DALLAS — Duke men’s basketball coach Jon Scheyer reached out to North Carolina State counterpart Kevin Keatts after the Wolfpack had won five games in as many days in the Athletic Coast Conference tournament this month. The middle of that run included a triumph over Scheyer’s Blue Devils.
“I was just so impressed,” Scheyer said Saturday. “I said I wish it didn’t happen against us, but that was a big-time run. … He’s got his guys playing the best basketball of the season.”
Now, only two weekends after that ACC tourney — which the Wolfpack had to win just to get into the 68-team NCAA tournament field via the ACC’s automatic bid — 11th-seeded N.C. State (25-14) gets to play No. 4 seed Duke (27-8) again.
At another neutral site, and this time for a spot in the Final Four.
The South Region final is Sunday in Dallas, about 1,200 miles from North Carolina’s Tobacco Road region, where their campuses are within about a half-hour drive of each other, with the Blue Devils in Durham and the Wolfpack in Raleigh.
“It’s really interesting for me, just you know, being in March Madness where teams from all around the country are participating, and then you — it’s not often that two teams from the same conference go head to head against one another, let alone two teams that are 30 minutes away from one another,” said Kyle Filipowski, Duke’s 7-foot center. “It kind of provides a sense of familiarity just because you’ve went up against each other already.”
In their first meeting this year, the Blue Devils won 79-64 at N.C. State on March 4, part of the Wolfpack’s four-game losing streak to end the regular season and a 2-7 stretch since early February.
N.C. State was already playing its third game in the ACC tourney in Washington 10 days later when it won a quarterfinal 74-69 over Duke, which was the league’s regular-season runner-up to North Carolina and playing its tournament opener thanks to byes in the bracket.
“You can see their confidence and their togetherness continue to grow,” Scheyer said. “They’re much different than the first time we played them, and I think they’re even better than the last time we played them.”
The Wolfpack have an eight-game winning streak and are the last double-digit seed still playing in the tourney, and they’re in their first Elite Eight since 1986.
Scheyer, in his second year as head coach, was part of Duke’s two most recent national titles — as a player in 2010 and as an assistant coach in 2015, when the program’s count went to five. He was also on staff when the Blue Devils made the Final Four two years ago in coach Mike Krzyzewski’s final season before retiring as college basketball’s all-time wins leader, a record broken this year by Stanford women’s coach Tara Vanderveer.
Keatts, a former Division III player and prep school coach, is in his seventh season with N.C. State.
While Keatts wasn’t there for the Wolfpack’s national championships in 1974 and 1983, he constantly hears from the players from those teams — whether guys such David Thompson and Monte Towe from the first one 50 years ago, or Thurl Bailey, Sidney Lowe and others from the 1983 team coached by Jim Valvano that beat Houston for the title right in the middle of its Phi Slama Jama era with Clyde Drexler and Hakeem Olajuwon starring for the Cougars.
N.C. State was close to facing Houston in the Elite Eight this time, but the top-seeded Cougars lost All-America guard Jamal Shead to an ankle injury in the first half of their 54-51 loss to Duke in the other Sweet 16 game in the Big D on Friday night, after the Wolfpack defeated No. 2 seed Marquette 67-58.
So the Wolfpack instead play one of their oldest rivals for the third time this year — but the first time ever in the NCAA tourney. This will be the 257th meeting in a series Duke leads 152-104.
“It all adds to this story and this run,” N.C. State’s Casey Morsell said.
Said fellow guard Michael O’Connell: “We’ve still been growing as a team, the chemistry has been growing and our confidence has been growing in each other. For us, it’s been a journey of growth.”
When the Blue Devils made it to the Final Four two years ago, they lost to archrival North Carolina in the national semifinals. That was the third meeting between those teams that season, but all those games were a month apart. Duke and N.C. State will play for the third time in 28 days.
“It feels different to me because there’s not such a long time in between, and two years ago there was,” Scheyer said. “There’s a lot more you can think about. There’s a lot more that can happen in between the two games that you play.”
And now there is a lot more at stake.