Duke was doomed by the long drought and had little hope of overcoming the Mountaineers' second-half spurt.
"The threes that we took at times, they were rushed," Scheyer said. "We didn't have many possessions where we moved the ball a lot to get good shots. When they went on run, when they had us on the ropes, that's when we needed really good possessions, and we didn't do that."
Starting out the season 22-1 but closing out their last 11 games with a 6-5 record, the Blue Devils never seemed to get back on track after consecutive losses at Wake Forest and Miami. And in the losing locker room at the Verizon Center, an explanation as to how Duke's winning ways came to such a sudden end in March was simply too hard to come by.
"Sometimes teams go up and down, and sometimes you don't have answers for things," Singler said. "With the length of the season, you can say it's a long grueling season and that it wears on you, but this team was ready to go.
"We didn't get the job done."
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