A Trip to Tie-Dye Nation

So I had the privilege of traveling to Winston-Salem Sunday night to cover the Duke-Wake Forest game. I had earmarked the game in my futile quest to see games in most ACC stadiums, a mission that appears detrimental to the Blue Devils, who are now 1-3 in ACC road games I cover.

Lawrence Joel Veterans Memorial Coliseum (it will always be “Lawrence Joel Coliseum” to me) is definitely a worthwhile place to see a game. It seats 14,000+ and the place was sold out even though Wake has even fewer students than Duke. The crowd was raucous most of the night (I wonder why?) although the band, embedded in the student section behind one of the baskets, showed a very limited range of songs (meaning they played the fight song a solid 12-15 times during the game).

The starting lineups at LJVMC were pretty intense, with historical highlights on the video board and U2’s “Where the Streets Have No Name” in the background (personally, when I want to get pumped before a big game, I put on “Achtung Baby,” but that’s just me). Then the Demon Deacon comes out on a motorcycle (a far cry from the Blue Devil’s wooden surfboard), and the players are introduced. Unfortunately, it still doesn’t quite match up to this.

(NOTE: Listen to the colleges of those four guys Jordan played with. Central Arkansas, Southeast Oklahoma State, New Mexico, and Miami (Ohio). That’s the best team ever?)

You could tell it got emotional for a lot of the Wake players as the fans stormed the court at the end of the game, as L.D. Williams was crying and pointing to Skip Prosser’s banner in the rafters, as did some other Demon Deacon personnel. (Zachary Tracer, a Chronicle photog, wrote a cool blog post on getting caught in the crowd.)

It’s easy to forget after the last two seasons how integral Prosser was to that program. Before he got there, Dave Odom left to coach South Carolina. In 2005, Wake reached No. 2 in the country and was one of the favorites to win the title before losing that double-overtime classic to West Virginia. As much as I hated seeing Duke lose, it is nice to have Wake back on the national landscape. (I will definitely regret these words next year when the Deacs are a borderline top-15 team or better.)

The thing that impressed me most on the night, however, was head coach Dino Gaudio. He really seemed to have a plan of attack against Duke (the plan was basically to “attack”) and he didn’t mind spelling it out in the postgame press conference. Gaudio talked about how the Demon Deacons practiced switching screens on the perimeter to limit Duke’s threes in the first half. The Blue Devils adjusted by rolling Singler and the other bigs to the rim to get the mismatch on the guard, which Wake then adjusted to by having the guards go under the screens. It was nice to hear how the chess match between Gaudio and Mike Krzyzewski went back and forth, although if Duke could have capitalized on those open shots, I don’t think Gaudio’s strategy would have seemed as impressive.

The loss does leave the door open for Duke to slide out of the Charlotte region of the NCAA Tournament or even to slide back to a 2-seed in the NCAA Tournament. A split with UNC (the regular-season finale and a potential ACC Tourney rematch) is probably enough to land the Blue Devils a 1-seed, and if they can sneak ahead of Tennessee, they’ll get the Charlotte region. But let’s be honest: who thought this would be the biggest issues facing this Duke team in February?

As for Wake, this puts them in the discussion for an at-large. Splitting the next two (at UNC, v. Maryland) would put them at 7-6 in the conference with winnable games down the stretch (at Georgia Tech, at Virginia Tech, v. N.C. State). They probably need to get to 9-7 with an ACC Tourney win to feel even the slightest bit comfortable on Selection Sunday.