Blue Devils fork Scott's minions

DURHAM, N.C. — Wednesday night was upset night for men's college basketball, as five teams in the top 20 fell to unranked opponents. Although Duke was ranked fifth in the nation, Princeton's defense was third in scoring defense, and the small contingent of fans who donned orange and black held onto a glimmer of hope that an upset was in the works. Unfortunately, no upset stories were reported from Cameron Indoor Stadium in Durham, N.C., as men's basketball (8-5 overall) fell to the Devils (10-0), 59-46.

For the first seven minutes, the Tigers' game plan was working as they matched Duke point for point, even accumulating a three-point lead, 8-5, at the 16-minute mark. Senior guard Will Venable scored Princeton's first 10 points, singlehandedly providing all of the Tiger offense.

But the Devils were too good to allow one player to dominate. Ratcheting up a stifling full-court press and applying unyielding half-court pressure, Duke prevented Venable and the rest of the Princeton team from having many successful offensive possessions. The Tigers were outscored, 19-2, during a 12-minute stretch, going scoreless for more than seven minutes.

"Their pressure was successful," head coach Joe Scott '87 said. "We didn't play the way we were supposed to play. They took us out of our stuff . . . and that's what Duke was trying to do, and they accomplished that with their pressure."

Still, Princeton's defense kept the Tigers in the game as they forced 10 Blue Devil turnovers in the first half alone and held Duke to 37 percent field goal shooting. At the end of the half, the score was 33-18, a margin that required successful long-range shooting and defensive stops if Princeton wanted to stay in the game.

Unfortunately for the Tigers, the three-pointers the team counts on to diversify its game were not falling. Coming into the contest, threes accounted for more than half of the team's field goal attempts. While most of the teams Princeton plays defend the backdoor as the way to shut down the Tigers' offense, this leaves them with open opportunities from beyond the arc, shots that any player on the team can hit. Instead of following this strategy, the Blue Devils decided to structure their defense primarily to guard against the three.

"We weren't running our offense," Scott said. "We had wide open threes in the first half... but they weren't coming off of our offense; they were coming off of Duke pressuring us and us dribbling through there and just trying to survive and throwing it out there to somebody."

Princeton was 0-for-8 from downtown in the first half and only 1-for-9 in the second. Sophomore forward Luke Owings hit from the left side of the court to cut Duke's lead to 12 just under five minutes into the second half.

With the basket, the Tigers went on a confidence-building mini-run. Senior center Judson Wallace dunked the ball after a bullet feed from Venable. Two plays later, Owings stole the ball from guard Daniel Ewing. Venable collected the ensuing pass and drove in the lane. Although the shot was batted away by Ewing, he was called for goaltending plus a foul after the shot, and the Tigers maintained possession. Wallace's subsequent hook shot cut it to a seven-point Blue Devil lead, 38-31. However, Duke quickly halted the rally when guard DeMarcus Nelson sank a three-pointer to push his team's lead back up to double digits. Princeton could not manage to get closer than eight points the rest of the way and trailed by 18 with three minutes, 30 seconds remaining in the game.

While their offense struggled, the Tigers demonstrated just how well they have adopted Scott's emphasis on defense. Only one Blue Devil had more than 10 points, guard J. J. Reddick, and he was held to 3-for-10 shooting from the field. He racked up most of his points from the charity stripe, where he was a perfect 14-14. Despite a slow start, senior forward Judson Wallace ignited in the second half to finish with a double-double — 12 points and 10 rebounds. But it was too little too late for Princeton, which could not match Duke's aggressiveness to pull out the victory.

"Any time you go on the road, you have to be really good, really, really good to beat teams, and we just weren't good enough tonight," Scott said. "We came down to win this game . . . We want to be out there saying, hey, it's Duke against Princeton, who's going to win, what way is going to win, whose way is going to win. Tonight their way won, and they deserve the credit for that because that's a good basketball team."