SAN ANTONIO — After spending a final season as understudy to Mike Krzyzewski before taking over the top job at his alma mater, one of Jon Scheyer’s first official acts as head coach of the Duke Blue Devils was to schedule a scrimmage to see just what kind of makeup his initial team had.
His first call, his only call, was to Houston Cougars coach Kelvin Sampson. Scheyer didn’t just want an easy warmup to build confidence in a group of young five-star freshmen mixed with a handful of veterans held over from the Final Four run a year prior, he wanted to test his team. He wanted to push them. He wanted to exhaust them.
So he took them west to Houston to scrimmage against a Cougars program which hung its hat on toughness, whose warmups before games include loose ball drills and which fostered an attitude on the court that was, with apologies to Nolan Richardson, as close to 40 minutes of hell as possible.
Neither of the two coaches ever declared an out-and-out winner of said scrimmage—it was basically a controlled practice, after all—but each noted in the days leading up to meeting in the Final Four on Saturday night how it served as an early foundation for the team Scheyer brought to San Antonio as the favorite to cut down the nets.
Whatever lessons the Blue Devils coach took away from the meeting and the man three decades his senior must have slipped his mind down the stretch in the national semifinal from the Alamodome. Scheyer, it seems, forgot about the grit and resilience that Sampson’s teams display right up until the horn sounds. It’s never over until it’s over when you play Houston.
Duke knows that now and will remember it in the wake of a 70–67 loss that will go down in the history books as one of the great March Madness choke jobs.
“It’s been a special ride that ended in a heartbreaking way. Frankly, the game, we did what we wanted to do. I thought our guys followed the game plan, controlled the game, we had the lead for 35 minutes,” Scheyer said. “It’s heartbreaking. It’s incredibly disappointing. There’s a lot of pain that comes with this.
“That’s what the tournament is all about. You’re an inch away from the national championship game.”
That inch, though, feels like a mile in retrospect. Duke didn’t just lose in its 18th Final Four appearance and have a victory snatched by the jaws of defeat—the Blue Devils blew it. One of the highest-rated teams by a variety of metrics, led by the consensus national player of the year and a certified No. 1 NBA draft pick, collapsed.
One shining moment? No, this was one shining .
The Blue Devils made just one field goal in the final 10 and 1/2 minutes of the second half. The second-best team in the two-decade history of KenPom’s efficiency rankings coming into the night managed to see a 14-point lead with eight minutes to play slip away.
They saw a nine-point lead with 2:14 on the clock evaporate.
They were up seven with 75 seconds remaining and had plenty of those wearing blue among the 68,252 in the building ensuring they had accommodations for Monday night to play the Florida Gators in the title game.
A mile away from the Alamo, the basketball world sure will remember this one as the one where the Texas side actually prevailed. For those at Duke, they sure won’t forget it—ever.
“We could talk about not scoring down the stretch. For me, it’s our defense. We gave up 42 points in the second half,” Scheyer said. “For me, as I reflect in the moment, I look at our defense. That was disappointing. Even if we’re not scoring, usually we get stops to get separation.”
Scheyer isn’t completely wrong, but he’s also not close to right either.
His defense was mostly fine in a game where they held their opponents to 37.7% from the field and held the lead right up until Emanuel Sharp’s three with 33 seconds left swung the momentum and unleashed a 9–0 run to close the game.
The Blue Devils’ incredible length was pesky from the opening tip and forced plenty of looks wide of the mark. The Cougars started the game just 3-of-16 from the field and prompted Sampson to call a timeout with Duke leading 16–9 and shooting 50%.
It looked like it was going to be a bloodbath, the kind of game that Duke had put together just about every week in building up the nation’s second-longest winning streak and which had lost just once since Thanksgiving.
But Houston kept hanging around. It kept attacking. It kept showing that veteran mettle that was Scheyer’s first test as a head coach and now his last of this season.
The Cougars made their final four baskets to close the first half, trailing by eight at the break, but never seemed to waver when Duke built its lead back up to 14 with 8:17 left. They kept attacking on the defensive end, diving for every loose ball available.
Mostly, they kept feeding Sharp and L.J. Cryer, who was Houston’s leading scorer with 26 points and prompted the whole team to shout he was, “the coldest,” in unison as they made their way to a very joyous locker room after celebrating on the court with alums Jim Nantz and Hakeem Olajuwon.
“They missed a couple tough ones. But we held them to 37% in the second half. We held that team to 67 points. That was a tempo we could live with. We could not win this game in the 80s. We couldn’t score 80,” said Sampson, who spoke uninterrupted for nearly five minutes when first discussing the victory. “I felt like we could win the game in the high 60s or low 70s.”
That they did, though it was not for a lack of effort from the player most in the building were there to see in Duke forward Cooper Flagg. He looked every bit like the best player in the sport over the course of 40 minutes and had a game-high 27 points to go with a stat-stuffing seven rebounds, four assists, three blocks and two turnovers.
The problem for Duke wasn’t that Flagg wasn’t Flagg in the loss. It’s that nobody else on the carefully constructed roster was in any way capable of playing sidekick to Superman.
“Coop had the hot hand,” said fellow freshman Kon Knueppel, who notched 16 points but was held to only four after halftime. “We had to give him the ball.”
“More than anything, it’s disappointment. We fully believe that we have the best team in the country,” said guard Sion James, who scored all seven of his points in the second half. “And we had a chance to prove it.”
They didn’t, even with the ball in Flagg’s hands and the clock ticking down under 17 seconds to play.
It was the scenario every kid dreams about on his driveway. A special season on the line and the play is calling your number. Flagg got a clear out to the left side of the lane, took a few dribbles into the heart of the Houston defense and pulled up with a clean look despite one outstretched hand coming in late.
“Took it into the paint. Thought I got my feet set, rose up. Left it short obviously,” said Flagg of the shot that bounced out and into the hands of a leaping Mylik Wilson for the game-sealing rebound. “A shot I’m willing to live with in the scenario.”
That is probably also the case for the rest of Duke’s roster, even if everything else leading up to it won’t be.
Flagg had 19 points in the second half but only three others managed to score after emerging from the locker room. Fellow lottery pick Khaman Maluach (six points) was almost nonexistent down the stretch despite a handful of lob attempts and layups at the rim early on. He didn’t have a single field goal attempt after halftime and finished the game without a rebound.
Guard Tyrese Proctor was also red hot coming into the Final Four, shooting 64% from beyond the arc during the tourney through the first four rounds. Yet he failed to connect on any of his four attempts from three on Saturday, made just two field goals and finished the game with more fouls than assists. He also missed the front end of a one-and-one with 20 seconds left and his lone turnover led to a foul the other way that put the Cougars in the bonus.
The Australian, one of just two who returned to the team from last season and the lone player present for that scrimmage with the Cougars three years ago, could barely speak afterward. He did his best to mumble through a few answers but mostly just sat in his locker room with a towel over his head in disbelief.
He wasn’t alone.
“Unfortunately, it comes with the tournament. It’s the most heartbreaking thing,” Scheyer said. “But I just try to explain to them, like, what they’ve done for Duke, our program, our university. It’s been one of the best seasons ever.”
Reaching the Final Four in his third season, winning the ACC with a conference-record number of victories and clinching the league tournament without Flagg can allow Scheyer to believe that. And for any other program, that would ring true.
But the former player turned assistant turned head coach must also know that in Durham, N.C., none of that matters. Only the banners they get to hang at Cameron Indoor Stadium do.
“Obviously, we have great respect for Duke and their team, their tradition, what Coach K and Duke has meant to this game for so long,” Sampson said. “I said the same thing after we beat Gonzaga. You’re not just beating a good team, you’re beating an unbelievable program. It took us a while to become who we are. At some points if you have a culture … quitting is not part of the deal. We’re not going to quit. We’re just going to play better.”
That program he beat is no longer Coach K’s however. This one is fully, and completely, Scheyer’s now.
He knows that better than anybody at the moment, one last lesson to take home with him from Sampson in the wake of a tournament collapse that will forever be on his record.
