Duke has national championship talent, but it won’t have a national championship season.
Duke is out of the NCAA tournament, and the reason isn’t that deep
Duke played an elite team in a tough environment and lost a classic by a shred. There’s no need to overanalyze this.
Photo by Jamie Squire/Getty Images
The Blue Devils are out of the NCAA tournament after an 85-81 overtime loss to Kansas in the Midwest Regional final Sunday in Omaha. There’s no shame in that result. Duke’s loaded with future NBA players, but Kansas is an elite recruiter with a great roster itself. The teams treated us to arguably the best game of this NCAA tournament.
Kansas looked to be pulling away in the opening 10 minutes of the second half. Duke led by three at the break, but Kansas went on a 15-5 run in 3:38 just after halftime. The seven-point deficit Duke faced at that point was its steepest of the tournament.
But this was a slugfest, and Duke hit back. The Blue Devils tied the game at 57 just inside the 10-minute-remaining mark, and it was clear at that point the two blue-bloods would play the dramatic kind of game you hope for when teams like Duke and Kansas meet up in the Elite Eight. This wasn’t just one of the tournament’s greatest games, but the season’s.
Duke led by three in the final minute. Kansas’ Svi Mykhailiuk hit a game-tying three-pointer with 26 seconds left, and a shot at the buzzer by Allen missed narrowly:
That’s the play that will live in Duke fans’ nightmares.
Duke has incredible talent every year, and it will have unprecedented talent next season. (The class of 2018’s three highest-rated recruits are all committed to Mike Krzyzewski’s team.) But this team had all the tools it needed to hang Duke’s sixth national title banner.
This Duke team had the talent to overcome its flaws. But no one has the talent to guarantee victory against a team like Kansas in the Elite Eight.
The Blue Devils had a small handful of problems, but their talent was never one. Their starting lineup featured four freshman five-stars and a senior who was once a high four-star. Their top bench guys were blue-chip recruits, too. Their coach is at the top of his field.
Talent can cover for a lot of things. It can even cover for a weird inability to play good man-to-man defense with five future NBA players on the floor. Duke probably got a bit lucky to have its defensive numbers get so much better after Krzyzewski shifted to an unusual-for-him zone defense in February. The Blue Devils seemed to benefit from an awful lot of teams missing an awful lot of fairly open threes for an awful lot of games. But even as Duke seemed iffy on D, it was a top-10 team by opponent-adjusted defensive efficiency. The only team still alive in the tournament who rated better is Michigan. Maybe the Blue Devils were clunky and underachieving, but being huge and fast still makes it hard to get scored on.
Duke’s season ended by a whisker. If Duke were a few small notches better on defense, the Blue Devils probably would’ve won and headed for San Antonio. But I don’t think analysis of why Duke’s season is over now has to be much more complicated than, “This is the NCAA tournament, and Kansas is really good, and Duke lost what was basically a coin-flip game.”
Duke lost, but it wasn’t indicative of anything that serious.
For instance, this doesn’t add up:
(Teams have won national titles in the recent past with freshmen driving the boat on both offense and defense. If Allen’s shot at the buzzer goes down, we’re not discussing this.)
The clearest reason for Duke’s defeat:
- Kansas is good. It’s hard to beat a No. 1 seed in March Madness.
That’s the only thing that’s inarguable. It could be true that if Duke’s defense were a little better, the Blue Devils would’ve been a No. 1 seed and had a better location or matchup for this game, and maybe that would’ve led to another result. Maybe Kansas would’ve scored one or two fewer key buckets, and maybe Duke would’ve won. Who knows?
But if Duke builds an identical team next year, it might win the title that time.
No other college basketball team’s failures inspire so many people to dissect what went wrong so meticulously. But this Duke team was really good. It was No. 3 in the country in Ken Pomeroy’s rating, the product of being No. 2 on offense and No. 9 on defense. The Blue Devils had the athletic upside to be the No. 1 team in the country on any given night. This was an objectively fun Duke team with great players, just as next year’s will be, and the year after’s, and the year after that’s. It’s just that winning a 68-team tournament is hard.
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