SYRACUSE, N.Y.—On paper, Duke’s win Saturday against Syracuse looked like utter domination from start to finish.
And for the most part, it was.
The Blue Devils quickly jumped out to a 14-0 lead and never looked back, cruising to a 97-72 victory and their seventh straight road win. But there were moments when the Orange looked like they could get back in it and give Duke a run for its money, similar to a lot of the Blue Devils’ other road contests this season.
Each time, however, one man stood in the way of a Syracuse comeback and kept the game in blowout territory—something Duke has struggled with all year. His name? Mark Williams.
While the Blue Devils’ 3-point shooting and ball movement stole the show in the first half, Williams cemented the win down the stretch, finishing with a career high 28 points on 11-of-14 shooting to go along with 12 rebounds and three blocks.
“Mark was fantastic,” head coach Mike Krzyzewski said. “His ability to catch and finish and also get eight offensive rebounds—12 total—was huge.”
But the numbers—as impressive as they are—don’t tell the full story. Because the biggest impact Williams made was his ability to stave off any momentum the Orange could muster.
Case one: With 14 minutes left, two Syracuse jumpers brought the Orange within 16 (close for Saturday’s standards). All of a sudden, the Carrier Dome was buzzing and it looked like a classic case of the Blue Devils once again letting a potentially dominant blowout slip away.
Then Wendell Moore Jr. found Williams with some space on the baseline, and the 7-foot big man absorbed a foul before slamming home an earth-shattering dunk. And as he lined up for the free throw, Williams couldn’t help but smile, a natural reaction after single-handedly silencing the largest crowd at a college basketball game this season.
“Obviously they cut the lead down a little bit…. I got a great pass, and I finished the play. So it was just a great play for us, just to get a little bit of momentum back,” Williams said.
But that wasn’t the only moment Williams staved off a potential Orange comeback.
After the Blue Devils stormed out to a 48-18 lead in the first 15 minutes of the game, Syracuse went on a 16-3 run to get right back in it, including the last 11 points of the period. While Duke still led 51-34, it had all but lost the momentum from its dominant start to the contest, and a few flat minutes to open the second could easily make it a ball game again.
Williams would have none of that, though, scoring the Blue Devils’ first six points of the second half to keep the Orange at bay, the final four of those points off second-chance opportunities. The Virginia Beach, Va., native dominated the offensive glass all night long, tying a career high with his eight offensive rebounds, each one serving as an extra momentum-killer for Syracuse.
“I think honestly just with the zone, I was able to position myself…and have a little bit of an advantage when it comes to o-boards,” Williams said. “A lot of those longer misses, just being able to be in the right place at the right time and just getting them and being able to convert.”
As the calendar turns to March, it’s likely that Duke’s two projected top-five NBA Draft picks—Banchero and AJ Griffin—will garner most of the headlines, and for good reason. But right next to those two in the Blue Devil frontcourt is another likely first-round selection, one that also has the ability to change a game single-handedly, just like he did Saturday.
“He’s automatic, especially in the paint around the rim,” Banchero said of Williams. “So you just want to get him the ball there, and he’s gonna do the rest. He’s been doing that all year. So we knew coming in, just with the zone, that we’d be able to have the advantage inside and get easy buckets around the rim. So we just wanted to feed him.”
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