After ACC championship game defeat, end draws closer for Coach K and his time at Duke
He walked off the court to the sound of the other team’s celebration and stopped just beyond the tunnel for a quiet conversation with one of two captains, Wendell Moore, Jr., before he took his wife by the hand. This was after Mike Krzyzewski’s final loss in the ACC tournament — the loss before loss, the last of his career, unless Duke wins six more games.
It was late Saturday night. Krzyzewski looked tired, worn.
Soon he’d reveal a hoarse voice during his postgame press conference, the sound of a man who’d spent much of the past two hours trying to will something out of his team it did not have. Then he entered a trance of resignation and acceptance in the final moments of the Blue Devils’ 82-67 loss against Virginia Tech in the ACC tournament championship game.
There was a time when Krzyzewski and his teams more or less owned this tournament. Entering Saturday he’d won it 15 times. This was the 22nd time he’d led Duke to the championship game, more than any other coach in league history. Throughout the late 90s and 2000s, it felt like the Blue Devils made it every year, and during one 13-year stretch they won it 10 times.
It looked easier for Krzyzewski back then, or at least easier than it looked here Saturday night. The Blue Devils trailed by three at halftime and Krzyzewski needed all of 36 seconds after the second half began to know that he’d seen enough. He called a timeout after Virginia Tech took a five-point lead and the Blue Devils formed a tight circle around their old coach, in his 42nd and final season.
From the other side of the court, Krzyzewski could not be heard but he could be seen, the sight of his arms emphasizing the points he was making visible through his players’ legs. His hoarseness gave it away later, too, as did Krzyzewski’s animation throughout most of the second half while the Hokies gradually exerted more and more control.
He could only do so much, though. And eventually, and especially throughout the final few minutes, Krzyzewski wore the expression of a man who’d come to understand the limits of his power. He could yell and he could scream and he could stand in front of his team’s bench and try to guide his players the way a director would a symphony. But ultimately it was up to them.
“Our kids fought like crazy,” he said afterward, before acknowledging that his team “played tired.” “We played hard. An older team handles tired better. I know they played an extra game than us, but when you’re older, you handle that better.”
Krzyzewski had built so many of his conference championship teams around older, more experienced players — around guys who stuck around for years and developed the kind of grit that Duke often lacked throughout the second half. He’d won 69 ACC tournament games entering Saturday but he’d experienced plenty of losses, too, including the worst one of his career.
That was in 1983, the 43-point defeat against Virginia in the opening round at The Omni in Atlanta. A number of Duke supporters — and no small number, either — wanted Krzyzewski fired after a second consecutive 17-loss season. That team 39 years ago was led by a talented core of freshmen who grew up and grew older together, and led Duke to a Final Four three years later.
This team has no such luxury. Like then, the Blue Devils’ best players now are freshmen but the window is shorter. Paolo Banchero is assured of being a top-five pick in the NBA draft and Duke’s other two freshmen starters, A.J. Griffin and Trevor Keels, will have the opportunity to leave school early, too.
More than once Saturday night, Krzyzewski came back to the lessons he hoped his players could learn from what they endured against Virginia Tech. The Hokies were relentless, and denied Duke every time it felt like the Blue Devils might rally. Once, Banchero found himself on the wrong end of a dunk that left him on his backside on the court, as if he’d been helpless to stop it.
“We’ve got to move on and learn from it,” Krzyzewski said, though he knows what everyone knows: that time is running out.
A week earlier, this same Duke team fell flat in the second half of a defeat against North Carolina in Krzyzewski’s final game as a head coach inside Cameron Indoor Stadium. That night, it was as if the Blue Devils wilted under the pressure of a national spotlight and the pressure to deliver Krzyzewski a victory in his final home game.
A week later brought a similar opportunity, and a similar feel. In a season in which he has tried to avoid thinking about moments in terms of “lasts” – last trip to Chapel Hill; last game here, or there; last home game — those final experiences have also been unavoidable. The Blue Devils had one chance to give Krzyzewski a championship in his last showing in an event he has dominated more than any coach ever has. This Duke team couldn’t get it done.
“Obviously it’s extremely disappointing,” Moore said, though he argued that he was proud, nonetheless, in the effort. “We came down here to ultimately win a championship. We fell short of our goal, but at the end of the day, I’m proud of our guys by the way we fought.”
For so long in the ACC tournament, Krzyzewski’s Duke teams often left their opponents to talk about being proud of the effort, and the fight. Now the Blue Devils were left to take solace in a moral victory, if one existed at all.
So many times Krzyzewski walked off the court at an ACC tournament having just climbed a ladder to help cut down a net. Late Saturday night he walked off mostly alone, until he met with Moore and held his wife’s hand on the way to the locker room. They talked softly, walking down a concrete hallway in the bowels of the Barclays Center, before they both went left into the locker room.
Krzyzewski spent about 15 minutes inside. In the distance, the sounds of Virginia Tech’s championship celebration could be heard drifting in through the nearby tunnel.
At one point, Kyrie Irving, whom Krzyzewski coached at Duke during Irving’s lone season there, walked up and waited outside the locker room. He talked with a security guard outside the door as if Irving, an NBA All-Star guard with the Brooklyn Nets, needed to explain who he was. Finally, a Duke staffer waved him inside.
The team managers, meanwhile, loaded bags onto a cart and wheeled them toward the bus. Irving made his way out, too, and talked with Blue Devils assistant coach Nolan Smith, before Krzyzewski walked out with Mickie still by his side. They made their way to Duke’s postgame press conference, where Krzyzewski sat down and sounded tired, like he said his team had been in defeat.
“Playing this game helps us,” Krzyzewski said, “because this is the caliber of team and execution that you’re going to have to beat in order to advance” in the NCAA tournament. It was a new season, he said the day before Selection Sunday, “and right now we’re 0-0.”
Soon enough he was on his feet again, making his way down the hall from where he’d come. He limped while he moved, his back slightly hunched, as though he was in a state of discomfort. Moments after Krzyzewski’s final ACC tournament press conference, a crew at the Barclays Center was already going to work. A man readied a forklift to enter the arena and prepare it for an NBA game the next day. Workers tore down the ACC tournament signage.
Another milestone had come and gone for Krzyzewski, his final ACC tournament game. He entered the locker room and walked out again and made his way out of the arena. His next walk like this, contemplating a defeat, would be his last. There was one more chance to start over. The new season, as he called it, had arrived.
This story was originally published March 13, 2022 at 7:38 AM.
