How a week in March helped Duke reach Final Four in Coach K’s last NCAA tournament run
Four Saturdays ago, Duke suffered one of the more humbling defeats of Mike Krzyzewski’s 42 years as head coach, the defeat against North Carolina in his final game at Cameron Indoor Stadium. The loss came amid a days-long celebration, one that reached a crescendo in the moments before tip-off when Krzyzewski made his way onto the court through a human tunnel composed of almost 100 of his former players.
When the game ended, he sat through an uncomfortable postgame ceremony, a celebratory video playing overhead while he sat in a chair, unmoved. It looked like Krzyzewski would’ve rather been anywhere else, and during one impromptu moment he described the defeat as “unacceptable.”
Three Saturdays ago, the Blue Devils failed to atone for that earlier loss. Duke’s defeat against Virginia Tech in the ACC tournament championship game, in Brooklyn, left the Blue Devils’ direction in doubt. They’d at times looked lethargic in that game, especially defensively, and afterward they appeared as far away as ever from the promise they’d shown earlier in the season, when they were thought to be one of the nation’s best teams.
Here in New Orleans this week, those Saturdays have felt like a hazy memory. No, Duke’s regular-season-ending loss against UNC will not be soon forgotten — or ever forgotten, if you’re a Tar Heels supporter — and neither will Virginia Tech’s first conference championship. But, pick your metaphor: Duke has risen from the ashes of those early-March tribulations or been shaped by the fire, like iron.
They’re in the Final Four, where another shot at UNC awaits on Saturday night, and the story of Duke’s arrival here cannot be told without a full understanding of what happened in those days between its defeat in the ACC tournament championship and the start of the NCAA tournament.
‘Get on the bus as one team’
Several players here on Friday described what happened then: the team meeting when the Blue Devils returned to Durham, the practices that followed, the message from Krzyzewski that still resonates.
Paolo Banchero, the Blue Devils’ standout freshman forward, put it like this:
“Coach had just told us after that game,” he said, referencing the loss against Virginia Tech, that “coming into the tournament we could get on the bus as one team and get back to how we win, or we could go home early.”
Krzyzewski pulled the metaphor from his grab-bag of assorted travel-related sayings, which also includes one about crossing the bridge. He used that one last week in San Francisco, after Duke won the NCAA tournament West Regional with a relatively easy victory against Arkansas, and after that game he turned to his players during the postgame press conference and congratulated them.
“You crossed the bridge, man,” Krzyzewski said, after this Duke team had secured his 13th Final Four in his final season.
Historic event
There has been so much focus here in New Orleans during the past two days of the significance of a Duke-UNC game in the Final Four and, indeed, it’s historic. The longtime rivals have played each other 257 times, with many of those meetings being between highly-ranked teams, and no shortage of them playing an important role in determining conference championships. But the Tar Heels and Blue Devils have never met in the NCAA tournament, much less in a Final Four.
That’s by design, given their shared history of success, and the frequency with which they’ve earned their way into the tournament with high seeds. The selection committee has more often than not placed Duke and UNC on opposite ends of the bracket, so that they’d play each other only in a national championship game. That it’s finally happening has been the dominant storyline of this event, in the way that Krzyzewski’s final season has been the dominant story of this college basketball season.
Players on both sides here on Friday took their turns trying to put into words the significance of this moment. Usually they came up with a variation of what Wendell Moore Jr. said, and Moore would know, given his North Carolina roots.
“It’s really the greatest rivalry of all time,” he said. “That’s really the only way you can put it. Honestly, there’s nothing else like it. I’ve grown up in Charlotte, and I’ve watched every single Duke-North Carolina game I could. And every single one of them has been an amazing game — I mean, I was glued to the TV from the start to finish ... it’s just iconic.”
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An improbable meeting
There have been many years when Duke and North Carolina both entered an NCAA tournament as favorites to reach the Final Four; years when observers could look at the bracket and imagine the possibility of what a game between them might be like in a national semifinal or national championship game. This was not one of those years — at least it wasn’t thought to be. That perhaps has added to the intrigue.
North Carolina entered the tournament as a No. 8 seed, and had to overcome top-seeded Baylor in the second round (and did, after building a 25-point lead and letting it evaporate, before prevailing in overtime). And Duke, meanwhile, had to find a way to rediscover its mojo.
The Blue Devils’ most visible turning point came against Michigan State in the second round in Greenville, S.C., when Duke trailed the Spartans by five points with five minutes remaining. The crowd in the arena rose to its feet. Tom Izzo, the Michigan State coach and a tornado of emotion, urged his players to rise to the occasion. Duke, though, kept its poise and found a way, which is something it failed to do against UNC and Virginia Tech on those consecutive Saturdays.
All aboard
That moment forged Duke, but so did everything that happened in the days before, when Krzyewski challenged his players to come together and decide which direction they wanted to go: toward New Orleans, or back home.
Like Banchero, Moore on Friday also recalled Krzyzewski’s message back then, and the metaphor: “We’ve all got to get on the same bus with each other,” Moore recalled Krzyzewski saying.
“Because coach has been there, he’s been to the mountaintop,” Moore said. “He even pointed out he’s failed more than others. So the thing is, whenever he tells you something, I mean, it would be a pretty smart idea to listen to him.”
The Blue Devils have been a different team since they returned home from Brooklyn. When they arrived back in Durham, said Mark Williams, the sophomore forward, Krzyzewski told his players to forget the Virginia Tech loss, or at least not to let it linger; that if Duke failed to do that “your season will be over quick.”
It has lasted three more weeks and now will end, as improbably as it seemed not too long ago, in New Orleans. The first thing the Blue Devils see when they walk into their locker room here at the Superdome is their tournament journey, laid out in bracket form. There’s a large West Regional bracket at the entrance of the locker room, and Duke’s evolution is seen through each round; the victories over Cal State Fullerton and Michigan State and Texas Tech and Arkansas.
Really, though, the journey began before that. It began with those transformational days between Brooklyn and Greenville, after the pain of consecutive losing Saturdays helped Duke find its way.
This story was originally published April 1, 2022 at 9:30 PM.
