WASHINGTON — In all fairness, if you’re the coach of this team, coming off a national championship, with a lot of incoming and returning talent, and you find yourself not in the top five of the national polls and barely within the top five of your own conference … you’d be reaching for every motivational ploy possible too.
But this coach is Mike Krzyzewski, and this program is Duke — among the bluest of college basketball's blue bloods. And on Wednesday he positioned his squad as the scrappy underdog fighting against the odds with nobody believing they can pull it off.
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“I’m proud of them. They’re young. At times today, we have four freshmen and a sophomore on the court,’’ Kyrzyzewski said after Duke beat N.C. State 92-89 in their ACC tournament opener. “Because we’re Duke, no one talks about that. Or because there’s seven guys (in the rotation), or whatever.
“But because they’re under that type of microscope all the time — pressure, people wanting to beat them — they have to get better in order to survive. They’ve gotten that way.’’
All factually correct. Of course Krzyzewski was talking about beating No. 12 N.C. State, with all of five conference wins, that got into the game by beating a team with only two ACC wins in Wake Forest the day before.
And Duke beat them by three points, largely because Cat Barber, the ACC scoring champion who finished with 29 points, missed two crucial free throws and committed a costly turnover in the final minutes.
Do what you’ve got to do, spin whatever narrative you’ve got to spin.
The uphill battle, by the way, has Duke in position to win four games in four days in the tournament for the first time in eight years. The last time they were in that spot, in 2007, they lost their opener (ironically, to the Wolfpack). They avoided that fate this time.
This short-handed squad, like its 2007 counterpart, is brimming with elite talent. Seven players did, in fact, play Wednesday; six of them were McDonald’s All-Americans. (In their defense, one missing McDonald's recruit, Amile Jefferson, is a big reason they're so short-handed.)
Still, that includes a first-team all-ACC player and star from last year’s national title game, sophomore Grayson Allen, who, for what it’s worth, committed a flagrant foul late in the game that Duke was lucky wasn’t more costly. Also on hand is the conference's Rookie of the Year, Brandon Ingram, who scored 22 points; and the last of the long line of Plumlees, Marshall, who’s a fifth-year senior (and who saved them late with some undeniably tough-minded play, with a broken nose).
Krzyzewski isn’t wrong: Sympathy is hard to drum up for Duke. On paper, they’ll still have an advantage over most opponents. It was lopsided in their opener. The actual game, though, wasn’t.
So yes, if Duke scratches and claws its gritty way through this tournament, it will be an accomplishment. Probably not comparable to, say, George Mason or VCU, but you work with what you’ve got.
And work the storyline just as hard.