By
Keith Carmona
Arizona Daily Wildcat
MINNEAPOLIS - In a slugfest of superpowers, it was the silent assassin that dizzied Arizona's hopes of capturing a national championship and the heavyweight that sent the Wildcats down for the count.
Arizona's 82-72 loss to Duke in the NCAA Championship game last night first came at the hands of the phantom shooter in the corner, Mike Dunleavy.
But the job was finished by the Blue Devils' Player of the Year, Shane Battier.
"You can only keep a team like Duke down for so long before they start clicking again," said sophomore guard Gilbert Arenas. "We contained Duke in the first half, but after that, they started proving why they spent a lot of the season ranked number one."
Arizona led for a good part of the first half, but had their title hopes buried early in the second half.
Dunleavy, a sophomore forward, helped the Blue Devils pull away with 18 points in the game's final 20 minutes.
Dunleavy would seemingly vanish from a pack of players, only to reappear outside the three-point line, where he repeatedly killed UA rallies with his shooting.
"It was just heartbreaking to see him get on such a roll," UA senior forward Gene Edgerson said. "Not only was he killing us from the outside, but it seemed like every time that he took a shot, he was the only player on the floor."
Dunleavy hit four three-pointers in the first 11 minutes of the second half to put Duke ahead 61-51.
Arizona would never recover from that deficit.
Battier scored 12 points in the second half, including six of Duke's final 11, after a poor shooting performance up to that point.
"I wasn't being the player that my team needed me to be in the first half and because capturing a national championship has been as lifelong dream, I knew my role had to increase," said Battier, who was named the tournament's Most Outstanding Player.
"I had an increased passion after the break. Better looks started coming, and luckily for me, the shots were really falling."
As Duke heated up in the second half, Arizona was cooling off.
UA's outside shooting woes continued. The Wildcats made 4 of 15 three-pointers while they were outrebounded 26-21 after the break.
UA senior center Loren Woods was able to contain Battier in the first half, but was playing with four fouls toward the end of the game and had to be cautious of any contact on the Duke forward.
Edgerson said part of the Blue Devils' run was due to being baffled by the style of offense that Duke operates.
"They were doing things on the offensive end that we were not used to doing," he said. "Myself and Michael Wright, we are used to guarding post players, but with Duke, you have Battier who is playing out on the wing giving you shot-fake after shot-fake. We're just not used to that."
Not only were the Wildcats victims of a hot-shooting Blue Devils squad (51.5 percent in the second half), but they felt they didn't get much help from the referees.
"There were calls that needed to be made," coach Lute Olson said. "I frankly thought that Jason Williams had fouled out twice with pushoffs, but the calls didn't happen."
Olson and the Wildcats didn't blame the referees for giving the game to Duke - Olson and his players said they realized that a team that shoots 41 percent from the field, 14 percent from behind the three-point arc and 64 percent from the free-throw line can't have a chance at winning a title.
"We just couldn't get on a run like we usually do," Woods said. "Most games, we have been able to get that run, like a 12-0, 13-0 or 20-0 run but we just couldn't get it today. Plain and simple, Duke just beat us at our own game."
Woods and junior forward Richard Jefferson were the highlights for UA last night, though.
Woods had a game-high 22 points, 11 rebounds and four blocks while Jefferson added 19 points and eight rebounds.
Switching between a zone and man-to-man defense, Arizona held Battier to just six points in the first half, but the Blue Devils offense was able to operate through Williams, who had 11 first-half points.
"If we could have kept the tempo that we had in the first half and maintained the defense on Battier and Jason Williams, the game would have been close down the stretch," said Arenas, who had 10 points on 4-of-17 shooting while nursing an injured shoulder. "They caught fire and we didn't. So they won the game and we didn't. Now they are national champions and we aren't."
