Duke Finishes Strong to Beat Pepperdine : Polee Held to Only Five Points in Midwest Regional Game

Tenth-ranked Duke started out Friday night as though it would give Pepperdine a quick boot out of the NCAA Midwest Regional tournament.

But the Blue Demons, after getting off to an early 10-2 lead, waited till the second half to put Pepperdine away, 75-62.

The first-round game was played before an estimated crowd of 8,000 at the University of Houston’s Hofheinz Pavilion. But many of the fans had left before this game got under way.

Peppedine, champion of the West Coast Athletic Conference, finished the season with a 23-9 record. Duke is 23-7.

The Waves, looking as if they had caught a case of NCAA jitters, were missing everything they put up at the beginning of the game.

They didn’t get their first basket until Dwayne Polee hit a six-foot turnaround in the lane after more than two minutes from the opening tip. Polee, the team’s scoring leader, finished the game with just five points on two-for-11 shooting from the floor.

Pepperdine calmed down after a while. Forward Eric White started hitting his shots and the Waves outscored Duke, 15-5, to take a 17-15 lead with 8:31 remaining in the first period.

White, who finished with a game-high 26 points, scored 14 in the first half.

But Duke pulled ahead, 34-32, at halftime.

In the second half, Duke’s guards, All-American Johnny Dawkins and Tommy Amaker, applied more defensive pressure on Polee and backcourt mate Jon Korfas and captalized on Pepperdine turnovers.

With 15:52 left in the game, the Blue Demons were ahead by only 42-40, but they went on a 15-4 run to take a 57-44 lead, and the game was all but over.

Dawkins finished with 21 points, and sixth-man David Henderson, who scored just seven points in the first half, finished with a team-leading 22 points.

Pepperdine Coach Jim Harrick said afterward that Duke is “a very good, experienced team and they kind of took us out of what we wanted to do.

“It’s easy to say that we didn’t play well,” Harrick said, “and that Duke had something to do with it, except for our foul shooting.” The Waves made only eight of 16 attempts from the line, while Duke converted 17 of 30 foul shots.

Duke Coach Mike Krzyzewski said that in the second half, “our defensive pressure picked up a lot.”

Krzyzewski added, “We had a spurt and got an eight to 10-point lead, and our 3-2 motion really opened it up. This has been our characteristic the whole year; we get scoring spurts keyed by our defense.”

Harrick said that Henderson “penetrated our zone a lot in the second half, and that doesn’t happen to us ordinarily.”