The Blue Devil's served notice to those that would bury them, by puting an end to Georgia Tech's four game winning streak before an always sold out Cameron crowd.

What a difference a week can make, huh?  The Devils fell from the top 25 last week and the chirping began.  Negative articles  were saying K was washed up or had lost his team.  Haters were just hating and ...

In hindsight, many voters may be reconsidering their ranking which placed Duke 26th after a 200 week run in the top 25. A team which had been ranked as high as 5th this season, still had 18 wins but wasn't considered worthy of a ranking.

I mean, I know Duke was overrated at 5th, but the truth is, they shouldn't have fallen all the way to 26th.  Go figure.

This is the same Duke program that had never finished out of the ESPN Top 25 since it's existence!  Pop shots aside, look for the Blue Devils to rise about as dramatically as they fell when this weeks rankings come out.

I think Duke could be ranked as high as fifteenth this week. If you look at the losses of other teams and the Devils wins it seems likely that seventeenth would be the lowest.  We will have to wait until later this afternoon to find out how many places they jumped.

Not to be lost in Duke fans euphoria is Coach K's milestone 700th win.  He is the second fastest coach in NCAA history to achieve this milestone.  Duke fans are indeed lucky to have him on the sidelines.

As for the Tech win itself, I thought it was a great team victory.  I expected Duke to clamp Crittenton and Young and they certainly did, holding the top two scorers to half their combined averages.

And how appropriate was it that the much maligned Duke PG, Greg Paulus led his team in scoring with 15 points, hitting several key three point buckets.  Add to that his 3 steals, 5 assists and floor play on the Tech guards and you can make a case that this was his best effort of the season.

Greg had plenty of help yesterday.  Lance Thomas put in some very productive minutes as did Gerald Henderson.  The two freshman have shown a lot of improvement of late and this bodes well for March.

While McRobert's had an off game offensively, he still anchored the middle and made some great passes to Paulus and others.  Considering Tech's depth down low, it isn't that unusual for there to be a drop in his scoring.

DeMarcus Nelson played extremely well on the defensive end and hit big shots when it counted.  His teammate Jon Scheyer played well too.  While he missed some shots, the ones he made had to sting;)

McClure had a wonderful game too, having eight points at the half. Anybody that can't recognize the glue he brings to this team simply isn't watching.  Is this guy a captain?

The aforementioned defensive effort was a team-wide affair.  Duke had 15 steals, the second highest total of the season in that category, and despite Tech shooting 50%, Duke was able to get into the passing lanes which opened up the break.

Duke fans couldn't help but see the effort and team unity today.  Duke took the early lead, rolling to a 41-26 half time lead.  Like any young team they are still learning to put teams away, so Tech naturally made a run. 

In fact, Tech had the crowd out of the game as Duke failed to score for the better part of four minutes into the second half.  It was a Paulus three that snapped the skid and got the Crazies back in game.  The teams battled hard the rest of the way.

Duke stymied the Jacket's comeback effort, much as they had in the Boston College game.  The improvement that may have seemed subtle before is much easier to see in this past weeks wins.

The Blue Devils were not about to lose on a day that earned K's 700th win.  Big plays were made throughout the game, be it Lance taking a charge or McClure having a big tip in.  It was a huge win that saw K showing unusual emotion, high fiving his entire bench before a short cermony commemorating his milestone where he of course recieved a standing ovation.  It was a good win!

Duke will now embark on a stretch of games where they will play three times in just nine days.  They go to Death Valley to take on Clemson, then to New York for St. John's before returning home game with Maryland -- the last game of the season in Cameron.

While this is indeed a tough stretch, Duke seems to have found themselves as a team and they are doing so when it counts.  Sure, there will be more learning experiences for the youngest Blue Devil team since the World War, but it sure looks a lot brighter now.

What a difference a week makes for a team that never leaves the college basketball radar.

700!

Coach K's opening statement to the media -

That was a great basketball game. [Georgia Tech] is good. They’re better than they were when they beat us down in Atlanta. It’s hard for me to think that our league won’t get nine teams in the tournament. We’ve played against really good teams. This conference is so good and all these teams better get rewarded. Kids in this conference are really playing their butts off, top to bottom. I think it’s been the most competitive conference – not just the race for first place but in games – that I’ve ever seen. Our guys did a great job defensively, forcing turnovers and turning them into points. I think each team had a hard time scoring against the other team’s half-court defense. They’re really good defensively in a different way than us; they’re athletic and long and it’s tough to get by them. This was such a big game for us. We haven’t been home for a while. The last time we were home was against North Carolina and everyone was crazy. Now the tents are down and it’s a Sunday afternoon. I wanted our sixth man to be hungry. I thought the crowd responded well to it.”

700th win -

“I had no idea about 700 wins. We’re 6-6 in the conference; I just want to get to 7-6. I was shocked at the end of the game when that happened. I don’t read our press notes. I think I know my team well enough. I do watch the standings of the league. That was a nice surprise.”

On his team's improvement -

“We are better. The league has made a lot of teams better because you really have to show up hard for every ballgame. I think the league will make a big splash in March. Our league has shown up very, very well. Georgia Tech is really good. There were two huge stretches for us [today] where our bench really came through. Against Florida State, we got in all that foul trouble and weren’t able to sustain that. To me, that was big. At the beginning of the second half, we didn’t come out with the defensive intensity. I think that sometimes when you’re in a physical game like this there is too much time between rounds. You lose a little bit of your edge. We put in Lance [Thomas], G[erald Henderson], Marty [Pocius] and Dave [McClure] and they brought us back. Then Greg [Paulus’] three was huge. He was a tough kid today.”

On Nelson -

“He’s been a really good defender for us. That’s why we put him on people. Looking back to last year, I would have loved to have had him all year so that J.J. [Redick] wasn’t our defensive stopper. That’s part of the game. He’s made the most of it this year and has been a real good defender.”

On the last few games -

“I thought we got better during those four games. We played winning basketball except for in the first eight minutes at Maryland. If you watch the Carolina game, we played winning basketball. We missed free throws and they’re obviously really good. The other two games we had a shot at winning. During the second half at Maryland, Josh [McRoberts] asserted himself and used that as a springboard for Boston College. We were getting better and you have to keep letting the kids know that. Everyone else is talking about losing streaks and polls and superficial stuff that really is not the right thing for us to talk about.”