How Duke discovered its mojo after earlier March losses left its direction in doubt
There was a time, not all that long ago, when Mike Krzyzewski could watch one of his younger players make a mistake — a not-smart foul, for instance, or a poor decision — and imagine how the experience of the blunder might one day prove beneficial. That’s how it used to be, he said here on Friday, back when “you would have years” to build teams, little by little.
Krzyzewski was dressed for work, all activewear and sneakers, when he took a moment to reflect on how things were. It was the day before Duke’s game against Arkansas here on Saturday in the NCAA tournament West Regional final; the day before his Blue Devils would be playing for the chance to go to another Final Four, which would be their first since 2015.
After 75 years on Earth and 1,201 college basketball victories and 42 years at Duke, none of this is all that new for Krzyzewski. He has been on this stage many times, on the precipice of the Final Four. This is the 17th time he has led Duke to an NCAA tournament regional final. Twelve times, his teams have won those games and advanced to the national semifinals.
And yet this feels different, too, in part because of the obvious storyline that this is Krzyzewski’s final March but also because of how different this particular journey has been. Exactly three weeks ago Saturday, Duke lost at home against North Carolina — a defeat that’s sure to be remembered among the most humbling of Krzyzewski’s tenure given it came in his final game at Cameron Indoor Stadium.
And exactly two weeks ago Saturday, the Blue Devils at times looked flat and unresponsive in losing against Virginia Tech in the ACC tournament championship game. Those consecutive Saturdays raised all kinds of questions about the Blue Devils, ones about their capacity for defense and whether they’d hit a wall or what had happened to a team that looked so promising earlier in the season.
Perhaps the most pressing question of all, though, was this: Was Duke tough enough for March?
It all had to be grating for Krzyzewski, who has built his program and Hall of Fame career on the intangible and difficult-to-define grit at the foundation of his best teams, which were defined by the floor-slapping intensity of relentless man-to-man defenses, and the courage to rise to the occasion in the biggest moments. And now here he was, approaching the end, with a team that suddenly had to answer for its lack of toughness. But that was then and this is now, and now the Blue Devils have suddenly discovered some resolve.
The Duke of two or three weeks ago would have found it difficult, indeed, to muster the fortitude to overcome a five-point deficit with five minutes to play last Sunday against Michigan State. And the Duke of early March might’ve found a way to lose against Texas Tech here on Thursday night, when the pressure of the moment seemed to seep through every crevice of the Chase Center.
Both times, though, the Duke of now found a way to prevail. The turnaround — from an inability to rise from the mat in consecutive weeks against North Carolina and Virginia Tech, to now, on the verge of the Final Four after surviving the exact circumstances in which the Blue Devils melted just weeks ago — has to rank among the most improbable of Krzyzewski’s trips to the NCAA tournament.
He has not had years to mold this team amid its challenges, after all, but weeks.
Krzyzewski on Friday thought back to his fourth national championship team, in 2010. That year, Jon Scheyer and Nolan Smith and others completed a transformation that had been a long time in the making, with the same players going through the same trials and, ultimately, experiencing the same euphoria when they were part of the last team standing on the first Monday night in April.
“They were able to have adversity help build them,” Krzyzewski said, and it had long become more difficult to reap the benefits of such adversity in a time of constant roster turnover due to one-and-done NBA Draft entries and transfers. With younger teams that haven’t had years together, Krzyzewski said, “you’re trying to avoid as much adversity.”
“But in the last 10 days or so of the regular season and the (ACC) tournament, we experienced a very deep level of adversity,” he said, “and in some respects it really helped us. I would rather not have experienced it, but I think it helped us.
“It hurt. They grew together and we all took responsibility and figured out what was wrong, and then we tried to correct it. It was actually in some respects a good thing, but that usually happens over a — it used to be, over a decade ago, over a period of time.”
It is not as if Krzyzewski has waved a magic wand during the past couple of weeks, or reached into a tattered bag of tricks that might be showing its age in his 47th year as a head coach. Krzyzewski has been “the same old guy every day,” sophomore guard Jeremy Roach said here on Friday, though Roach acknowledged that the Blue Devils have benefited from an attitude adjustment that Krzyzewski engineered.
After the defeats against UNC and Virginia Tech, Krzyzewski embraced the approach, as he does every year, of treating the NCAA tournament like a new season. He asked his players to deposit their baggage somewhere else and not carry it into the tournament where, Roach said, Duke has adopted a fresh motto: “We can, we will.”
By now these Blue Devils have spent nearly a year living inside the college basketball version of an aquarium. Visitors step into their world a bit and look behind the glass and wonder how it might be in there, amid the swirl and drama of Krzyzewski’s farewell season. Wendell Moore Jr., the junior forward, acknowledged Friday that perhaps he and his teammates might have been “a little distracted” entering the regular season finale against North Carolina, and one could pardon the Blue Devils if that were the case.
After all, that game became the main event in what seemed like an endless ESPN infomercial recapping Krzyzewski’s career and accomplishments. The network’s “GameDay” show set up outside of Cameron Indoor Stadium, where nearly 100 former Duke players arrived to see their old coach on the home bench one last time. Since then, though, it feels as though a weight has been lifted off of Duke — or at least as though the pressure of the tournament hasn’t exceeded the sort of pressure the Blue Devils have already endured, and perhaps become acclimated to playing through.
“It’s not only his last tournament, it’s our last tournament,” said Mark Williams, the sophomore center. “Like, it’ll be the last time the 14 of us are going to be together, playing. Obviously, we know the stakes for Coach, but at the same time, for us, we’re not going to get this back.”
Williams revealed that he and his teammates had spent some time this week with Steph Curry, the NBA All-Star and face of the hometown Golden State Warriors. Curry shared some advice with the Blue Devils, Williams said, as did Grant Hill, the former Duke All-American who is in town to work the West Regional as part of CBS’ lead college basketball broadcasting team. Both Curry and Hill shared the same sentiment, according to Williams, the message being about “just cherishing the moment.”
If anything has become clear for Duke during its past two games, it’s that the moment no longer appears too big. That wasn’t the case on those back-to-back Saturdays earlier this month, but it has become so now, and the Blue Devils seem to have somehow managed to condense a yearslong growth process into a couple of weeks.
Their evolution now has them one game from the Final Four, and if they get there it’d be the first time since 1994 that Duke advanced that far without being a No. 1 seed. Of Krzyzewski’s 12 Final Four teams, seven reached the national semifinals after earning top seeds, including the ones that made it there in 1999, 2001, 2004, 2010 and 2015.
Those five teams all entered the tournament as Final Four favorites, with the certainty that they belonged. This one, meanwhile, began the tournament with no shortage of questions. Before it began, Krzyzewski issued his team a challenge, said Moore, one of the Blue Devils’ captains.
“We’ve just been playing with that immense intensity lately,” he said, before describing how Krzyzewski has coached the potential out of this group. “He’s gotten on a couple of us just because he knows we can play better. Everybody he’s gotten on has responded in a positive way to what he’s been saying.
“That could be his kind of way of using tricks to get us motivated. But it’s been working.”
Duke has responded with its two grittiest victories of the season, throwback performances to a different time, when teams grew up together and grew older and tougher as the years passed. The Blue Devils don’t have that luxury now but they have this moment.
This story was originally published March 25, 2022 at 11:07 PM.
