ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, January 16, 1997 TAG: 9701160067
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: WINSTON-SALEM, N.C.
SOURCE: DOUG DOUGHTY STAFF WRITER
In its men's basketball history, Virginia never has won a road game against a team ranked No.1 or 2 in the country.
The Cavaliers won't have many opportunities better than the one they let slip away Wednesday night.
UVa, ahead by five points with less than three minutes remaining, failed to score on any of its last six possessions in losing to second-ranked Wake Forest 58-54 at Lawrence Joel Coliseum.
The Demon Deacons (13-0 overall, 5-0 ACC) trailed almost the entire game before All-America center Tim Duncan hit a turnaround jumper to put them ahead 56-54 with 1:05 remaining.
Duncan sealed the Cavaliers' doom with 12.2 seconds left when he hit another turnaround, putting the cap on a 28-point, 14-rebound performance. He was the only Wake player to score in double figures.
``It's going to happen,'' said Dave Odom, the Deacons' coach. ``We're not going to go undefeated. We're not going to hold people to 32 percent every night. But I'm glad we had this game, and I'm glad it was a cheap lesson to learn.''
And the lesson was?
``That you can come back, if you're down,'' Odom said. ``It's the first time we've been down all season for an appreciable amount of time. Virginia had us down for maybe 35 minutes, or 37 or more.''
Unranked Virginia (11-5, 2-3) led by nine points in the first half - matching the biggest deficit Wake has faced this season - and went ahead 54-48 on a Harold Deane 3-point basket with 5:03 left.
It was 54-49 when Wake got the first of two huge offensive rebounds, which Ricardo Peral controlled and passed to Tony Rutland for the 3-pointer that made it a two-point game with 2:57 remaining.
Then, after Duncan missed the second of two free throws, Peral got enough of his hand on the ball to tip in the rebound that made it 54-54 with exactly two minutes remaining.
``It's hard to express how badly this one hurts,'' said Jeff Jones, UVa's coach. ``It's unfortunate, when the game was on the line and we had the opportunities - if not to seal it, then to help our cause - we allowed Ricky Peral to make two huge plays.
``In my opinion, the play of the game was the put-back of the two free throws. It does hurt to have worked so hard, put so much work into it and have something as basic as that be the difference in the game.''
Peral said he actually was trying to flick the ball away from the basket on Duncan's second missed free throw, but he barely got a finger on it. Virginia's Norman Nolan seemingly tipped it in as much as Peral did.
``That's what it felt like,'' Nolan said. ``I truthfully don't know how it went in there. I checked him out and thought I had the rebound. I tipped it forward, he tipped it forward and it went in.''
It was the 16th offensive rebound for the Deacons, who outrebounded Virginia 41-28. That offset 36.2 percent shooting from the field by Wake, which had five fewer field goals than UVa, but outscored the Cavaliers 20-2 from the line.
``We knew we had some fouls to use in there,'' said Jones, whose team was a 16-point underdog. ``That [free-throw discrepancy] seems a bit extreme, but that's the way it goes.''
It was basically the same strategy Virginia used against the Deacons last season, when it became the last ACC team to defeat Wake, winning 67-49 in Charlottesville.
``Their defense was exactly like Utah's,'' said Odom, whose team went 12 minutes without a field goal in the second half. ``Utah took us on one-on-one and said, `You ain't getting no 3s, buddy.'''
``Defensively, [the Cavaliers] were going to take us on inside. That's the Virginia way and it worked. For 39 minutes-plus, it worked. In the end, we had No.21 [Duncan] on our side and that was the difference.''
Duncan, leading the ACC in field-goal percentage (65.2), needed to hit his last two shots to finish 9-of-21. UVa used four players on him; two fouled out and two finished with four fouls.
Courtney Alexander led the Cavaliers with 18 points, followed by Nolan and Curtis Staples with 12 each. Staples went over the 1,000-point mark for his career early in the second half with his fourth of four 3-pointers.
Wake is ``the No. 2 team in America,'' Alexander said. ``We had them on the ropes and we didn't have the maturity to put them away. That's tough to swallow.''
NOTE: Please see microfilm for scores.
LENGTH: Medium: 86 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: AP. Tim Duncan was the key for Wake Forest on Wednesday,by CNBscoring 28 points and grabbing 14 rebounds. color.