Curry bounces back for Duke

DURHAM – On Wednesday night, Duke sophomore guard Seth Curry did what good players do after they have a poor performance.

Curry didn’t have a crisis of confidence.

He didn’t need what coach Mike Krzyzewski sometimes refers to as “couch time” – counseling to rebuild a shattered ego.

Instead, Curry treated his humbling effort Saturday at Virginia Tech as an aberration.

“A bad player goes into a funk,” Krzyzewski said. “A good player says, ‘I played poorly.’ If he goes into a funk, he shouldn’t have a Duke uniform on. I mean, this isn’t some middle school, Johnny had a bad game and Johnny had another bad game. You’ve got to be a man. Nothing against those middle school kids. They have time to grow up to be men.”

Curry went to Virginia Tech on Saturday as a starter for Duke, and that must have given him some measure of pride. His father, Dell Curry, had an outstanding college career for the Hokies before landing in Charlotte as an NBA guard.

But Curry had his worst performance of the season there in the Blue Devils’ 64-60 loss. He fouled out in 15 minutes and was held to zero points and zero assists.

When he came back to the bench after one of his fouls, the Virginia Tech students heckled him.

“Who’s your daddy?” they shouted.

His daddy must have been proud of the way Curry bounced back during Duke’s 70-59 defeat of Clemson on Wednesday. Curry played 35 minutes, scoring 18 points with two assists.

He hit three of Duke’s seven 3-pointers and hit a difficult, step-back 18-footer from the wing in the second half during a scoring surge that finally established a comfortable margin for the Blue Devils.

“I just tried to put it [Virginia Tech] out of my head,” Curry said. “I tried to take it as a learning experience and just come in, not get down on myself. I had a lot of people that had my back and gave me confidence coming into this game, so that meant a lot to me.”

Ken Tysiac