North Carolina edged Duke 61-56 Thursday night in Carmichael Auditorium in an ACC women’s basketball game. The loss was Duke’s first in conference play and drops them to 16-2 overall, 6-1 in the ACC. It also ended an 11-game winning streak for the Blue Devils.
The win moves North Carolina to 13-5 overall, 4-3 in the ACC, with home wins over Notre Dame, NC State and now Duke.
Full disclosure. I had dental surgery yesterday. I wasn’t on death’s doorstep or anything like that. But I also didn’t need to be driving on I-40 at 11 P.M. either.
So, I stayed home and watched on TV.
Back to the game. If you had told me going in that Celeste Taylor would play 20 minutes and score two points, that Duke’s three biggest players would shoot a combined 0 for 11 from the field, that Shayeann Day-Wilson would miss six foul shots and that Carolina’s Alyssa Ustby would dominate the second half, I would have thought Duke was looking at the wrong end of a blow-out. But Duke played defense well enough in the first, second and much of the fourth quarter to stay in the game into the dying seconds.
But that third quarter decided the game.
Along with Taylor’s foul trouble.
And a spectacularly slow start by the visitors.
Lots of culprits here.
Duke fell behind 10-0, going almost eight minutes without a point, a toxic mixture of badly-missed shots, turnovers and fouls. Taylor picked up her first and second fouls 17 seconds apart in the middle of this dismal start and took a seat.
“We didn’t panic,” Kara Lawson said, “even though it took us awhile to score to start the game. I thought our defense held us in it.
Duke was playing uphill the entire first half. And incredibly they got there. Trailing 16-9 Duke held Carolina to two points for over five minutes and took a 19-18 lead on a Day-Wilson 3-pointer.
The half ended at 21 all and Duke had to feel like it had had dodged a bullet.
“I thought we were in pretty good shape to be tied after a start like that,” Lawson said.
Taylor played most of the second half. But she never found her rhythm and never made much of a positive impact on offense.
The teams traded baskets for much of the third quarter, Duke leading 28-25 after an Elizabeth Balogun jumper. But after Balogun tied the game at 31 with a 3-pointer Carolina outscored Duke 9-0 over the final 4:47 of the third period, four Carolina field goals, all on layups as Duke’s usually solid defense let them down at the same time as the offense was shooting blanks.
“I thought they were aggressive attacking the paint,” Lawson said. “We did not do as good a job as we had hoped keeping them out of the paint, taking layups away.”
Carolina led 40-31 after three.
Again Duke was playing uphill and this time they couldn’t pull it off. Day-Wilson scored 14 of her game-high 24 points in the final period but Duke couldn’t get the stops it needed, Vanessa de Jesus missed a triple that would have cut the deficit to two and the Tar Heels made six of eight from the line over the final 30 seconds to keep the Devils at bay.
Duke out-rebounded UNC 31-29 and forced 19 turnovers. But Duke turned it over 16 times and shot only 33 percent from the field, not a formula for winning on the road against anyone, let alone a nationally-ranked opponent.
Lawson credited Carolina’s defense.
“I thought UNC was terrific defensively tonight. Disrupted us quite a bit. We never really got into a rhythm.”
Duke hosts Syracuse at noon on Sunday.
“It’s the bounce-back that’s really important for us,” Lawson said.
I'm glad you mentioned "Celeste" and "rhythm" in the same sentence. I disagreed strongly with Lawson sitting her, and that's a big reason why. This is a comment I made elsewhere.
"I don't understand Kara's coaching here. Pre game, Duke was all about hyping that statement from the Georgia Tech coach. So if you have that attitude, you DO NOT sit your ACC POY for a whole half, even if she has two fouls. That is playing (and coaching) scared. And it takes Celeste out of any rhythm that she may have established."