San Antonio – The echo of the door is closed so that it wavy and wavy in the burning silence of the Duke Rocker Room. Every time players and staff were dressed in the adjacent coach’s locker room, the bangs on the door still echoed like a siren in the evening.
There’s nothing to prepare your team for the emotional spiral that comes with wasting a 6-point lead in the final 35 seconds. After Houston scored the final nine points of the game in 33 seconds and scored Stand Duke 70-67 in the Final Four on Saturday night, Hash accompanied the Blue Devils’ attempt to handle it.
The player wandered quietly, grabbing slices of pizza from ten boxes and stacking them up on a Power Rade cooler. They stared at their phones to avoid prolonged eye contact with media. I returned from the shower with tears in his eyes. Another wrote in his diary in a pencil.
They managed to play how a 6-point lead disappears within 20 seconds. But even after the inbound failure, mistakes and mental goff riots, two key moments, the final 20 seconds, from the Starfreshman Cooper Flag (foul and miss), concluded the stunning meltdown.
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Flagg’s missed 12-foot jumper is a play in which Duke follows him one point at a time, living forever in replays. Duke had the opportunity to control the game and stop the bleeding. A timeout was called with 17 seconds remaining. The Blue Devils cleaned up for Flag, who was faced with sixth-grade senior J’Wan Roberts from Houston for quarantine. Flag rose from inside the lane and moved away from the extended arms of 6-foot-8 Roberts. The shot was carom from the front rim.
“It’s a play that the coach drew,” Flag said. “I put it into the paint. I thought I had stopped, it rose. I obviously shortened it. A shot that I want to live with in the scenario.”
I never re-estimated the play or appearance. It simply didn’t go in.
“Cooper is the best player in the country and when he gets the best player in the country where he likes it’s really easy. “Sometimes the shots go down. Sometimes I don’t. That wasn’t.”
Hard to explain was the Flag’s over-the-back foul against Roberts when Duke’s Tyrees Proctor missed a one-on-one frontend with 20 seconds left. Duke led 67-66 at the time, and Flag blew hists due to Roberts’ foul, which Flag was clearly in the box.
Cooper Flag, who finished with 27 points, said he missed a 12-foot jumper that Duke trailed one by one in the final seconds of Saturday night. Imaging images
Cole’s validity is long debated on the Barstool in the Final Four, but Flag puts himself and Duke in a vulnerable position by holding Roberts’ left arm down and appearing to be hissing.
Roberts, a 63% free throw shooter, changed the game by making both 1-1 ends, pushing Houston to a 68-67 lead and setting the stage for Flag’s final advance.
For programs that retain a rebellious image of grit and toughness, it is appropriate that Houston’s trip to national title games features game-changing box-outs. Kellen Sampson, son of Houston assistant and Cougars coach Kelvin Sampson, summed up the moment by breaking one of his father’s ethnic basketball proverbs.
“Discipline beats you more than it helps you win,” Kellen Sampson said. “I’ve heard that they’ve probably grown 100 million times.
“The big free throw blockout was just what you need,” he added.
Regardless of the discussion about Cole, Flag’s foul put Duke in a sudden, unthinkable position. The Blue Devils continued one by one with a 19-second mark from a six-point lead with 35 seconds remaining. The foul was the final swing.
Houston’s key comes from letting Roberts go on the flag. This was something that wasn’t early in the game. Flag pulled away without losing the Cougars and adjusted it so that Roberts could handle the matchup himself.
“We said here at halftime that we were going to trust J’Wan,” Sampson said. “He’s working one-on-one with Cooper, and we’re probably overreaching.
“You have the number one defense in America for a reason. Trust him.”
Houston defenders were looting them all night. The most jarring stat in box scores is the stats of the scores of Duke Centre Kamanmaruach, who grabbed a rebound in plays over 21 minutes and failed to finish the night with a plus or minus of -20.
Roberts’ final Salvo had won a tough contest with the winner of a potential game for Flagg.
“I thought he did an amazing job of raising his hands to make it look easy,” Sampson said of Roberts. “Some tough shots all night.”
Flag finished the contest with 27 points and shot 19-8 from the field. Duke had only one field goal at the end of the game at 10:30, so he almost got help.
He returned to the golf cart’s dug rocker room at 11:54pm and stared at space with a towel wrapped around his neck. Flag entered the corn of silence in the face of the end of the season and perhaps a college career.
Three minutes later, Duke coach John Shayer rode in the past with his wife and athletic manager Nina King sitting in the back next to him. Duke spitted out the fifth-largest lead in his final four history after leading at up to 14 years old. That loss resonates long in the offseason, like the door to that smashing.
“I’m coming back, we’ll rise six in less than a minute,” Shayer said.
“We need to close the deal.”
