After Duke rises to the occasion, Coach K savors the moment with his family
Mike Krzyzewski turned around once and then again. A wide smile broke out across his face, an expression that was part relief and part jubilation. He touched his heart. He lifted his arms and reached out his hands, as if to send whatever he was feeling in the moment — love, pride, gratitude and anything else — into the first rows of seats closest to the Duke bench.
His grandchildren and other members of his family were sitting there, standing now, in the final seconds, and for about two hours they’d lived and died with Krzyzewski and with every minute of Duke’s odyssey against Michigan State here in the second round of the NCAA tournament.
The finish had been wild, chaotic, intense, heart-pounding — all of that and more — and when the Blue Devils emerged from the maelstrom with another day to play, Krzyzewski turned toward his family and gave thanks. Once. Then again. They shared this moment and memory together.
Krzyzewski had survived. His team had survived, somehow, and it prevailed just when it looked like it all might end — Duke’s season and Krzyzewski’s career. But now, in the final seconds, he wore the look of a man who’d seen the end and fended it off; the look of a man who’d somehow won something more than a second round NCAA tournament game. Behind him, the clock above one of the baskets showed 3.9 seconds remaining in his team’s 85-76 victory, and soon enough he’d recount both his team’s performance during the final minutes and this moment here, now, with his family a few feet away.
Duke was moving on, bound for San Francisco and the tournament’s West Regional. For the 26th time, Krzyzewski had guided a team into the Sweet 16, and this particular journey there was hard-won and hard-fought, filled with the kind of gritty moments and gut checks that the Blue Devils have lacked in recent weeks, or failed. Amid all that toughness, though, this was a Duke performance that left Krzyzewski an emotional puddle at the end, a grateful grandpa, proud.
“One of the best moments for me was turning around and seeing all my grandkids right behind the bench,” he said, “and they’re crying, they’re cheering,” and then Krzyzewski during his postgame press conference momentarily lost the ability to form sentences and was left with only exclamatory words.
“Wow,” he said, searching. “I mean, God bless — how lucky ...
“I mean, it’s so good,” he said, regaining his composure, and someone had just asked him to share his perspective about having reached another milestone number, for the victory Sunday was also the 1,200th of Krzyzewski’s career.
“It’s so good,” he said, not so much about that number but about being able to share it with the people behind his bench. “So 1,200’s great. But that scene was better.”
It was the kind of celebration, in the final seconds and the immediate aftermath of Duke’s victory, that almost seemed out of place given the circumstances. This was, after all, only the second round, and the Blue Devils, the No. 2 seed in the West, were expected to make it out of Greenville, anyway. And yet when it ended there was Trevor Keels making his way to Kryzyzewski’s family for a big group hug, and there was Krzyzewski’s grandson, Michael Savarino, a former walk-on turned scholarship reserve, climbing atop the partition at the edge of the seats to bask in the moment.
For Duke and Krzyzewski, it was “the how” of the whole thing that led to the outpouring afterward. It was the catharsis of winning the way the Blue Devils did — by allowing a nine-point second-half lead to evaporate, slowly, before it was gone altogether, and replaced by a five-point deficit with five minutes to play.
It was the kind of moment in which Duke has faltered and even folded in the past. The Blue Devils could not handle the pressure of Krzyzewski’s final home game, or North Carolina’s penetrating guards, during a humbling defeat at the end of the regular season. Last week in Brooklyn, in the ACC tournament, Duke did not rise to the occasion against Virginia Tech in the championship game; it was the Hokies, instead, who seized the moment. And then came another test of fortitude late in the second half here on Sunday, with Krzyzewski’s grandchildren and one of his daughters screaming for the Blue Devils to persevere — urging them, pleading with them to find a way.
Did they think this might be it? The end of a once-promising season, and an inglorious ending to one of the great coaching careers in any sport, at any level?
“Losing didn’t come up one time,” Wendell Moore Jr., the junior forward and one of Duke’s captains, said afterward — and it almost sounded believable before Krzyzewski interjected: “You’re not going to talk about losing or else you’re going to lose,” he said.
Said Paolo Banchero, Duke’s all-ACC freshman:
“The season’s on the line every single game. So I mean, that’s really all that needs to be said. We knew that. We got down. We were in the timeout, and we were just like, look ... We can either lay down, or we can turn it up. That’s really all it was, man. Just fighting, like you said, having heart.”
It was a journey to discover such fortitude.
During one timeout midway early in the second half, Krzyzewski implored his players to give more effort; to rebound with more hunger, to expend more energy pursuing the loose balls that the Spartans, to that point, always seemed to wrangle. Krzyzewski during that timeout focused his attention on Trevor Keels and Moore and Mark Williams, and Krzyzewski yelled, “All three of you guys are like this,” before he did his best impersonation of a statue.
“When that balls goes up, everybody goes up,” he said.
He has not often had to coach such effort with his more veteran teams, but an experienced bunch this is not. The Blue Devils remain young, reliant on freshmen the way that so many of Krzyzewski’s recent teams have, and after the loss in the ACC tournament championship game, Krzyzewski lamented how his team played young, unable to overcome its inexperience and lack of poise.
It felt, for several intense moments here inside the Bon Secours Wellness Arena, that Duke’s youth might again prove to be its undoing; that the moment might be too great, as it was last week in Brooklyn and not long before that during Krzyzewski’s farewell at Cameron Indoor Stadium. Krzyzewski himself was left to wonder, as his team’s lead disappeared and as the pressure mounted, “if we were going to stay young.”
But then Banchero, who has shouldered the expectations and hype that has followed him throughout his first and presumably only college season, finished an aggressive drive to the basket with a layup and Duke came up with a defensive stop and Jeremy Roach penetrated and finished at the rim to cut Michigan State’s lead to one. And then, after the Spartans pushed it back to three, Roach made a long 3 from the left side to tie it, and send Krzyzewski’s family into delirium behind the bench.
“My guys were so tough in those last six minutes of the game,” Krzyzewski said, and soon his voice was cracking with the kind of emotional display that for him is rarer. “... I’m incredibly proud of my guys,” he said, turning toward some of them on the podium in the interview room and addressing then directly: “You guys were terrific, man.”
“I’m really proud to be your coach. It had nothing to do with coaching those last four or five minutes. It all had to do with heart and togetherness.”
He said his team was “becoming men,” and in the final moments it felt like the Blue Devils had grown more in the span of those dizzying final five minutes than they did during various weeks- or months-long stretches this season. That was the cause of the euphoria in the final seconds, Krzyzewski’s family members bouncing in their seats, his grandchildren yelling and clapping and embracing. At most, Krzyzewski has four more games remaining and at worst he has only one.
The moments are slipping by now, a long journey nearing its end, and after his 99th NCAA tournament victory Krzyzewski looked like a man aware of the clock, and that victories like this are fleeting. And so he turned back toward his family and shared the moment with them and later, he said, “Look, I’m 75. To have moments like that, you’ve got to be kidding me.”
“Really, how damn lucky can you be in that?” and it was an impossible question to answer. He knew one thing, though: “Today was one of the really good days,” he said, and he and the Blue Devils were off to San Francisco.
This story was originally published March 20, 2022 at 10:58 PM.
