Record: 29-5, 15-1 (1st place)
ACC Tournament: Won
NCAA Tournament: Lost in Sweet 16
Final AP Ranking: 1
All-ACC Players: Chris Carrawell (ACC POY), Shane Battier (1st), Jason Williams (3rd)
All-Americans: Chris Carrawell (1st), Shane Battier (2nd)
This team was smack dab in the middle of the five-year run of great Duke teams from 1998-2002. While it’s all relative, of course, I think this team was the worst of the five. But when you look at the circumstances, it’s still really impressive what they accomplished. The top four scorers from the juggernaut 1999 team – Elton Brand, William Avery, Corey Maggette, and Trajan Langdon – were gone. Over 65% of the minutes from the 1999 team were gone. As a result, the Blue Devils were ranked “only” tenth in the preseason poll. After losing their first two games to Stanford and UConn, they fell to 18th and alarm bells were sounded.
Then they proceeded to win 18 in a row. Alarm cancelled, I guess… the only other losses were at home to Maryland and at St. John’s. The Blue Devils closed the regular season at 24-4, 15-1. They won the ACC regular season by a record margin of four full games over second place Maryland.
The tournament was more of the same. The closest game was the nine-point semifinal win over Wake Forest. The whole event seemed like an exercise in postponing the inevitable. Jason Williams became the fourth freshman overall and the first non-UNC freshman to win the Everett Case Award (Phil Ford 1975, Sam Perkins 1981, Jerry Stackhouse 1994).
So this team that had lost so many key players and stumbled out of the gate found themselves ranked number one in the country going into the NCAA Tournament. How did they do it? Well, in short, the returning players – Shane Battier, Chris Carrawell, and Nate James – stepped up, and the freshmen – Williams, Carlos Boozer, and Mike Dunleavy – were as good as advertised. Carrawell, in particular, took a major leap forward. I’m not sure he deserved to be first-team All-American, but he had a great year.
They got a little bit unlucky in the NCAA Tournament, running into a seriously underseeded Florida team in the Sweet 16. This was the Mike Miller – Udonis Haslem group that advanced to the national championship game. Boozer got into foul trouble and played only 21 minutes, and the Blue Devils shot an uncharacteristically poor 3-19 from three-point range. Florida got great contributions from their bench – unlike Duke, they went ten deep – and the Gators advanced.
As good as this team was, it had some real weaknesses, or at least vulnerabilities. It wasn’t a deep team. They basically played six and went deeper only if they ran into foul trouble. They were a good but not great defensive team, and in particular their defensive rebounding was terrible. The problem was that their real big guys – Casey Sanders, Nick Horvath, and Matt Christensen – weren’t very good. As a result, Boozer played as an undersized center, and they just were not a big team overall. Whatever weaknesses they may have had, they made up for it by being the best offensive team in the country, overwhelming defenses with their ability to put points on the scoreboard.
I also have to ding this team a little bit for playing in what was a relatively weak ACC. I think there is a good argument that 1999-2000 was the weakest year for the ACC in the forty-year window from the early 1970s until the early 2010s. The only other ranked team was Maryland. North Carolina, in their last year under Bill Guthridge, made an unexpected run to the Final Four, but they really weren’t very good. 15-1 is 15-1, but it has to be seen in the context of that year’s ACC.