2004-05

Season Overview

The summer of 2004 had nearly torn the program apart. K turned down the Lakers’ $40 million offer in July, but the aftershocks lingered. Chris Duhon had graduated. Luol Deng was a lottery pick. And Shaun Livingston — a five-star point guard who had committed to Duke and would have been the missing piece — skipped college altogether and entered the NBA Draft straight from high school, where he was selected fourth overall by the Los Angeles Clippers. For the first time in five years, Duke was not picked to win the ACC.

What K had left was a “Big Three” of a different kind: junior J.J. Redick, junior Shelden Williams, and senior Daniel Ewing. No dominant freshman. No lottery-pick wing. No future MVP point guard. Just three upperclassmen who had been through the UConn heartbreak, the Lakers drama, and now faced the reality that this season would rise or fall on their shoulders alone.

And they delivered.

Redick exploded into a national star, averaging 21.8 points per game and winning the ACC Player of the Year award and the Adolph Rupp Trophy as National Player of the Year. His shooting was otherworldly — he set the ACC record for consecutive free throws made at 54 (a streak spanning two seasons) and had nine 20-point games, the most by any freshman-through-junior in the Coach K era. He was still the baby-faced kid from Roanoke, but now he was the best player in college basketball.

Shelden Williams became the most dominant interior defender in the nation. He averaged 15.5 points, 11.2 rebounds, and 3.7 blocks per game — the first player under K to average a double-double for an entire season. His 122 blocks set a Duke single-season record. He won the NABC National Defensive Player of the Year award and the ACC Defensive Player of the Year, led the conference in rebounding, offensive rebounding, defensive rebounding, and blocked shots simultaneously, and was a finalist for the Wooden and Naismith Awards. They called him “The Landlord” because nothing happened in the paint without his permission.

Ewing, the steady senior, co-captained with Redick and provided two-way reliability at shooting guard. He would become K’s 36th NBA Draft pick and the last link to the 2001 championship team’s recruiting class.

The season had milestone moments beyond the wins and losses. On December 12, K earned his 700th career victory with an 82-54 rout of Toledo at Cameron Indoor Stadium, becoming the second-fastest coach to reach that mark behind only Bob Knight. On January 5, Duke beat Princeton 59-46 to celebrate the 65th anniversary of Cameron Indoor Stadium — almost exactly 65 years to the day after the first game at Cameron, when Duke had beaten Princeton 36-27 on January 6, 1940.

The ACC season was competitive but not dominant. Duke went 11-5, good for third in the conference behind Wake Forest (featuring Chris Paul) and North Carolina (Roy Williams’ surging second-year squad with Raymond Felton, Sean May, and Rashad McCants). The Blue Devils’ depth issues were the season’s recurring theme — the Big Three of Redick, Williams, and Ewing accounted for an enormous share of the scoring, and when opponents could neutralize one of the three, Duke struggled.

But the ACC Tournament in Washington D.C. was where Duke reasserted itself. The Blue Devils won three games to capture the championship, beating Georgia Tech 69-64 in the final. It was K’s ninth ACC Tournament title and a declaration that even in a “rebuild” year, the program’s March DNA was intact.

In the NCAA Tournament, Duke earned a #1 seed in the Austin Regional — the third overall seed nationally. The Blue Devils survived a grinder against 16th-seeded Delaware State (57-46 in one of those games where the score never felt comfortable) and then dispatched Mississippi State 63-55 in the second round. The win over Mississippi State was historic: it was K’s 66th NCAA Tournament victory, passing Dean Smith for the all-time record. The man who had almost left for the NBA seven months earlier was now the most decorated tournament coach in the history of the sport.

The Sweet Sixteen brought fifth-seeded Michigan State and Tom Izzo to Austin. The Spartans had a blueprint: send wave after wave of defenders at Redick, rotate fresh legs to body him off the three-point line, and dare anyone else to beat them. It worked devastatingly well. Redick was bottled up, held to 13 points and unable to get clean looks. He didn’t attempt his first shot until more than nine minutes into the game. Paul Davis dominated inside with 20 points. Alan Anderson added 17. Maurice Ager threw down a tomahawk dunk over Redick and pounded his chest — the kind of moment that defined the scouting report: Duke’s Big Three could be suffocated if you were deep enough and physical enough to wear them down. Michigan State won 78-68. It wasn’t particularly close after halftime.

The loss ended K’s bid for an eleventh Final Four with Duke. The Spartans would go on to reach the Final Four themselves before falling to Roy Williams’ North Carolina team — which won the national championship, Roy’s first, behind Sean May’s dominant tournament performance. It was the first UNC national title since 1993, and it came in Williams’ second year after returning from Kansas. The contrast was not lost on anyone along Tobacco Road: while Duke was losing in the Sweet Sixteen with three upperclassmen and no bench, UNC was cutting down nets with a roster full of talent that Williams had inherited and developed.

But the 2004-05 season was far from a failure. It was a season of individual brilliance — a National Player of the Year, a National Defensive Player of the Year, an ACC Tournament championship, and an all-time wins record — produced by a team that was never supposed to be here. And it set the stage for what everyone assumed would be the grand finale: the 2005-06 season, Redick’s and Shelden Williams’ senior year, when the two players whose numbers would eventually hang side by side in the Cameron Indoor Stadium rafters would get one last shot at everything.

The scouting report on the 2004-05 Blue Devils was simple and devastating: stop Redick, Williams, and Ewing, and you stop Duke. The problem was that almost nobody had the depth or physicality to execute it for 40 minutes. Michigan State did.

Tom Izzo’s Spartans came into Austin as a fifth seed with nothing to lose and everything to prove. They had lost to Duke in the ACC-Big Ten Challenge earlier in the season but had spent the intervening months getting tougher and deeper. Their plan was straightforward: rotate fresh defenders onto Redick every four minutes, body him on every screen, contest every catch. Make Duke’s other players beat them.

Redick couldn’t get free. He didn’t attempt his first shot until there were 10:17 remaining in the first half. By late in the half, he was shaking his head at the officials, looking for calls that weren’t coming. Shelden Williams tried to pick up the slack, pounding his way inside for 13 first-half points, and the teams went to halftime tied at 32.

The second half was all Michigan State. An 8-0 Spartan run early in the period, fueled by Alan Anderson’s three-pointer and Shannon Brown’s layup and another three, built a 40-36 lead and forced Duke to call timeout. Then came the signature moment: Maurice Ager soared over Redick for a thunderous tomahawk dunk and pounded his chest, the kind of exclamation point that told everyone watching that the Spartans were not intimidated by Duke’s name or Redick’s reputation.

Paul Davis dominated the interior with 20 points. Anderson added 17. Michigan State substituted early and often, keeping fresh legs on the floor while Duke’s Big Three wore down. The final score was 78-68, but the game had felt decided long before the final minutes.

Redick finished with 13 points — another sub-par NCAA Tournament performance that would become a recurring narrative of his college career. Ewing led Duke with 22. Williams had his usual double-double. But there was nobody else. The bench was empty. The depth that had powered Duke’s championship teams — the Nate James role players, the Casey Sanders glue guys, the freshman surprises — simply didn’t exist on this roster.

It was Izzo’s first win over K in five tries, dating back to the 1999 Final Four. Michigan State went on to reach the Final Four before losing to Roy Williams’ North Carolina, which won the national championship behind Sean May and Raymond Felton. It was Roy’s first title and UNC’s first since 1993.

For Duke, the off-season question was clear: one more year. Redick and Williams would return as seniors. The recruiting class would add Josh McRoberts and other fresh legs. The 2005-06 season would be the grand finale for two players whose numbers would eventually hang from the Cameron Indoor Stadium rafters. The Big Three era had ended. The Redick-Williams farewell tour was about to begin.