SAN ANTONIO — Inside Duke’s locker room — away from the jubilant Houston Cougars, a crying Jim Nance and a stunned Hakeem Olajuwon — you heard every door close, every uniform tossed softly into a giant duffel bag and every word uttered by guard Sion James, who kept repeating the same refrain.
“Cooper (Flagg) is the best player in the country,” James, his eyes red from emotion, told Hoops HQ. “Get him where he wants the ball. The play was for him to shoot the shot he got. He got a good look. We trust him in that spot 100 times out of 100. Just be Cooper.”
The Blue Devils will have months (or forever) to dissect their final possession that began with 17.2 seconds remaining, trailing by one point — Flagg’s drive left, the spin toward the paint, the jumper over Houston’s J’Wan Roberts that fell tantalizingly short.
But in the raw aftermath of a national semifinal for the ages — Houston 70, Duke 67 — this is what it looked like as players tried to grasp in real time how a team that looked so dominant all season built what looked to be an insurmountable 14-point lead, how a brilliant performance by the nation’s best player under the brightest of spotlights looked like a prelude to a Monday night climax — how it all came with one jaw-dropping, late-game plot twist.
And in an eye-blink, it was over — Duke’s fabulous season, the brilliant college career of the 6-foot-9 Flagg. Chapter closed.
Players with blank stares sat on Final Four seats bearing the words: “The Road Ends Here.” Others stared into their cell phones. Tyrese Proctor, a 6-foot-6 junior, sunk into a corner locker with a towel draped over his head. Some staff and players nibbled on cold pizza. James, a 6-foot-6 fifth-year senior, tried to distill the emotion of seeing a remarkable season end so abruptly.
“It just really hurts,” James said. “We fully, 100 percent believe that we’re the best team in the country. We had a chance to prove it, and it hurts that we weren’t able to.”
For nearly 40 minutes, Flagg’s performance left most fans slack-jawed watching his dazzling display of acrobatic layups, jumpers, assists and blocks. He finished with 27 points, 7 rebounds, 4 assists, 3 blocks and 2 steals, demonstrating the full repertoire of his game that has made him a one-of-one talent, arguably the best freshman season we’ve seen in the modern era.
And now it’s left for posterity, ending without a national title that fellow freshman sensations Carmelo Anthony and Anthony Davis won during their one-and-done college careers.
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“The connectivity of this team, the connections and relationships we were able to have all year long — it was phenomenal,” Flagg said. “I hope that was able to shine through on the court. People can remember us and appreciate the way we were able to play and the effort we gave one another.”
Duke had a 14-point lead with 8:17 to play. A nine-point lead with 3:03 to play. A six-point lead with 1:14 to play. All erased in the third-largest comeback in a national semifinal in history.
The first thing coach Jon Scheyer told his team in the locker room: “I’m sorry.”
Scheyer has been on the other end of these soul-crushing Final Four games, having won the national title as a starting guard for Duke in 2010 after Butler’s Gordon Hayward came oh-so-close to banking in a near-half court shot that would have been etched in history. After that classic, the vibe in Butler’s locker room was much the same as Duke’s: Shock and devastation.
In his first Final Four appearance as a head coach, Scheyer couldn’t shake how his team allowed 42 second-half points, especially after the Blue Devils’ exceptional length caused the Cougars to hit just three of their first 17 shots. Even when his team’s offense stalled at times this season, it could almost always get stops to get separation on the scoreboard. But not late in the second half Saturday.
“I’m reflecting right now (on) what else I could have said or done,” Scheyer said. “I’m sure there’s a lot more that I could have done to help our guys at the end. That’s the thing that kills me the most. The amount of game situations we’ve watched this year — we haven’t had the real-life experience all the time, but that’s something that I really felt we prepared for. So I feel like I let our guys down in that regard.”
In the locker room, Duke players shrugged off the notion that the Blue Devils weren’t prepared for a late-game stress test because they won so many ACC games with relative ease. As they said, some ACC games would have been close had Duke not executed in the final minutes. The difference Saturday was the Blue Devils failed to execute.
Houston’s press forced a critical late-game turnover. Flagg committed a costly over-the-back foul with 19 seconds remaining, enabling Houston to take the lead on two free throws by Roberts. And with that, a team — and a player — saw it all come to a sudden end.
“The thing I loved about this group, they had a purity to them,” Scheyer said. “We’ve done this thing differently. Being young, to be this successful, part of ’em doesn’t know any better, which is great. Then also, like, these are the things that experience gives you when you go through these moments. Unfortunately, it comes with the tournament — it’s the most heartbreaking thing.”
As reporters trickled out of Duke’s locker room, James said, “Duke fans are special. It breaks our hearts that we couldn’t bring (national title) No. 6 back for them.”
Once all the fans had long departed from the Alamodome, once Duke’s locker room was closed to the media, once all the news conferences had ended, a golf cart carrying Duke’s two fabulous freshmen, Flagg and 6-foot-7 guard Kon Knueppel, zoomed by a few bystanders.
And with that, they were gone.
