Duke's Mike Krzyzewski on Playing in Empty Arenas
Duke isn’t used to playing in front of anything except full houses, especially at home at Cameron Indoor Stadium. With many sports leagues starting to discuss plans to return, potentially in empty stadiums and arenas, coach Mike Krzyzewski remembered back to a game that might be similar to the post COVID-19 games.
“The closet we came was in the early (actually mid) 90s,” he said after a late-season game, when the Italian basketball league was one of the first to discuss the possibility of playing with no fans in the building. The date was January 7, 1996. Not only was the school still out for holiday break, but the area had just been hit by the Blizzard of 96, the worst winter storm to hit the East Coast in 70 years. Duke’s campus was hit with eight inches of snow, which ground most activity in the area to a halt for several days.
But the basketball went on.
“They had an ice storm here, and we were playing Georgia Tech,” Krzyzewski recalled. “They had (Stephon Marbury), and there was nobody here. And they beat us. And it was weird. Not that it was weird that they beat us with Stephon Marbury, but that there was nobody here. I know in Italy they are doing that. Look, whatever the powers that be come up with as a decision on this, we need to all work as a team to make sure that we follow up on it. Pretty dangerous.”
The crowd for that game was generously listed as 3,000, and Marbury scored 25 of his 27 points in the second half to lead Tech back from a six-point halftime deficit to win 86-81, knocking Duke from the AP Top 25.
“That’s on of the best halves that anybody has played against us,” Krzyzewski said after the game.
Duke got 21 from Chris Collins, 17 from Jeff Capel and 16 from Greg Newton.
