So at first glance, it is not particularly embarrassing that Mike Krzyzewski’s coaching career ended with a defeat in the Final Four. So is Dean Smith – and most coaching legends are not even fortunate enough to go that far. Roy Williams’s last game came in the first round of last year’s tournament. Lute Olson and Jim Calhoun also finished with unusual defeats in the first round. Others, such as Jerry Tarkanian or Eddie Sutton, were not even close to entering the NCAA Tournament in their final seasons. But no one has ever had a final game like Mike Krzyzewski, whose Blue Devils lost Saturday night to North Carolina. That was a flood in college basketball: The first NCAA tournament match between the sport’s two biggest rivals, the Final Four, at the end of Krzyzewski’s long-running retirement tour. These two teams can play continuously, but they have never done that. And somehow, the 81-77 battle was more in line with the tariff. You would expect any Duke-UNC game to be a relatively uniform competition. Both teams are eternal forces – UNC has six national championships. Duke has five. Only in 2019, both teams got 1 seed in the NCAA tournament. Krzyzewski ended his career with exactly 50-50 against the Tar Heels. But only Duke looked like a league team this season. Duke started the season 7-0, with victories over the top-10 Kentucky and Gonzaga. They have never been ranked lower than ninth in the AP poll. And they have four players on Kevin O’Connor’s Big Big draft, including Paolo Banchero, the top contender in the category, freshman AJ Griffin (No. 8), sophomore Mark Williams (No. 16) and of junior wing Wendell. Moore Jr. (No. 29). North Carolina has no players on this list. They reached the top in 18th place in the AP Poll and lost their first six games to teams that reached the NCAA Tournament. They lost 29 of a Kentucky team that Duke won. with 22 on a Wake Forest team that Duke won twice. with 28 in Miami; and of course until 20 at Duke in February. They looked lost in their first year under coach Hubert Davis, who took over after Williams’s surprise departure about a year ago. But UNC’s players improved throughout the season, beating twice Duke’s supposedly better team — first at the Cameron Indoor Stadium in early March, destroying Coach K’s last home game in Durham and now in the Final Four. ending his career. They have grown from a team that could not beat a quality opponent to a team that could win the national championship. And they have reached the title game as 8-seed, just the fifth team to ever do so. We can see this increase in the way players played against Duke in February compared to the way they played in Durham and on Saturday night. Take Armando Bacot, who was the dominant threat inside the tournament, averaging 15.4 points and 16.8 rebounds. Bacot had just five rebounds in Duke’s 20-point defeat in February. had 21 on Saturday night, more than any of Duke’s opponents since 2016 and helped UNC finish with 17 offensive rebounds, tying them more than any team this season. In the first half, Bacot had both Williams and his backup, Theo John, in foul trouble, while rebounding them and defending the rim: Bacot is the first player with 20 rebounds back-to-back games in the NCAA tournament after Tim Duncan and his 21 boards on Saturday were more than any other Final Four player since 2003. Bacot seemed to finish for night with five minutes left, as he fell to the ground broken by pain after stepping on his teammate’s leg. But he came back less than a minute later and said just two words when he re-entered the game: “damn it.” Or look at Leaky Black, the UNC senior who learned during his career that he is not very good at attacking – he averaged 7.0 shots per game as a sophomore and 3.8 this year. (He is the guy who threw a fastball 100 miles per hour from the board in Round 2.) But he dedicated his skills to ruining the nights of rival players and unleashed it on Griffin in the last two UNC games with Duke. Griffin had a career-high 27 points in his first UNC game and just 11 in his last two games together. On Saturday night, he shot 1-to-7 from the field and missed every 3 he got. Prevailed 8-6 by Leaky, who knows he should not even try to score. And then there was Brady Manek, who began his career as a shaved teammate of Trae Young in Oklahoma and ends up as a fully bearded man on the mountain in the National Championship. He played 122 games for the Sooners, but two of the top seven appearances of his scoring career came in recent weeks, as he lost 28 points to Marquette in the first round and 26 against Baylor in the second. He made three tough 3-pointers of the second half against Duke, including the final bucket: But no player is peaking at the right time like second-year guard Caleb Love, who has turned into an absolute killer. Three of his top four career scores have come in this NCAA tournament — 23 points in the first round against Marquette, top 30 in his Sweet 16 career against UCLA and 28 against Duke. He pierced a dagger 3 over Williams to seal the game slowly: There are two possible explanations for a team where every player plays the best basketball of their career at the most important moment of the season: almost impossible luck or excellent coaching. With UNC, I bet on the latter. We do not have a long history with Hubert Davis as the first coach, because this is his first change. However, in every way, it was great: UNC has gone much further with Davis than last season with Roy Williams, despite having a similar roster that needed a mid-season recovery to thrive. . However, we have a story with Mike Krzyzewski. Obviously, Krzyzewski is an legend of all time. He has more wins than any other college basketball coach and this was his 13th Final Four, a men’s record. Krzyzewski was not just a coach for 40 years. he adapted to a changing world of college basketball. But we have seen his teams hit games in the past. We’ve seen it in the NCAA Tournament, with multiple defeats in 15-seeds, and we’ve seen it this season: While Duke remained unbeaten against ranking opponents, he lost seven games to unbeaten teams while in the top 10 of the AP voting. This is a new record. Krzyzewski’s departure from college basketball is humiliating for all obvious reasons: The last game of his career was a once-in-a-lifetime match on the biggest stage of the sport against Duke’s biggest rival. And he lost. But it’s particularly humiliating because, frankly, Duke should not have lost this game. Duke had an obvious talent advantage and is supposed to have a great coaching advantage as well — a living legend facing a literal rookie. But this rookie made UNC the best version of himself during the season. Coach K Blue Devils, meanwhile, failed to play better than the sum of their parts. Duke clearly had the players to be the best team in the country. Instead, his season ended with one of the biggest upheavals in Final Four history. While UNC grew up on a team built for one of the greatest moments in college basketball history, Duke faded and lost his last two Coach K games to his biggest opponent despite a roster that was clearly capable of beating them by 20 points. . Almost everyone’s career ends with a loss – this in itself is not memorable. But Coach K’s latest game is something we will remember for decades.
