If Duke fails to defend its national championship this spring, the Blue Devils can blame bad toes and bad timing, so says NY Times Sports Blogger Viv Bernstein, referring to Kyrie Irving’s early-season toe injury and Nolan Smith’s injury during Duke’s 87-71 victory over Maryland in the ACC tournament Friday night.<\/p>\n
It was a tough day for Duke despite the win. Irving practiced Friday for the first time since injuring his big toe Dec. 4 and it doesn’t appear he’ll be back soon. Then Smith went down with a toe injury with just less than seven minutes to go tonight. He injured the second toe on his left foot and it’s not yet known if he will be back Saturday to play Virginia Tech, who survived a final shot by Florida State that was ruled late. <\/p>\n
\u201cTo make a run in this tournament, in the NCAA, you need your players, there\u2019s no question,\u201d Krzyzewski said. \u201cNolan\u2019s been the player of the year in our conference. It\u2019s not just losing a player, it\u2019s losing an outstanding player if we don\u2019t have him.\u201d<\/p>\n
As for Irving, he’s in a new phase of his rehabilitation. “He\u2019s progressing very well. There\u2019s no timetable on him, though. He\u2019s not going to magically appear tomorrow or anything like that. He hasn\u2019t done anything with the team, but it\u2019s coming along great.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
If Duke fails to defend its national championship this spring, the Blue Devils can blame bad toes and bad timing, so says NY Times Sports…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1297,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[82,79,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1296","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-duke-blue-devils","category-featured-stories","category-uncategorized","wpcat-82-id","wpcat-79-id","wpcat-1-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/capitalsportsnc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1296","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/capitalsportsnc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/capitalsportsnc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/capitalsportsnc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/capitalsportsnc.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1296"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/capitalsportsnc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1296\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1299,"href":"https:\/\/capitalsportsnc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1296\/revisions\/1299"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/capitalsportsnc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1297"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/capitalsportsnc.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1296"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/capitalsportsnc.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1296"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/capitalsportsnc.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1296"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}