David Hale
Multiple Authors
CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Virginia’s Dallin Hall understands how Duke’s Cameron Boozer must have been feeling Saturday. Hall spent the summer trying to work the paint against teammate Ugonna Onyenso, the Cavaliers’ 7-foot, shot-blocking center.
“It’s frustrating,” Hall said. “[Boozer] is a really great player, and he made some great plays down the stretch, but you could tell Ugo was frustrating him.”
For all of Onyenso’s relentless disruption near the rim, the frustration roiling inside Boozer’s head never showed on the court. Despite a 3-of-17 performance from the field, he still sparked Duke with eight rebounds, eight assists and a pair of free throws with three seconds remaining to ice the top-ranked Blue Devils’ 74-70 win over the No. 10 Cavaliers.
“I did get frustrated,” said Boozer, who finished with 13 points. “But I just had to keep attacking and find ways to win.”
It helped to have his brother, who was more than capable of picking up the slack on the court. Cayden Boozer poured in 12 points in the game’s first 11 minutes to spark Duke early, and he finished with 16 points and pulled down the Blue Devils’ 20th offensive rebound of the game to help seal the win.
If Virginia did its job against one Boozer brother, it whiffed on the other.
“In the beginning of the game, they weren’t guarding me, and I kept scoring,” Cayden Boozer said. “Once I get confident, I feel like no one can really stop me.”
Cayden Boozer becoming Saturday’s star was a fitting culmination of Duke’s ACC tournament championship run.
The Blue Devils entered the week missing two key contributors, guard Caleb Foster and center Patrick Ngongba II. After a shaky performance against Florida State on Thursday, during which Cayden Boozer stumbled through a miserable first half, it seemed the No. 1 team in the country was suddenly facing some questions ahead of the NCAA tournament.
Three days later, Duke is a champion and the presumptive top seed for the tournament. Those questions have vanished amid a flurry of productive minutes from the background players — even when superstar Cameron Boozer was far from his best.
For much of this season, Cameron had been Duke’s Superman — a strong candidate to win national player of the year honors. But Saturday, Onyenso was his kryptonite.
Onyenso finished with nine blocks — more than half coming against Boozer — and ended his three-game tournament run with 21 blocks, demolishing Tim Duncan’s previous ACC tournament record of 14.
“Blocking shots is what I do,” Onyenso said. “I’m really good at it, even against the top players.”
Onyenso grinned as Hall lamented the struggles of getting to the rim with the big man nearby, but Onyenso was quick to downplay any frustration he might have caused Boozer.
“He didn’t show it,” Onyenso said. “Most players, that would’ve been the reason they lost the game — being frustrated like that, not getting their shots. But he made plays for them.”
That’s part of the secret sauce of this Duke team, coach Jon Scheyer said. He has built a roster of guys who are long on grit, even if the shots aren’t falling.
“He finished with 13 [points], eight [rebounds] and eight [points],” Scheyer said. “That’s a bad night for him. We’re very spoiled.”
With Saturday’s win, Duke secured an ACC trifecta, winning the conference title in football, men’s basketball and women’s basketball. That’s something that had never been done in ACC history. According to ESPN Insights, the last school to win a major conference championship game in all three sports in the same academic year was Ohio State in 2009-2010. (Oregon came close in 2020, winning the Pac-12 football and women’s basketball titles and the regular-season championship in men’s hoops before the tournament was canceled because of the COVID-19 pandemic.)
And yet, this hardly feels like a crowning moment for the Blue Devils. Scheyer has won the ACC tournament in three of the past four years, but his NCAA tournament title hopes have been dashed each time.
Saturday’s win doesn’t guarantee a different outcome in 2026, but the performance amid so many potential pitfalls offered a reminder that Duke is more than its best player and is capable of finding ways to win even when the blueprint is being drawn up on the fly.
“The identity we’ve created,” Scheyer said, “the loose balls, the rebounds, the will to get it has to go up as you go on in March.”
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