With Coach K's final visit to JPJ, a look back at recent Duke-UVa history

Depending on what happens in Brooklyn (and potentially the postseason), Wednesday’s game could be the final time Coach K faced Virginia.

It will definitely be the last time Mike Krzyzewski leads a Duke team into John Paul Jones Arena. Krzyzewski will retire after this, his 42nd season coaching the Blue Devils. College basketball’s all-time winningest coach won 58 of his 79 career games against UVa, including a 6-3 record at JPJ since the arena first opened its doors in 2006.

The rivalry has been amplified in the last decade since Tony Bennett has elevated UVa to one of the elite programs in the country. Over the past 10 seasons, both teams have finished in the top four in the ACC standings six times, with five regular season championships (all won by Virginia) in that stretch. They met to decide the conference tournament title in 2014. They’ve attracted ESPN’s College GameDay on three occasions, for the pregame show’s first-ever visit to JPJ in 2015 and both of the teams’ regular season meetings in 2019.

But most of even that recent history has continued to favor Coach K and the Blue Devils. Bennett is 155-56 against the rest of the ACC, just 5-12 against Duke. He’s 2-5 against the Blue Devils at JPJ, compared to 175-29 against other visitors.

There was the night Rasheed Sulaimon hit a late 3-pointer to extinguish a UVa rally at Cameron. The first GameDay game, when Duke snapped UVa’s 19-game winning streak to open the season. The Grayson Allen Travel Game. The two tight losses to Zion Williamson and RJ Barrett and company, including the night the Blue Devils shot 62 percent from beyond the 3-point line in front of LeBron James at JPJ.

The scars of those games are burned in the memories of UVa basketball fans. But so are the rare victories against Coach K and Duke, most recently on Reece Beekman’s game-winning 3-pointer at Cameron two weeks ago. With that win, the Wahoos can complete their first season sweep of Duke since 1995; they haven’t even gone into a game against Duke with a chance to sweep the Blue Devils since 1996.

With Coach K's final visit to Charlottesville on the horizon, a look back at Bennett's victories in the series:

Bennett was 0-5 against Duke going into this matchup against the No. 3 team in the country. But the Hoos never trailed on that Thursday night at JPJ.

Coach K called Joe Harris “a stud” after the junior guard scored a career-high 36 points and grabbed seven boards in the 73-68 UVa win. Akil Mitchell finished with 19 points and a game-best 12 rebounds. A Duke team that included Seth Curry, Quinn Cook and Sulaimon shot just 32 percent from beyond the 3-point arc.

It was UVa’s first win against Duke in nine games, and the Wahoos’ first win against a top 5 team in 11 years. The aftermath produced the timeless images of Justin Anderson, Jontel Evans, Harris and others crowd-surfing celebrating atop the scorer’s table as fans flooded the floor at JPJ—and Coach K’s postgame complaints about the court storming.

The celebration was even bigger a year later at the Greensboro Coliseum, as the Wahoos pulled away late to clinch the program’s first ACC Tournament title since 1976 with a 72-63 win.

It was a rematch of two months earlier in Durham, when Sulaimon’s 3-pointer with 18.8 seconds to play bounced in to put Duke in front for good en route to a 69-65 victory. That was the Wahoos’ first ACC loss; they didn’t lose another until the regular season finale at Maryland, finishing atop the league standings at 16-2. It was the program’s first outright regular season title since 1981.

Three Hoos finished in double figures in the ACC title game—Malcolm Brogdon with 23, tournament MVP Harris with 15 and Anthony Gill with 12 off the bench. Mitchell’s 15 rebounds were one shy of a career high. The teams were tied six times in the second half before UVa used a 12-3 run to end a six-game losing streak to Duke in the ACC Tournament.

Malcolm Brogdon never won at Cameron Indoor Stadium. Neither did Joe Harris or Justin Anderson, or Mike Tobey or Mike Scott, or Sean Singletary or Curtis Staples.

Since a two-overtime victory in 1995, Generations of UVa basketball players had come and gone without winning at Duke. The losing streak was at 17 straight when the Wahoos visited for a showdown of top-five teams.

No. 4 Duke entered the game as the nation’s top-scoring offense, averaging almost 92 points per game. No. 2 UVa was giving up an NCAA-best 51.6 ppg. The Hoos struggled to contain freshman Marvin Bagley, who finished with 30 points on 13-of-18 shooting. But the rest of the Blue Devils shot just 37 percent and scored 33 points.

UVa had four players finish in double figures—Kyle Guy with 17, Devon Hall with 14, Ty Jerome with 13 and De’Andre Hunter with 12. It was Jerome’s 3-pointer with 37 seconds left that put the game out of reach. The 65-63 win snapped not only the Hoos’ decades-long losing streak in Durham, but also a four-game skid in the series since UVa’s triumph in the 2014 ACC title game. It also gave Bennett a road win at every ACC school.

No. 7 Duke entered their Leap Day visit to JPJ a game in front of a surging UVa team for third place in the ACC standings. Each team only had two games remaining after their only meeting that season, which would abruptly end two weeks later because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The teams traded the lead six times down the stretch before Mamadi Diakite’s short jumper in the paint with 37 seconds to play put the home team in front for good. Duke had a chance to go back in front with just three seconds left, but Jay Huff blocked Vernon Carey’s shot under the basket then ripped the ball away and drew a foul. He hit one free throw to complete the 52-50 victory.

It was a career night for the UVa seven-footer, who finished one rebound shy of a triple-double with 15 points, nine boards and a career-high 10 blocks. Those 10 blocks were the second-most in a game in program history—and the most ever for a UVa player not named Ralph Sampson.

UVa was an 11 1/2-point underdog going into Cameron two weeks ago. The Blue Devils were atop the ACC standings, riding a five-game winning streak and at No. 7 in the country, the conference’s only nationally ranked team. The Hoos were among a muddled group of teams trying to gain ground in the ACC standings and had just won back-to-back games for the first time in a month.

But an early 8-2 UVa lead eventually ballooned to a dozen before Duke got it back to five before halftime. The Blue Devils finally reclaimed the lead with four minutes left, but were never able to make it a two-possession game. Beekman’s steal and bucket tied the game with less than two to play—and his 3-pointer with 1.1 seconds remaining, just the second shot from beyond the arc for UVa on the night, gave the Wahoos a 69-68 win.

It marked the second straight meeting between UVa and Duke that was decided by a single point, the sixth game in their last seven meetings decided by two points or less, and their 12th straight game decided by 10 points or less. Those streaks will all be at stake when they meet again Wednesday night at JPJ.

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