Fallen Devils: A Guide to Duke's Fall from Grace, 2002-09

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I tend to think of myself as a law-abiding citizen. But when it comes to Duke basketball, I’m prepared to commit the occasional crime.

I transferred to Duke from Emory as a sophomore in August 2001, after getting rejected from Duke the first time around and missing out on a championship in what should have been my freshman year. A few months into the season, Maryland was playing Duke in Durham, the first time the two teams had faced each other since the Final Four just months earlier, when Duke came back from a 22-point first half deficit to advance to the championship game. Considering that UNC went 8-20 in ’01-’02 (ahh, those were simpler times), this was the biggest game in Cameron all year. I vowed to take any steps necessary to see this game live (except, of course, for tenting and seeing the game legitimately).

There are a handful of locked, unmonitored doors surrounding Cameron Indoor Stadium. I figured that if I could find a way to leave a door open, then I’d discreetly enter the building hours before game time and go unnoticed. I’d remembered from random movies (and stories about the Watergate burglars) a method of using tape to prevent the inside lock from catching on the door. I bought some duct tape at the Duke store and made my way to Cameron. A fool-proof plan. What could go wrong?

Juan Dixon, Steve Blake and Byron Mouton were taking half-court shots—important preparation for the game—and I scurried past them into a corridor and back stairwell of Cameron, which I knew would lead me to my secret door. I opened it from the inside, made sure I was alone, and applied the duct tape. At first glance, the door appeared fully closed, but with the tape now covering the locking mechanism, it could be opened with a light push. I walked away feeling like Michael Corleone after he shoots Solozzo and Captain McClusky at Louis’ restaurant in the Bronx. I remembered Clemenza's advice ("Don't look at 'em, but don't look away either!"), and briskly headed back to the dorm.

A few hours before tipoff, I walked around the outside of Cameron looking for any suspicious activity that might give me away (of course, I was the suspicious activity), and pushed on the door. Nothing. My tape was gone, my plan foiled. Dejected from my failed scheme, I tried to come up with a Plan B. I considered knocking unconscious a member of the Duke Band and swiping his saxophone and blue and white striped rugby shirt, but that eliminated the victimless part of the “victimless crime,” so I decided against it. I noticed a prominent side door on the Wallace Wade Stadium side of Cameron that’s always open but guarded leading up to games. But at this perfect moment, the guard was talking to some other guy and facing away from the door. When in doubt, just act like you’re supposed to be there.

I casually walked past the guard, and when I got out of his sight, ran to the top of the stadium stairs into a bathroom. I jumped into a stall and squatted on top of a toilet and waited. At one point, someone walked in, stopped and looked under the stalls. I felt like Eddie Murphy in “Trading Places” when he finds out Randolph and Mortimer Duke bet $1 on his future. After about an hour on the stalls, I heard the rumbling of students filing into the lower deck. I’d made it. All that was left was to leave the bathroom, get downstairs, and into the student section.

The moment I left the bathroom I heard a “hey, you, where’d you come from!?” I pretended not to hear and continued walking. The guy ran up to me and demanded to see my wristband. The jig was up. He threw me out of Cameron and I watched the game from the Armadillo Grill over a congealed bowl of chili con queso.

Like the immensely talented ’02 team (six future NBA players—four of whom are still in the league—and one presidential body man) that lost in the Sweet Sixteen, I had gotten cocky. I thought I was home free. I left the bathroom too soon.

For years as Duke fans, we’d all gotten cocky. We expected our absurd run of success to last least through the end of the Coach K era. Has the Duke fan been spoiled by his success? Sure. Through the years, Krzyzewski cautioned fans on their perennially sky-high expectations, understanding the pitfalls that can come from the back end of success.

The last time Mike Krzyzewski went this long without sniffing the Elite Eight, he was a 38-year-old sixth year coach in danger of losing his first head coaching job. He then went on a Woodenesque run of seven Final Fours in nine years from 1986 to 1994, suddenly elevating Duke into the ranks of the ultra elites with along with Carolina, Kentucky, UCLA, Kansas, and Indiana.

Tonight, November 13, Duke basketball enters its sixth year without a team that has the talent to contend for a title (in the past 20 years, only the 2003 Syracuse team won a championship with fewer than three future NBA players). The Blue Devils have lost to teams with lower seeds for six straight years in the NCAA tournament. And despite a preseason #9 AP ranking, this team is filled with holes. Gerald Henderson left an enormous scoring void (20.0 ppg in the ACC in ’08-‘09) on a team that already lacked offensive options. Last year’s next best athlete, Elliot Williams, whose defensive peskiness nearly gave him “make sure you know where he is on the court at all times” status for opposing ball handlers, has transferred to Memphis to live closer to his ailing mother. Only Kyle Singler is a virtual lock to become a 2010 first round draft pick.

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So how did we end up here? How did the most successful program of the last two decades lose its groove, and how do we get it back? This blog will be a place to be realistic about all things Duke basketball in a pivotal year for the program. We’ll have honest analysis after every game, updates on news, and links to any compelling stories or quotes concerning the Duke basketball universe. No topics or individuals are off limits.

In order to get a sense of what’s changed, where Duke has been unlucky and where it’s made mistakes, let’s take a look back at the last eight years of Duke basketball.

2002: #1 seed, Sweet Sixteen loss to #5 seed Indiana. No one saw this loss coming. This team was immensely talented, but may have gotten a bit overconfident after losing only Shane Battier in the rotation coming off the 2001 championship season. This team was capable of winning another title; Jason Williams was player of the year and became the #2 pick in the draft that year, Mike Dunleavy was a 6-foot-9 inside-outside threat who averaged 17.3 points and 7.2 rebounds on 48.3 percent from the field and was picked third in the draft. Carlos Boozer, who was never fully utilized, was a second round pick and a future NBA All-Star. Despite an underwhelming sophomore season, Chris Duhon was still NBA caliber. Dahntay Jones transferred from Rutgers and averaged 11.2 points per game but hadn’t quite hit his stride yet.

We all know how this one ended. With one exception (the 2004 Final Four game to UConn), this was the most gut wrenching Duke loss of the last eight years, also trumped in the last decade by the loss to a far inferior UConn team in the 1999 championship game. Down four points in the final seconds, JWill drained a 3 from the top of the key and drew the foul. Pure bedlam in the dorm halls. I was sure he’d hit the free throw to tie it and we’d win it in OT. Williams missed the free throw, Boozer got the offensive rebound and badly missed the follow. He was fouled but didn’t get the call, and Duke lost by 1. We had no business losing to a team with Jared Jeffries and little else.

I still blame myself for this loss. I was tied for first place out of 1.5 million people on the ESPN tournament challenge and completely preoccupied with my bracket. I was more focused on the #2 Oklahoma vs. #3 Arizona score in the corner of the CBS broadcast and didn’t have adequate fear that Duke could possibly lose this game. Duke lost and my bracket fell apart. I’ll take the heat for this one.

2003: #3 seed, Sweet Sixteen loss to #2 Kansas. For a transitional season that saw the departure of Williams, Dunleavy, and Boozer, this really was an admirable showing for a Duke team that relied heavily on its highly touted freshman class (JJ Redick, Shelden Williams, Shavlik Randolph, and Sean Dockery). Led by future NBA mainstays Kirk Hinrich and Nick Collison, this Kansas team ultimately lost in the finals to Syracuse. Duke kept it tight for most of the game but just couldn’t overcome the talent and experience of the Jayhawks.

Out of nowhere, Dahntay developed a jump shot and gave us some us some of the most athletic and powerful dunks I’ve ever seen in person, leading the team with 17.7 points per game. JJ averaged 15.0 points per game as a freshman and we were introduced to the majesty of his devastating three ball. Unfortunately, as we’ll see, in subsequent years, it would ultimately be used for evil instead of good. Coach K swung and missed like never before on Sean Dockery, who would remain a blight on the program for the next four years and abruptly end the run of great Duke point guards. Duhon had another subpar year for his talent level, but that would soon change. Daniel Ewing was a sophomore and contributed 12.0 points per game. Ewing’s slash and shoot game and his overall toughness and quiet intensity quickly made him my favorite player through his graduation. Shavlik showed flashes of brilliance one percent of the time and was completely befuddled the other 99 percent. Shelden arrived amid controversy surrounding an alleged gang rape for which he was never charged, although he did concede that “things got out of hand.” Now he’s married to a woman who can beat him in one-on-one.

This was also the year of another highly touted freshman class a few miles down 15-501 recruited by Matt Doherty (Raymond Felton, Rashad McCants, Sean May) before he was sacked. The year before, I had remembered watching Felton blitz down the floor in about half-a-second during the McDonald’s All-American game and thought “this isn’t going to end well for us.” And it didn’t.

2004: #1 seed, Final Four loss to #2 UConn. This one hurt. This one really, really hurt. The Aaron Boone home run (yes, I’m a Red Sox fan from New York) months earlier coupled with this loss nearly ruined my senior year. Led by future #2 overall pick Emeka Okafor and #3 pick Ben Gordon, UConn was probably the best team in the country that year even as a #2 seed. Up 75-67 with just a few minutes left, it looked like Duke was on its way to the final. Okafor (18 points in just 22 minutes) and Shelden (4 points in 19 minutes) were in foul trouble most of the night, a trade we would have gladly accepted if only our backup big men weren’t Shav (a surprising 6-for-6 for 13 points in 14 minutes) and Nick Horvath. Yikes. Josh Boone destroyed us on the boards, gathering 14 rebounds while playing most of Okafor’s minutes. UConn went on an 11-3 run to win the game. Devastating. Duke would have likely beaten Georgia Tech in the final. This was the second time in five years Coach K suffered a few bad breaks and lost to UConn (’99 Championship game) in a deciding game. The K man could easily have five rings right now.

This was a wonderfully balanced Duke team, with five players averaging in double figures. Luol Deng averged 15.1 points per game as a do-it-all freshman, but we’d never see him wear the Duke blue again. Duhon finally started living up to his potential, averaging 10 points and 6.1 assists per game. Redick led the team in scoring at 15.9 a game and shot 95.3 percent from the line. Sean Dockery continued to play a sport that didn’t remotely resemble basketball. And Reggie Love had an unfortunate well-documented incident with incriminating photos in a UNC dorm that…umm….I think my phones are tapped, the Secret Service is coming up the stairs, and there’s a red laser on my forehead. I’m going to move on.

2005: #1 seed, Sweet Sixteen loss to #5 Michigan St. Ah, the year that could have been. Luol decided to enter the draft and was taken at #7 by the Bulls. As a top 10 pick, it’s hard to blame him for leaving, but I did expect to see him back at Duke after the loss to UConn. More importantly, does anyone remember the Duke point guard? It was abundantly clear that Dockery would never run the point, and Coach K managed to secure the nation’s top point guard, a lanky 6-9 physical freak named Shaun Livingston who never stepped foot on the Duke campus. Instead, he bolted for the NBA and was drafted at #4 by the LA Clippers. A few years later, he blew out every ligament and tendon in his knee in one of the most gruesome injuries to occur on an NBA court in recent years and hasn’t been heard from since. Shaun, we hardly knew ye.

This was the offseason where the unthinkable nearly happened, and once word started to come out that the rumors were true, it all started to make sense. Coach K was offered the LA Lakers job and left the Duke faithful in a will-he-or-won’t-he scenario we never imagined possible. I, for one, thought he was gone. For the first time, he had lost his most prized star recruit to the NBA (Livingston) and his first one-and-done (Deng) since friends whispered in Corey Maggette’s ear that he’d be a top pick in 1999 (he went 13th). Until then, Duke players had managed to stay above the fray of leaving ridiculously early. If Coach K had interests beyond Duke, this was the time to do it. To compete in the future, he would have to change his recruiting strategy. Do you pursue top tier talent with the understanding that they’ll likely leave after a year or never show up at all? This was the offseason of reckoning. From what I gather, Krzyzewski is a man set in his ways, and I didn’t think he wanted to change his recruiting style, so I fully expected him to leave. Historically, once Coach K finds his man on the recruiting trail, he looks no further. To remain at the highest level of competition, he’d have to cast a wider net and plan for backup contingency plans. I thought he accepted that the times they had a-changed, and that would inform his decision one way or another.

Duke nation exhaled when he announced he would stay. But did his recruiting strategy change? Somewhat. This really was the turning point in the Duke program. Since ’05, Duke hasn’t produced a single one-and-done player. Did Coach K believe he could avoid the pitfalls of top talent and early NBA entry and still compete, or did his recruiting and eye for talent simply take a nose dive? I tend to lean towards the former. How else could you explain such a sharp drop-off in recruiting, especially for a guy who had managed to pluck top players from across the country from urban, suburban, rural backgrounds, you name it. It seems that he’s always developed deep personal relationships with his players. Maybe he just didn’t want to get hurt again. It should also be noted that in October of 2005, Krzyzewski signed on to take the reins of USA basketball. So maybe his priorities were just elsewhere. Maybe he couldn’t take the time and effort to recruit because he was burning the candle on both ends of the basketball world. All I know is that since Livingston and Deng (and not counting Shelden, the #5 pick and JJ, the # 11 pick in ’06, who were already there), Duke has produced only one first round NBA draft pick, Gerald Henderson at #12 in ’09. I believe Coach K thought Duke could still be an elite program by avoiding the one-and-done guys. If this was indeed his plan, then he was sorely mistaken.

The ’05 team miraculously earned a #1 seed but lost to Michigan State in an ugly Sweet Sixteen loss. JJ upped his average to 21.8 a game while shooting barely 40 percent from the floor. It’s astonishing that a team playing Dockery 26.7 minutes a game and Lee Melchionni 21.7 minutes a game (yes, let that sink in) could win the ACC tournament and earn a #1 seed in the NCAAs. UNC went on to beat Illinois in the title game and the balance of power had officially returned to the other side of Tobacco Road where it remains. In both years that UNC won the title (’05 and ’09), Duke managed to win the ACC tournament despite being far worse than Carolina. Roy always saves his guys for the big dance.

Daniel Ewing’s senior year should have been a time for him to shine. Instead, he was relegated to point guard duties, playing out of position, handling the ball far too much, trying to initiate offense for others when he should have been exploiting his diverse offensive game. He averaged 15.3 points and 4.0 assists, nice numbers, but didn’t play the right role on this team. If there were a point guard in the house, things might have been different for my boy Daniel. He ended his career never truly playing on a Duke team that fit his strengths. I hope Jon Scheyer doesn’t suffer the same fate. If only Ewing had played with Livingston…wait a second, he did! The Clippers would wipe away any hope of Ewing having a productive NBA career by drafting him with the 32nd pick in the draft. Playing alongside former Dukies Elton Brand and Corey Maggette, the worst franchise in basketball not called the Knickerbockers made the playoffs for the first time in years. Ewing was a benchwarmer all season, and a cold Ewing was inexplicably sent in to defend a three-inches-taller Raja Bell in the final seconds of the deciding playoff game against the Phoenix Suns in the ’06-’07 season. Bell drained the 3 in the corner to win the series and Ewing never played another minute in the NBA. And who was the coach who decided to send in Mr. Ewing? Tell me it’s not another Duke connection…well, we do have a connection by blood, does that count? It’s Mike Dunleavy Sr.! He still has that job, by the way.

2006: #1 seed, Sweet Sixteen loss to #4 LSU. This wasn’t the worst Duke team of the era (we’ll get there!), but of all these Duke teams, this one might have been the most excruciating to watch. Maybe it was because they actually believed they were good. In a terrible year for the ACC, Duke didn’t lose until late January against Georgetown, and didn’t lose again until Florida St. in March. The worst thing that happened to this team also happened to be the high point of Sean Dockery’s career. He hit a buzzer beating 40-footer against Virginia Tech to win the game in what should have been a loss and wake-up call for this team. Instead, they continued to hold illusions that they were a contender. The offense revolved around the team’s ability to set roughly 18 screens for JJ on every possession until he found an open 3. He averaged 26.8 points per game on 47 percent shooting, pretty remarkable considering a JJ 3-pointer was the only play Duke ran. That and some sort of weird hand-off-the-ball-at-the-top-of-the-key until-the-next-man-in the-three-man-weave-arrives play. Dockery played 29.7 minutes a game and played defense by doing one of two things: A) he either over ran the passing lanes to get a steal, creating a 5-on-4 for the other team or B) he let a an offensive player drive past him so he could attempt that stupid playground move where you reach back around for the steal to slap the ball away from behind. These worked about 1 in 10 times yet he continued to play defense like someone who’d never seen basketball before. But he averaged 1.7 steals a game so people thought he was a good defender. And rumor has it that he was packing a monstrous dong, so it really didn’t matter.

As the Sean Dockery era ended, so began the age of Greg Paulus, passing the torch from one grossly underachieving point guard to another. Also arriving was Josh McRoberts, the counterpart to some guy on UNC named Tyler Hansbrough. Jeez, whatever happened to that guy?

2007: # 6 seed, First Round loss to Virginia Commonwealth. You wanted your worst Duke team of the era? Well, we have a winner! It was a tough year for the Paulus-McRoberts-DeMarcus Nelson trio. They were 8-8 in the ACC and were at risk of being the first Duke team to miss the tournament since 1995. McRoberts was a 6’10 forward with guard syndrome. Instead of playing high post and learning moves at the position, he preferred to hang out around the three point line and run the fast break as if he were a guard. Too bad. He had a lot of talent. Meanwhile, Paulus had begun perfecting the timeless art of throwing an impossible baseball pass (or more accurately, football pass, in his case) into the third row. DeMarcus led the team in scoring with 14.1 points per game, usually barreling through the lane on the drive only to miss the free throws. Or he shot a line drive shot about 100 mph with zero arc towards the hoop. It was an ill fated team from the start and a rude awakening when Virginia Commonwealth’s Eric Maynor proved he was the best player on the court by miles in a first round loss. Even worse, this was Gerald Henderson and Jon Scheyer’s rookie year, and I fear they didn’t have the most mature of upperclassmen to teach them the ropes. The highpoint of the season was when a rookie Henderson broke Tyler Hansbrough’s face in the final seconds of an ACC tourney loss to UNC. This was one of many times we’d see Hansbrough on the verge of tears, which never got old, and Gerald became a pariah of the college basketball world. Come on media, the guy’s a scratch golfer (seriously)! He can’t be that evil!

2008: #2 seed, Second Round loss to West Virginia. This team provided yet another well-balanced scoring attack, but lacked a single guy who could take over during close games. Five guys averaged between 11 and 15 points per game, led by Nelson at 14.5. Sure this team had some talent, but with no true big men and an absentee point guard in Paulus, they were incredibly vulnerable to teams with big men and athletic guards. With forward Joe Alexander and a crop of interchangeable guards, West Virginia in the second round proved to be a nightmare scenario. This team peaked extremely early in the season, and for a while was a fun team to watch; it seemed like the first Duke team in a few years that really enjoyed playing together. But everyone had to fit into roles that didn’t fit their games. Since there were no traditional big men to rely on, the whole team had to collectively carry the rebounding load, including the guards, which often prevented them from running the ball with numbers to find the open 3. A functional point guard and a big body or two, which seem to be a dime a dozen for everyone but Duke come tournament time, and this team might have made a decent run. Instead it’s remembered as little more than a second round loss, a failure in the eyes of Duke fans, as it should be.

2009: #2 seed, Sweet Sixteen loss to Villanova. This latest team suffered from many of the same weaknesses as its predecessor: guys filling roles, doing work that they shouldn’t have to do. The always reliable Jon Scheyer assumed the point guard responsibilities even though it wasn’t his natural position. He’s smart with the ball and perfectly competent at initiating offense, but without the quickness to penetrate, you lose a key dimension from the point guard position. As Ty Lawson shredded his way through the lane running circles around opposing defenses on the other side of the bracket, Villanova’s Scottie Reynolds and Corey Fisher mixed up the tempo and controlled the Sweet Sixteen game from the start. During the season, the tantalizingly talented Henderson finally turned into the all-around shooting guard we all knew he could be. But his game still wasn’t refined enough to handle the mix-and-match defense of Villanova’s interchangeable guards. A game that I expected to go down to the wire was an absolute humiliation for Duke. Gerald went 1-for-14 from the field and got increasingly frustrated as the game went on, which played right into the hands of the ‘Nova buzzsaw playing at the top of their game. The Blue Devils looked outclassed in every conceivable way, a sad end to Gerald’s career which showed so much promise. But again, when you can’t match up at point guard or with any size, it’s only a matter of time and matchups.

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As we get ready to tipoff the 2009-10 season, it doesn’t appear enough has changed to overcome the shortcomings that have plagued Duke in the last few seasons. Coach K has tried to address the lack of size with top recruit Mason Plumlee, but word is that he’ll be shelved for four to six weeks with a broken left wrist. Nolan Smith might be ready to make the leap into a bona fide ACC starting guard, but what will his role and position be? Will he split the point with Scheyer? And who’s going to carry the scoring load that Henderson left behind? How quickly can the physically gifted Andre Dawkins learn the tempo of the college game? There should be plenty of opportunities for guys to step up and earn some minutes, which hopefully will act as motivation for guys to compete with one another, as long as a rotation and specific roles are designated before the grind of the ACC schedule. So much will be expected of Singler and Scheyer, and I fear they’ll lose what makes them so valuable by trying to accomplish too much. I generally don’t like to analyze players and project their potential until I see them on the floor in a game that actually matters. In my mind, this season is a freebee. Let’s enjoy it and see where it takes us.

For the first time since Chris Duhon’s senior year in ’04, it looks like we’ve finally landed a top flight point guard in Kyrie Irving for the 2010-11 season. And later today, we’ll learn the future of top recruit Harrison Barnes. In recent years, Duke has missed out on guys we might have gotten in the past. But as the program diminishes in stature, and as we get further away from the yearly expectations of a Final Four, it gets increasingly difficult to attract top talent. The last time Duke won a championship, Barnes was about nine years old. Scary thought. UNC and Kentucky have routinely beaten us to top recruits in recent years. A Barnes signing would be a wonderful omen for things to come.

Even as our current streak and relative tournament futility taunts us, we’re still Duke. The program wasn’t built overnight and it’s far from being dismantled. We have the greatest arena and the most loyal fans (some would argue to a fault) in college basketball. Nearly every game is televised nationally. Players are learning from a master motivator, a coach who sticks by his guys no matter what, shielding them from negative outside influences for better and for worse, a coach who looks out for his kids years after graduation. You’re telling me a talented kid can’t be seduced by that?

We’ll see how many more years the 63-year-old coach has left in him. Down the road, should we decide to stay in the family, there’s a coach at Oklahoma who’s done more than just about anyone by his age. Jeff Capel learned from the best. I know, I know, we’re not there yet. People have been betting against Mike Kzyzewski all his life. I won’t fall into the same trap.