2 days Ago
NEWARK, N.J. — With 6:39 separating Duke from the Final Four berth it’s been chasing all season, Jon Scheyer huddled his team and took a deep breath.
What he said next would be the thread: either the thing that sent the Blue Devils to San Antonio ...
or the most misread moment of Scheyer’s three-year tenure. Advertisement “It’s our time, right f—ing now. Right f—ing now!” Scheyer barked out.
“This is our game.” And soon enough, it was. Two days after Alabama posted one of the truly historic offensive efforts in the hallowed history of March Madness, Duke dialed up its top-five defense one more time and put the clamps on the Crimson Tide, 85-65, to advance to its First Final Four under Scheyer and the program’s 18th overall but first since 2022.
Duke will play the winner of Sunday’s South Regional final between Houston and Tennessee next Saturday. No. 1 Florida advanced earlier Saturday after defeating Texas Tech.
Duke’s defense had carried the Blue Devils to ACC regular-season and tournament titles, to the No. 1 ranking in the country and the No. 1 seed in the East Regional.
Now, only two more games separate the Blue Devils from immortality and a sixth national championship banner to hang in Cameron Indoor Stadium. Given Alabama’s offensive explosion on Thursday, Saturday’s regional final was always going to be decided by whether Duke could sufficiently slow Nate Oats’ team’s high-octane offense. The Crimson Tide finished the game shooting a dismal 23-for-65 (35.
4 percent) overall and 8-for-32 from 3 — a dramatic departure from two days earlier, when Bama canned an NCAA Tournament record 25 triples. But perhaps most noteworthy of all was limiting a team that averaged 13.7 fastbreak points per game — the 18th most in America, per CBB Analytics — to just eight on Saturday night.
It’s no coincidence, then, what Scheyer’s message was all game, repeated seemingly every time his team huddled inside Prudential Center: “Get our asses back, play our f—ing pace and do what you do.” It helped that Duke couldn’t have asked for a better start, with Cooper Flagg (who finished with 16 points, nine rebounds and three assists) draining a top-of-the-key 3 on the team’s very first possession to kick off a 15-5 run out of the gate. And while Alabama eventually settled in, that initial cushion proved pivotal to Duke building a game-long lead, which stood at 46-37 at halftime.
So did the fact that Duke’s offense — which entered Saturday night averaging 94 points in its first three tournament games — faced little early resistance. The Blue Devils shot 56.3 percent in the first half.
Advertisement But just as critical? That airtight Blue Devils defense, which suffocated an Alabama offense that has comfortably stood inside the top 10 all season. Duke and Alabama made the same number of threes (five) in the first 20 minutes, except Duke did so on 10 fewer attempts: nine compared to the Crimson Tide’s 19. It helped, obviously, that Duke threw entire waves of defenders at Alabama’s All-American guard Mark Sears, stymieing who had been the hottest player in the Crimson Tide’s Sweet 16 blowout over BYU.
Sears did not score for the first 17:43 of the game, instead racking up as many turnovers (three) as he did shots. And while he finally got a middy to fall minutes before the break, Duke’s length — as the tallest team in the country, per KenPom, with no rotation players under 6 feet 5 — proved to be just as much of an impediment as it was all season. There’s a reason why Scheyer and one of his closest friends in basketball, Boston Celtics general manager Brad Stevens, agreed on the best college roster-building philosophy back in the preseason: There’s no substitute for length.
As Duke returned to the court for the second half, Flagg’s mother, Kelly, said out loud what Duke fans in their living rooms nationwide were surely thinking: “100 more minutes, that’s all I want.” Alabama’s response out of intermission — a 1-for-7 shooting start and a missed opportunity to whittle down the deficit — only made that more likely. Even when Duke went three second-half minutes without a made basket, the Blue Devils’ ability to get to the charity stripe — they shot 19-for-22 from the line for the game, including 14-for-16 in the second half — kept Alabama at bay.
But ultimately, that same free-throw prowess was what allowed Alabama to claw its way back into the competition. Alabama shot 10 of its 14 total free throws in the second half. In that same huddle with 6:39 to play, Scheyer didn’t mince words in reminding his team of that: “They are automatic free-throw shooters.
” Advertisement Message received. For the rest of the game, Alabama scored seven points, finishing with its fewest since Jan. 14.
And what do you know? An 11-0 run during the game’s final minutes, highlighted by a Flagg floater, extended Duke’s margin and made the home stretch a coronation. For a team that, once again, proved it’s more than capable of winning this whole thing. (Photo of Cooper Flagg: Vincent Carchietta / Imagn Images).
