Duke’s Season Wasn’t Supposed to End in Another Stunning NCAA Tournament Exit
It wasn’t supposed to end like this for Duke.
After a 29–2 regular season that culminated with both an ACC regular-season and tournament title, the Blue Devils were rewarded with a well-earned No. 1 overall seed in the NCAA men’s tournament.
Duke—along with fellow No. 1 seeds Arizona and Michigan—were far and away the three best teams in college basketball all season long. Arizona punched its ticket to the Final Four on Saturday night with a big second half against No. 2 Purdue, while Michigan controlled the game from start to finish against No. 6 Tennessee on Sunday to punch its ticket to Indianapolis.
Through 20 minutes on Sunday at Capital One Arena in Washington, D.C., Duke seemed destined to join them. The Blue Devils led by as many as 19 against No. 2 UConn, and took a 15-point lead into halftime. The Huskies, who had been to two of the last three Final Fours, with two championships under Dan Hurley, seemed like they met their match.
But in the second half, it all fell apart.
You know what happened next. The Huskies, despite making just one of their first 18 three-point attempts as a team, converted on four of five to close. The Blue Devils, which had their fair share of turnover issues at points throughout the season, had committed just five in the first half as they built their lead.
But eight second-half turnovers propelled the Huskies back into the game, and the final one from star Duke point guard Cayden Boozer led to a March logo dagger from opposing freshman Braylon Mullins, who had missed his first four three-point attempts before his half-court prayer.
“I had the ball, and I know [Alex Karaban] had just hit one. So I threw him it with four seconds left, and man, he just threw the ball back to me, and I knew I had to put one up. Man, I’m just happy that was the one that went down tonight,” Mullins said.
Mullins’s three, which flushed the nylon with less than a half-second to play, was as remarkable as it was stunning. It was fitting that Mullins, a freshman from Greenfield, Ind., was the one to bury the shot to send the Huskies to Indianapolis to play in their third Final Four in four seasons.
“One of the most brilliant shooters you’ll ever see shoot a basketball made an incredible, legendary March shot,” Hurley said.
The heave from just inside half court sent the crowd into a frenzy, but the Duke bench was left stunned, and the disappointment reverberated through the locker room after the game.
“I could not be more disappointed and feeling for our guys at the same time of just trying to process what happened,” Duke coach Jon Scheyer said. “I don’t have the words. I don’t have the words.”
Nobody did.
But as stunning as the ending to Sunday’s East Regional final was—a true “remember where you were moment” that will be replayed for years to come—it was somehow unsurprising.
After all, we’ve seen this story before from Scheyer’s Blue Devils in March. Just one year ago in the Final Four, Duke held a 14-point second-half lead before making just one field goal in the final 10 ½ minutes of game time in a 70–67 collapse that sent Houston to the national championship game.
But even so, it was not supposed to end like this for Duke. Not this season with this team, featuring a top-three NBA draft prospect in Cameron Boozer and professional talent littered throughout the rotation.
Late-season injuries to veteran guard Caleb Foster and big man Patrick Ngongba II minimized the margin for error. Even as both players returned to the lineup in the NCAA tournament, they were not at full health, but their impact from just being on the floor showed how good this team was. Foster scored 11 points in the Sweet 16 against St. John’s and had to use a scooter after the game to get around the bowels of the arena as he iced his surgically repaired foot. Duke doesn’t win that game without him, and Scheyer knew it, as the performance brought him to tears in the aftermath.
Foster wasn’t supposed to be out there, but played. He willed Duke to a late-season victory and put the Blue Devils on the cusp of a Final Four. It was hard not to believe this team was different and in the midst of a special run.
But that was all undone fewer than 48 hours later by the same culprit that sent the Blue Devils home a year ago: turnovers.
“We just gave them easy baskets. We just had to secure the ball better, and that’s a recipe to put yourself in that position. That was the big difference in the game obviously,” Scheyer said.
For the second consecutive March, the turnovers were a big difference in the outcome of the season, too.
In four seasons under Scheyer, the Blue Devils have gone to two Elite Eights and a Final Four, and somehow it feels like they’ve underperformed.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this Duke. But heading into another offseason in the Scheyer era that’s fallen short of expectations, the program has more questions than answers.
