‘Touch the floor, right now’: The sights and sounds as Duke beat Texas Tech in the Sweet 16 - The Athletic

2022-04-21 09:21:12 By : Ms. Miya Lin

SAN FRANCISCO — Wait a second. Mike Krzyzewski thought of one more thing.

It was the thick of a timeout, Krzyzewski’s Duke team clinging to a 69-68 lead over Texas Tech with 2:54 to play, and the 75-year-old head coach had mostly finished talking. He’d already implored his players, his bigs especially, to explode with every movement. “Be strong with the ball!” he barked, pumping his fist for extra emphasis. Then the players started shifting in their seats, standing up, ready to spring back onto the court inside Chase Center … until Krzyzewski called them all back to attention. He was mostly done. Not totally.

“Listen!” he called out, pausing to make eye contact with seemingly every player. They hung on his every word. And then, a coach’s command, for confidence and cohesion and clarity all at once:

“Touch the floor, right now.”

They did. All of them. Together, and Krzyzewski too, his palm pressing on the hardwood just the same. Call it corny, hokey, a harkening-back to the height of Duke’s powers, whatever … but also, call it for what it is. It worked. It worked, perfectly, the precise button to push at precisely the right time. On Duke’s first defensive possession after that timeout, Mark Williams emphatically blocked Bryson Williams’ shot, with the rebound landing in Jeremy Roach’s reliable hands. A lead preserved. A game preserved — Duke didn’t trail from that moment on, eventually outlasting Texas Tech and its No. 1 defense for a 78-73 Sweet 16 win.

A season preserved. And this coach’s career, too.

Now, yes, Duke did the same thing publicly a minute or two later. Krzyzewski was down on one knee when it happened, his players properly slapping the floor, invoking images of Amaker and Wojciechowski and all the ones who came before. But it was that private moment, out of the purview of the 17,514 people in attendance Thursday, upon which Duke’s title hopes took a turn for the better. “Slapping the floor,” Krzyzewski posited postgame, “what the hell? Why not? Our guys really wanted that, because it’s kind of like (crossing) the bridge to the brotherhood. They can now say they did that.”

That, and much more. They sent this team to the Elite Eight, and the verge of a Final Four in Krzyzewski’s curtain call. That it was the Hall of Famer’s 100th win in the NCAA Tournament — more than all but five programs in the country — is a shiny statistic, but not a consequential one. What mattered much more in win No. 1,201 overall for Krzyzewski was what his kids did, how they fought, and, ultimately, figured things out.

Because, after the way Texas Tech trounced all over Duke in the game’s opening minutes, there was a lot of figuring to do. Basically everything. Duke had more turnovers (3) than points (2) through the first four and a half minutes, with Krzyzewski calling timeout to calm his troops. “Obviously in that first four minutes,” he said later, “we weren’t ready for that level of expertise on defense, and their strength.” The Red Raiders — the 29th-tallest team in the country, per KenPom, with the length to match, that and its no-middle defense equating out to a 11.9 percent steal percentage and allowing opponents to shoot 44 percent on 2s — came out roaring, as ready for a rugby match as a basketball one. Duke, on the other hand … did not.

What that sounded like in the huddle? “That’s not us,” Krzyzewski said straight-faced to his squad, this moment and others witnessed and heard by this reporter’s seat assignment behind the Blue Devils’ bench. “We’re playing scared. What the hell do we have to be scared about?” His team looked terrified, not like one of the more talented of the 16 squads still standing.

So Krzyzewski challenged, and his players punched back. Immediately, Duke rattled off a 7-0 run, requiring 66 seconds to do so. Recalibration, complete. Then, you know, just keep up that caliber of play for the next 34 minutes and change.

Easier said than done. In one first-half huddle, with Krzyzewski finishing up his NCAA-mandated in-game TV interview, assistant coach Chris Carrawell took the metaphorical mic to remind Duke that, no, actually, this wasn’t going to be easy. “We can’t get tired. You miss a shot, get your ass back!” And, again, the staff hit the nail square on the head. Texas Tech’s halftime lead? Four points. Texas Tech’s first-half advantage in fast break points? Five. You do the math. Duke was .500 going into Thursday when it trailed at halftime (2-2), precedent saying the game could’ve gone either way.

But to only be down four at the break, after shooting just 37 percent overall and 27.3 percent from 3? Take that. Take that any day. And watching Krzyzewski when he emerged from the halftime locker room, you could sorta tell he felt the same. He plopped down in his padded folding chair while his team finished shooting, and just sat there for a second, whiteboard in hand, breathing out slowly through pursed lips. Then his players came back over, the second half was on, and so was his game face. For good measure, it turned out. We couldn’t have known in the moment itself, but the first possession after intermission proved prescient. Roach, resilient as he’s been since mid-February — the dagger-deliverer against Michigan State in the round of 32 — whittled his way into the lane and finessed a layup for his third field goal of the game. “The resolve of Jeremy Roach was incredible,” Krzyzewski said postgame. “His drives against that defense were so strong, so determined.” A week ago, Krzyzewski said Roach had some of the best drives he’d ever seen from a Duke guard. Hard to top that heaping praise, but if Roach keeps up this sort of play, his coach will find a way, and the words.

“These guys trust me,” Roach said, motioning to Mark Williams and Paolo Banchero beside him on the postgame dais, “and the coaching staff trusts me.”

Trust: What a word choice. Because the decision that changed the course of the game — for Duke to go zone with just over 14 minutes left to play, and then back again in the game’s waning minutes — was built on that entirely. Duke went into Thursday’s game having played zone on only 4 percent of its defensive possessions, per Synergy Sports. Krzyzewski joked that, on the team’s scouting report for Texas Tech, it noted zone defense was only an option if necessary. Then he smiled.

On Duke’s first defensive possession playing it, Banchero — who finished with a game-high 22 points, four rebounds, four assists, and three steals, in one of his better games in a Blue Devil uniform — grabbed a steal. The switch momentarily stunned the Red Raiders, even if the Blue Devils didn’t turn it into points. Maybe only momentarily, too. But it was a setback, the kind of small swing it takes to advance into the Elite Eight. “They have a Hall of Fame coach in Coach K over there,” said Texas Tech’s Adonis Arms. “He was trying to find a way to slow us down because we were scoring, giving the ball to Bryson (Williams) and attacking the gaps and their zone.” As for attacking those gaps: Yeah, coach-in-waiting Jon Scheyer noticed it immediately. And in a sign of ceding to the succession plan, in one second-half huddle, when Krzyzewski noticed Scheyer wanted to speak, he allowed it. “No, go ahead.” So Scheyer did, communicating that Duke’s zone was extended too far out, and then Krzyzewski picked back up right where he’d left off, one in-game baton pass back-and-forth, before the big one after this season.

Duke didn’t stay with it the rest of the game — rather, just long enough to get over itself offensively, to string together a 9-1 run that righted the ship. At that point, Duke let its decided talent advantage take over. Some of that was Roach, who ended up with 15 points, a team-high five assists, and whose probing drives punctured Texas Tech’s no-middle defense. Some of it was Williams, too, even if Duke’s 7-foot center drew Krzyzewski’s ire on the national broadcast; Marcus Santos-Silva stuffed one of Williams’ shots at the rim with 8:54 to play, prompting his coach to say “soft” when the camera panned to the sideline. All was forgiven about three and a half minutes later, though, when Williams hammered home a dunk that extended Duke’s lead to three, and brought the droves of blue-wearing fans in attendance back to their feet. “It felt like it gave the team some life,” Williams said after the game, still grinning. “I was really amped up. I think it got the team going, and I think that translated to the defensive end as well.”

That was an underrated element to Thursday’s nightcap: energy. More specifically, the exertion of it. “I’ve never,” Banchero said, “played in a basketball game like that.” Digging deep against a team as tenacious as Texas Tech isn’t just grabbing a shovel and slinging it around in the backyard; it’s an industrial operation, one requiring the no-quit equivalent of an enormous excavator. Against Michigan State, or at least in that game’s last five minutes, Duke had that machinery. Maybe it has not in every game this season, but when it has mattered most? “I wouldn’t say it’s a new clutch gene at all,” Banchero added. “I would say all year in the biggest moments, we’ve always stepped up — and there’s no bigger moment than this.”

So, let’s go to the biggest moment, after these teams kept trading haymakers and found themselves nearly matched with under 30 seconds to play. Two things on the coaching checklist: inbound the ball successfully, and make your free throws. “Listen, do not try to split,” Krzyzewski said in a last-minute timeout. “Let them foul you.” So Duke did. And up 3 with 25 ticks left, Wendell Moore drained two free throws. Up 2 with 12.9 seconds left, A.J. Griffin did the same. It took them all: the Blue Devils didn’t miss a shot over the game’s final 8:55 and ended up shooting 70.8 percent overall in the second half, the best an opponent has shot in a half against Texas Tech in the last seven seasons, and still had to sweat out that last minute. But by then, Texas Tech’s tank was torched, no fuel (or time) left to keep fighting. So when Arms’ last-ditch heave landed in Banchero’s behemoth grasp, Krzyzewski finally cracked on the sideline, flapping his arms in excitement and turning to face his family behind him. Daughter Debbie Savarino, standing in the front row behind Duke’s bench, could only muster one word: “Wow.” Then she teared up, burying her face in a bear hug, overcome by the moment.

Dad would keep going. Duke would keep going. At this point, they’re one in the same — and now, one step closer to the storybook sendoff. Arkansas awaits in the Elite Elite, another tough out on this treacherous climb to a final, Final Four.

But now halfway through the six-game slate it takes to win a title, all things seem possible again for Duke’s program. So too does Krzyzewski’s huddle hurrah, the timeout break-down he told his team every time it brought its fists together:

(Top photo of Mark Williams, left, and Paolo Banchero: Steph Chambers / Getty Images)