On Saturday, Duke’s men’s basketball team will make the short trip to the Dean Smith Center to take on North Carolina.
And while it's the first of two scheduled meetings between the teams this season, it's the final time Blue Devils’ coach Mike Krzyzewski will be on the sideline in Chapel Hill. The longtime Duke coach announced last summer that this season would be his last.
In Coach K's first battles with the Tar Heels, he faced legendary Carolina coach Dean Smith. During a press conference Thursday, Krzyzewski called Smith one of the greatest coaches of any sport, ever.
“What's really is good is that Carolina named the arena after the appropriate man. Dean,” Krzyzewski said. “It's the Smith Center. He deserves that and hopefully in the future no one will sell that. We have a tendency to sell those things. Because that's earned.”
Smith retired from coaching in 1997 and died in 2015. His battles with Krzyzewski in the 1980s and 1990s added an extra layer of intensity and competitiveness to the rivalry between two schools separated by just 10 miles.
While Carolina leads the all-time series with Duke 141-114, the rivalry has titled slightly in Duke’s favor since Krzyzewski arrived in Durham in 1980, as he is 49-46 all-time against UNC. However, most of those victories have come at Cameron Indoor Stadium or on neutral courts. No matter what Saturday’s result is, he’ll finish his career with a losing record in the Dean Dome, as his Blue Devils are 17-19 there since the venue opened in 1986.
Since Krzyzewski was hired at Duke, the Blue Devils and Tar Heels have each won five national championships. In that same stretch, Duke has captured 15 ACC Tournaments to UNC’s 10, while the Tar Heels have won the ACC regular season 18 times to the Blue Devils’ 12.
“Either here or there, at the jump ball, when you look at the guys on the court and say, 'Woah, there are a lot of good players on the court.' I've seen so many great players play against us in Carolina uniforms,” Krzyzewski said, when asked about what he’ll remember about his clashes with Carolina. “Thank goodness we've been able to have a few of our own, too, which has made it unbelievable. We've had so many amazing games. Some that we've won and some that we've lost, but they've been really high-level games."
UNC remains strong at home this season. While the Tar Heels aren’t ranked in the AP Top 25 Poll, they're 12-0 at the Smith Center in Hubert Davis’ debut season at the helm. North Carolina has won four straight games entering this matchup and is 16-6 overall this season.
For Davis, this will be his first game against Duke as a head coach. Davis will be the fifth Carolina coach to go head-to-head with Krzyzewski.
"We have a great relationship. Hubert is one of the really good people on this planet,” Krzyzewski said. “Hubert, he was not only a great player – he's an outstanding coach. His guys should really look up to him as far as what it means to be a man. He's got it all, and I feel honored to say he's been a friend for a long time.”
Exactly 30 years ago Saturday, Davis was the lone senior on a North Carolina team that upset an undefeated No. 1-ranked Duke team in Chapel Hill. Fans stormed the court as the Tar Heels won 75-73.
“That was a long time ago,” Davis said this week. “It was an incredible game, because you had tremendous talent out there on the floor… Like all the games, it was highly competitive, fun to play in and exciting to be a part.”
Duke is ranked No. 9 in the latest AP Top 25 Poll and has also won four straight games. The Blue Devils are at the top of the ACC standings with an 8-2 mark in conference play. When ranked, Duke is 26-8 against unranked UNC teams.
Freshman forward Paolo Banchero leads Duke in scoring and rebounding with 17.8 points and 8.3 rebounds per-game, while junior captain Wendell Moore Jr. averages 14.2 points and 4.5 assists per-game. Mark Williams — a 7-foot-1 sophomore — patrols the paint and leads the ACC in blocked shots with 3.2 per-game.
Powering the Tar Heels this season is double-double machine Armando Bacot, who averages 16.5 points and 12.6 rebounds per-game. He’s surrounded by three sharpshooters in RJ Davis, Caleb Love and Brady Manek, each of whom are shooting better than 39% from behind the arc this season.
Four players in Saturday’s game were former high school teammates. Duke’s Moore and UNC’s Leaky Black played together at Cox Mill in Cabarrus County. And Duke’s AJ Griffin and UNC’s Davis played together at Archbishop Stepinac in New York.
Tip-off for Saturday’s game is at 6 p.m. and it will be televised nationally on ESPN. The network’s “College GameDay” show will air live from the Smith Center at 11 a.m. It marks the 13th time the show has aired from a Duke-Carolina game, the most of any matchup in men’s college basketball.
The final regular season meeting for Duke and North Carolina this season is slated for March 5 in Durham.
