Duke player, Lance Thomas, (42), charges Deron Washington ,(13), during the game at Duke last January where Virginia Tech won.
The Virginia Tech men's basketball team plays host to the No.4 Duke University Blue Devils this evening in what is likely to be the hottest home ticket of the season.
Correction: This story misidentified Duke's Lance Thomas as Kyle Singler. The Collegiate Times regrets this error.
Tech, a school with far less basketball history than many of its Atlantic Coast Conference colleagues, can boast a reasonably impressive level of success against Duke. The Hokies are 2-3 against the Blue Devils as members of the ACC and are a 45-foot Sean Dockery buzzer beater from leading the recent series against Duke.
All of the Tech vs. Duke ACC meetings have seen the Hokies encounter a Blue Devil team that was ranked in the top-10. In four of those games Duke was in the top-five, and three times they were No. 1 or No. 2. Given such, Tech's 2-3 record stacks up pretty well against the rest of the league.
In fact, when comparing each league member's last four games against Duke, only Florida State and Maryland are also 2-2, as is Tech, while only North Carolina can best Tech's four-game record with a 3-1 mark of its own. Duke's recent record against the Hokies may serve as a motivating factor for the Blue Devils this evening.
"They beat us last year in our first ACC game," said sophomore Duke gaurd Gerald Henderson, who enters the game averaging 13.1 points and 4.8 rebounds per game. "It's not just about them. It's also about us going 4-(0) in the conference and getting another road win. It's about a lot of things, but, definitely-yeah, we want to get back at them 'cause we lost our last time against them."
But leaving Blacksburg with a victory is not something easy to achieve. The Hokies are 7-0 in Cassell Coliseum this season-a building basketball writer John Feinstein listed as one of his "10 great places to get pumped for NCAA action." But it's not just prominent members of the media who get pumped for games in such places, players enjoy them, too.
"I think there's something to be said for the old arenas," Henderson said. "They get really loud and there's more of a close and home atmosphere to (them). I definitely like playing at places like that."
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re: photo...thats Lance Thomas, who's African American charging...Kyle Single, a Caucasian, is only a freshman and didn't play in the game last year...
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looks like a block to me.
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it is Kyle Single[r] not Single.
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Too bad it's not even Kyle Singler. Kyle Singler is white. Plus , on top of that, he's a Freshman, so how in the world could he have played against the Hokies last year? Good job. By the way, it's Lance Thomas in that photo w/ Washington. I know it's Washington because he looks like a girl.
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Great job with the photo . . . Mr. Barrineau should remove Editor from his title.
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If you're a sports editor Mr. Barrineau, you should know that that is Lance Thomas and not Kyle Singler. How could you not distinguish the two? They are both very different players and are of different races!
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Don't forget to wear your Hokies on Fire shirt tonight!
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the description of the photo was right in the paper. i think someone messedup online.
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I don't do captions--that's someone else's job.
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I doubt it
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