CHAPEL HILL - After a steal by center Chante Black, Duke barreled down the court on a breakaway late in the first half. A basket would have put the Blue Devils up 14.
Instead, Jasmine Thomas missed the jumper, and Tar Heel point guard Cetera DeGraffenreid scored on the other end to cut the Duke lead to 10. The basket jumpstarted a critical three-minute run for North Carolina, capped by a She'la White buzzer-beating floater that pushed the Tar Heels into halftime trailing by only two.
No. 4 Duke could never quite recover from the Tar Heels' 14-4 run, falling to No. 8 North Carolina 75-60 at the Dean E. Smith Center Monday night. It was the Tar Heels' fourth straight win over their Tobacco Road rival.
"We could have gone in with a substantial lead, based on the statistics at the time," said head coach Joanne P. McCallie, who still has not beaten the Tar Heels in her two-year tenure at Duke. "It was an excellent run by them.... There's absolutely no excuse for the performance we had. None whatsoever."
North Carolina (21-3, 6-2 in the ACC) had trouble finding the gaps in Duke's full-court press at first, coughing up 20 turnovers before the break. Those miscues meant the Blue Devils (19-3, 7-2) had plenty of opportunities, but they had trouble converting chances into points.
Duke's half was aptly represented by the performance of its two leading scorers. Senior guard Abby Waner was 0-for-4 from the field, including several wildly off-the-mark 3-pointers, while Black frequently found her shots altered or blocked by the shorter but ferocious Jessica Breland. Breland finished with five blocks and troubled the Blue Devils all night in the paint.
Despite returning from the break with at least a favorable foul situation-DeGraffenreid, Breland, Rashanda McCants and Chay Shegog all had at least two fouls in the first half-it was Duke which fell into foul trouble when it mattered most. Forwards Carrem Gay and Joy Cheek each committed their fourth foul with more than 11 minutes left to play, and without them on the floor, the court opened up for McCants. The Tar Heel senior carried her team during critical second half runs, scoring 19 of her 22 points after halftime and pushing North Carolina's lead to as much as 15.
And without Gay and Cheek, the Blue Devils could not complete the task McCallie had set before them: to win the rebounding battle.
"Rebounding wins games," said Waner, who tied the school record for made 3-pointers in a career, before the game. "Coaches don't lie when they say that."
After the game, the statistics didn't lie, either. Duke was beaten on the boards by 16, the largest margin of the year. The Blue Devils' inside presence was heavily impacted by the play of Breland, who single-handedly pulled down 23 rebounds for North Carolina.
"To be outrebounded by this margin says it all," McCallie said. "To have a player [get] 23 rebounds in a game-I've never experienced that before. That's a tremendous performance, one that should never happen if our team is rebounding effectively."
Unable to corral rebounds, Duke could not find the spark to get back into the game, facing a 10-point deficit for the last eight minutes.
"We need to learn to withstand runs and make some runs of our own," Waner said. "We didn't do that. It was frustrating."
In the last two minutes, Duke managed to force two Tar Heel turnovers, but both Cheek and Waner squandered their subsequent chances to score buckets. The sequence epitomized the Blue Devils' wasted opportunities throughout the game, which in the end, they simply couldn't overcome.
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