Duke in the Final FourThe chronicle FriDAY, APril 2, 2010 | 17

• Lunch • Dinner• Catering • Delivery

EASTER SUNDAY

Easter Sunday Grand BuffetAll day from 11am to 9pm

Live Belly Dancing!By Paola @ 6:30 & 7:30

FRIDAYFresh Seafood Specials

Enjoy one of our multiple HDTV Big Screens for the Final Four!

SATURDAYHalf off ALL Wine Bottles!Trefethen, Hess, Rodney Strong, Kendall Jackson and More!

GO DUKE!

Authentic Italian Restaurant

Monday $2 draft beer Tuesday $4 Martinis

Wednesday $4 glass house wine Everyday $3.75 House Margaritas

Putting The Love Back Into The Kitchen

New Lunch Menu!

1811 Hillandale Rd • Durham 382-2915 • Free Wi-Fi Open 7 Days A Week for Lunch & Dinner Catering Available 10% OFF with Duke ID

Dine In or Take Out Menu Average $8 - $14

Check out our menu online at www.pomodoroitaliankitchen.com

michael naclerio/The chronicle

Brian Zoubek and Lance Thomas came up with key rebounds and defensive stops against Baylor Sunday.

of crashing the offensive boards. In fact, over the first two weekends, the Blue Devils averaged an absurd 15.8 offen-sive rebounds per game. Those boards are critical, especially considering Duke hasn’t been a particularly good shooting team in terms of field goal percentage, where it checks in at a mediocre 43.9 percent.

Consider this: The point differential in Sunday’s final score was seven points. The tally for second-chance points? Bay-lor, 16. Duke, 23.

“They’ve carried us, you know, especially on the boards, Brian having 14 boards the last game and Lance having nine the game before,” Scheyer said.

And as two of the most veteran players on the team, Thomas and Zoubek exert their influence through sheer will and senior leadership, the latter a fleeting commodity in today’s college basketball environment. In one instance, Zoubek picked up his fifth foul Sunday with 2:18 showing on the game clock, the Final Four on the line and his team up six. The center headed back to the Duke bench, TV cameras trained on him.

Zoubek pointed at replacement Miles Plumlee, looked him straight in the eye

ZouBek/ThomaS from page 13and implored him to take over where he had left off. It was not unlike a general sending his troops off to war.

“The thing that was going through my head was, ‘I fouled out,’ and I didn’t want that to be the last thing that I did in my Duke career,” Zoubek recalled. “I knew that Miles could take care of busi-ness. I wanted to make sure that he knew that I believed in him, and that he could have no letdown when he got in. And he did a great job.”

A few minutes later, Thomas wove be-tween the Baylor players and dunked the Singler miss, despite being stymied by the Bears’ long and athletic front line for nearly the entire game. No matter—Thomas came up with the biggest play when it mattered the most.

“We’ve been underrated and looked over my whole career, and sometimes

we may have deserved it,” Zoubek said of the Duke teams he has been a part of over the past four years. He may as well have been referring to Thomas and himself.

But in his last year as a Blue Devil, the now-fully-healthy Zoubek has finally giv-en Duke the legitimate center presence so many have said it lacked since Shelden Williams graduated in 2006.

Even beyond that, Zoubek said that after having been through the public’s abuse, the media’s criticism and some devastating losses the past four years, he and Thomas understand where they need to be on the court and what kind of attitude they need to adopt in every situation. These seniors are determined to make the most of their last chance at a national title run, and so far, they’re doing just fine.