With the No. 16 Duke Blue Devils leading 58-49 at 58 seconds remaining Thursday night at Cameron Indoor Stadium in Durham, North Carolina, the No. 12 Virginia Tech Hokies began to foul.
At that point, Tech had scored nine points in the fourth quarter. If you don’t count the six more points the Hokies scored because they extended the game by fouling, they only scored 17 in the second half.
It was yet another dominant performance by the second-best defense in the country and the Blue Devils won the game 66-55. Tech only saw one of its players have a good night offensively and that was Taylor Soule, who finished with 19 points. Everyone else was held to single figures and the team’s top two scorers, Elizabeth Kitley and Georgia Amoore, were held to four and seven points, respectively. Kitley was 1-of-9 from the field and Amoore was 2-of-12.
That Duke’s Shayeann Day-Wilson had one less point than Soule doesn’t capture how on fire the sophomore was early on from both mid-range and distance, as she dropped 10 points in the first quarter alone. Elizabeth Balogun added nine points, including a short bank shot at the shot clock buzzer with 1:47 to go that pretty much put the game out of reach at 58-46. Balogun also had six rebounds, three steals and two blocks.
That make…
