“They’re so hard. You get past them laterally, and then you have to deal with them vertically”.
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And the Selection Sunday story about the Ducks centered on their slot as a top seed over Michigan State and Villanova. They won in the same way they have all season – swaggering, smiling, enjoying it right to the end.
Perhaps that set the scene for Brooks’s long three-pointer as time wound down, though to be fair, the discrepancy between the shot clock and game clock meant he had to get a shot off or turn the ball over. A rainbow. It swished through the net, a fitting ending to a night when everything went Oregon’s way.
But look at the video of the handshake line. Krzyzewski greeted Dana Altman with hardly a word. When later informed how Brooks described the conversation, Krzyzewski became defensive.
“Our team could not even have been in the tournament”, coach Mike Krzyzewski said after the game in Anaheim, California. “I said, ‘You’re a terrific player”. “He makes their team go”.
Krzyzewski told the Blue Devils they earned the right to be a Duke team and to wear the Duke uniform by the toughness they showed all season. “Wish we could have played better, but OR didn’t let us play better”.
“I didn’t say that”.
“You can say whatever you want”, he said.
Brooks and Altman have handled this situation in a much stronger manner than Krzyzewski did on the dais last night, where he basically called Brooks out for being less than truthful to the media in the locker room by saying that he didn’t say anything beyond telling Brooks he’s a terrific player.
“Their athleticism, and that combination of being so good laterally and then being so good vertically, is something you don’t face very often”, Krzyzewski said.
The cameras caught a post-game exchange between Krzyzewski, who appeared to say something to Brooks about the celebration. “I shouldn’t be doing that”. “But I feel like I found a way and I have to bring it everyday”. I gotta respect Duke.
Although the Blue Devils won’t be back-to-back champions, the veteran coach felt his young players’ tumultuous season went farther than many had imagined and left them no reason to be ashamed.
“I know that I’m a great person. I’ve just got to keep playing with emotion and live or die by it”.
None of this really matters, not in any meaningful way. Because the Ducks were too quick, too big and too athletic for Duke.
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Although there was still plenty of basketball to be played when the jacket toss sparked a Twitter explosion, the gesture was a symbolic beginning of the end for a Duke team that, by many accounts, overachieved on the year. OR was the last Pac-12 team standing after the league received a record seven bids to the NCAA tournament.
