Caleb Love has another chance to torment Duke in March Madness: Not afraid of anything
Pervis Ellison still hits Duke fans hard, nearly four decades after keeping Coach K from his first title.Scotty Thurman took the knife in the 1994 national championship game.
Richard Hamilton relegated the ’99 Blue Devils team to one of the greatest to never win it all. Caleb Love handed Duke perhaps its most painful loss of all.And he could soon add another to the list. In Thursday’s Sweet 16 matchup in Newark, the North Carolina guard turned Arizona star will face Duke for the 10th time in his career.
It will be Love’s first matchup against Duke in the NCAA Tournament since giving the Tar Heels their biggest win of college basketball’s biggest rivalry, ending Mike Krzyzewski’s career at the 2022 Final Four. After putting up 29 points and nine rebounds in a second-round win against Oregon, Love was asked about the upcoming battle between No.4 Arizona (24-12) and No.
1 Duke (33-3).Love gathered his thoughts, building anticipation through silence.
He smiled knowingly, biting his tongue and betraying the feelings so clearly written across his face. “I didn’t want to give them no fuel or bulletin board material,” Love said Wednesday.“I just wanted to focus on what this group’s got to do and not give them anything that they can feed off of.” He didn’t need to say a word to attract the attention of the opponent or the ire of its fan base. Love was a freshman when he scored 25 points in a win during his first visit to Cameron Indoor Stadium.
He went for 22-5-5 in Coach K’s final game on Duke’s campus. Then, Love scored 28 points to lead the eighth-seeded Tar Heels to an upset of the top-seeded Blue Devils in the rivals’ only Final Four matchup.Love, who hit three free throws in the game’s final seconds, made the most devastating shot of the 265 games played in the series, hitting a 3-pointer to put North Carolina up by four with 25 seconds remaining, preventing Krzyzewski from going out on top like John Wooden. “I just think...