Kendall Marshall felt dissed by Duke. The Blue Devils played the highlights of their last-second win over North Carolina on the video scoreboard and Marshall didn’t like it, so he brought his Tar Heels into a quick huddle.
“I told my teammates I thought that was disrespectful, and we need to go out here and prove a point,” Marshall said.
Did they ever.North Carolina never trailed in an 88-70 rout of No. 4 Duke on Saturday night, claiming the Atlantic Coast Conference regular-season title behind 20 points and 10 assists from its motivated point guard.
“It left a bad taste in our mouths,” Marshall said, “and we wanted to be able to come out and play well today.”
Tyler Zeller had 19 points and 10 rebounds, and Harrison Barnes added 16 points for the Tar Heels (27-4, 14-2). For the second straight year, they rolled in a winner-take-all season finale with the ACC tournament’s top seed — and possibly one in the NCAA tournament, too — on the line.
“My team’s had some bounce-back to them all year long,” North Carolina coach Roy Williams said. “We go down to Florida State and lose by 3 million and everybody’s jumping off the bandwagon … but our team kept playing. We lose to Duke and everybody’s got a great opinion of how stupid we are … (and) my team kept playing.”
North Carolina shot 54.5 percent, built a 45-28 rebounding advantage and sent Duke to its deepest halftime deficit ever at Cameron Indoor Stadium — 24 points — while winning its seventh straight since last month’s loss to the Blue Devils.
Mason Plumlee had 17 points, and brother Miles Plumlee added 16 points and 11 rebounds in his final home game for the Blue Devils (26-5, 13-3). Freshman guard Austin Rivers — the hero of that last meeting — had 15 points.
But Duke — which erased a 10-point deficit in the final 2½ minutes to win the first matchup, then rallied from 20 down in the second half to beat North Carolina State — couldn’t come up with another improbable escape and instead had its seven-game winning streak snapped.
“Throughout the year, we’ve been immature. We always want to see how little we have to do to win,” Miles Plumlee said. “You give a team like that a 20-point lead, it’s nearly impossible to win. We need to fight, like we did at times, for a whole game.”
