#2 Villanova ground it out for a win over Houston. It was a good defensive battle but also another display of poor shooting. Houston was 1-for-20 from beyond the arc and missed ten of the last eleven shots they tried. Villanova wasn’t that much better, shooting 29% from the field, but they did make an occasional three, and went 15-for-15 from the stripe – enough to win. Villanova is in the Final Four, but will have to play much better than that to beat the winner of the Kansas-Miami game (presumably Kansas).
The final margin of nine doesn’t reflect how completely Duke dominated Arkansas. They were up 72-54 and then finished on cruise control. Arkansas played well, but Duke was just better.
Duke plays too much one-on-one ball for my taste. They basically play only six players and they don’t pass much, preferring to isolate the man with the ball and let him create shots off the dribble, looking for the offensive board if he misses. But they have the talent for that strategy, and a good coach comes up with a strategy to match his talent. You know any team run by Coach K is going to play smarter ball than the kind of play we saw from Houston or Villanova. Duke rarely took threes, letting them fly only when they had a reasonable chance to make them (4-for-10), and spent the rest of the game penetrating. They shot better than 50% from the field and went 16-for-18 from the charity line. They held Arkansas to only 25 rebounds in the entire game.
That gives Coach K the record for the most Final Four appearances. Their next game will be against either a #8 seed (UNC) or a #15 (the Double Dicks, of course), so the Blue Devils will be heavily favored even though they split with UNC during the regular season. The likely Duke-UNC match-up creates a dream story line for Coach K. Can he beat the regional rival, whose campus is just a few miles from his own, in the semi-finals, then bring home a championship in his final game of his final year? Hollywood couldn’t write it any more dramatically.
