Ken Davis

Watch the Duke Blue Devils on television and at least once a game there will be a predictable cutaway camera shot to the Duke bench. 

That guy in street clothes? That's Kyrie Irving, the Duke freshman guard who injured his toe and may not return to action this season. The suspense is killing us. Why? Well, if there’s one player powerful enough to change this season, it has to be Kyrie Irving.

And we all want to know.

North Carolina travels to Duke Wednesday night to continue the greatest rivalry in college basketball. Suddenly, this one has a lot of intrigue because the Tar Heels have won five straight and are in second place in the Atlantic Coast Conference standings — right behind first-place Duke. A month ago, that didn’t seem likely.

Things are exactly as they should have been — except for the fact Irving won’t be playing. Neither will Larry Drew II, who bolted on the Tar Heels last week, right when they needed him most. But that’s another story.

We see Irving and we are reminded that there is the game being played — and then there’s the story that overrides the game being played. We haven’t seen Irving in uniform since injuring his toe Dec. 4 against Butler. (It’s almost hard to remember that far back, isn’t it? Duke won 82-70 and at that point we were still excited about a rematch of last season’s championship game. Butler has kind of killed that thrill, huh?)

Duke was 8-0 and No. 1 in the nation. Irving played 34 minutes that day and scored 21 points. His backcourt mate, Nolan Smith, scored 24 points. When your backcourt is so good that Kyle Singler can have foul trouble and become a third scoring option, you’ve got a contender.

Irving was averaging 17.1 points, 5.1 assists, 3.8 rebounds and 1.5 steals a game when he went down. He was shooting over 45 percent from 3-point range. He was better than advertised and it didn’t take long to realize the possibilities.

“Well, I think that Duke seemed to start the season off, even though they lost some players last year, they seem to have been really in sync with Kyrie Irving,” Florida State coach Leonard Hamilton said Monday. “I think he's given them such a different dimension. They won a national title, but with him they were better than they were last year I thought early on in the season.”

That’s what everyone was thinking.

At first, the toe appeared to be a minor injury. But when the Blue Devils played Bradley the next week, Irving was in street clothes and Coach K said he was out indefinitely. Coach K said Irving’s status would be updated in a week or 10 days. Then Coach K said there was a possibility Irving would be lost for the season.

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Suddenly we looked at Duke in a different way.

“To their credit, once they lost him to the injury, they seem to be playing at an extremely high level,” Hamilton said. “That just says a lot about their system, how the kids have bought in, the job they're doing.”

But it seemed as if the Blue Devils were one bad shooting night away from a loss. That’s what happened Jan. 12 against Florida State. Duke shot 31.1 percent overall and lost 66-61.

“They knocked us back,” Krzyzewski said. “We have a long way to go.”

There was a little excitement last week when Irving had his cast removed. According to most reports, that was an expected part of the long-term plan. The good news was that doctors didn’t find additional reason for concern and they are encouraged by the way the injury is healing. The bottom line is Irving still has a month of rehabilitation before an assessment of his playing status can be made. This isn’t a common basketball injury and that makes recovery difficult to gauge.