LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) – The Final Four is over, the Final Two have emerged. With Houston and Florida gearing up for what promises to be an NCAA championship battle worthy of the four No. 1 seeds who gathered this weekend in San Antonio – here are my four quick takeaways from the games we saw Saturday night.
DID DUKE LOSE, OR DID HOUSTON WIN? Obviously, both. Houston deserves every ounce of credit for not panicking while down 14, for getting big stops, making big shots, and for, in general, being the tougher team when it counted the most in its 70-67.
Which it always is.
That was embodied in the statement that Cougars coach Kelvin Sampson made to CBS reporter Tracy Wolfson immediately after the game.
“I hear what people say. Duke this, Duke that. Duke’s great. Jon Scheyer is awesome,” Sampson said. “But don’t sleep on Houston. Don’t sleep on Houston. We weren’t 34-4 playing in the toy poodle league. We went 19-1 in the Big 12. Winning the Big 12 helped us.”
That “toy poodle” league is going to stick for a while in the ACC, until the league performs well enough to make it go away. Because Sampson had a point. Clearly, Houston was comfortable with the game pressure of clutch moments in the Final Four.
And just as clearly, Duke was not. It was tentative against Houston’s pressure. It was tentative, period, once it got a 14-point lead. Several times, Duke players hesitated to pull the trigger on three-pointers in the final 10 minutes, only to wind up with shots that were more contested. Going to the rim against Houston is a whole different proposition from going to the rim in the ACC. It’s why Duke shot less than 50 percent (6-for-13) on layups, with a majority of those misses rejected.
Tyrese Proctor has been really good at times in this tournament. He wasn’t good on Saturday. He coughed a ball up late with the lead – again, driving into trouble against Houston. And he missed the front end of a one-and-one with a one-point lead that led to a (questionable) Cooper Flagg foul and Houston draining the winning free throws. Even Flagg’s final shot was falling away and predictably contested.
Houston deserves the credit for that. As it does for negating Khaman Maluach, Duke’s excellent 7-2 freshman. He as anything but excellent in this one, finishing minus-20 in his minutes on the court. Houston negated his perimeter defense and beat him – and Duke’s other interior defenders – down low.
LJ Cryer was outstanding offensively – 26 points and 6 of 9 from three-point range for a Cougars team that went 10 of 22 from beyond the arc. Duke went just 7 of 17. Not only did it not make as many, it didn’t shoot as many.
Ballgame.
FLORIDA WORE AUBURN DOWN. Auburn needed some breaks to beat Florida. It got plenty of them from an officiating standpoint. I thought the Tigers got a good whistle in their 79-73 loss.
What they didn’t get was good enough guard play. I watched Auburn’s trio of Miles Kelly (30), Chad Baker-Mazara (22) and Tahaad Pettiford (21) combine for 73 points against Kentucky in Rupp Arena. They combined for 33 against Florida. And they combined for seven second-half turnovers. It wasn’t that they were bad. They just weren’t great. And in these games, you need great.
Walter Clayton was great – 34 points. He scored 10 of Florida’s last 13 points – and all but three of their points in the final 4:30 of the game. He went 7-of-7 from the line.
And Florida’s big men wore down Auburn’s Johni Broome, who finished with 15 points but had only three in the second half.
“Second half, Florida’s effort and energy, the fact that we’re not as deep as what we normally are, was a factor,” Auburn coach Bruce Pearl said. “I thought fatigue was a factor. As a result, we weren’t able to maintain control of the game, which I think if we had taken care of the basketball a little bit, not turned it over, not given them easy ones, we could have been in position to win the basketball game.”
SHINING MOMENT. The most memorable moment of either semifinal was Florida’s Alijah Martin flying down the court on the break for a poster-perfect dunk in traffic against a team that has specialized in posterizing people all season.
I know Clayton was the player of the game. But what a magnificent game Martin had. Florida doesn’t advance without his relentless defense and overall contributions. I thought that dunk was like the big blow to the head late in a heavyweight fight.
It left Auburn weak in the knees, emotionally speaking, and energized the Gators.
Martin finished with 17 points, second-best on the team.
SCHEYER TAKES THE BLAME. When it looked like Duke would win, I wondered what Mike Krzyzewski, sitting right behind the Blue Devils bench, was thinking of his successor, and his succession plan.
Obviously, both were excellent. You don’t get to the Final Four if you’re not. But after the Houston comeback, I also couldn’t help but wonder what Krzyzewski’s notes would be for the young Duke coach – not that he’d offer them. I don’t know.
For his part, Scheyer was critical of himself – which I respect in that moment.
“Obviously as a coach, I’m reflecting right now what else I could have said or done,” he said. “I’m sure there’s a lot more that I could have done to help our guys at the end there. That’s the thing that kills me the most. The amount of game situations we’ve watched this year. We haven’t had the real-life experience all the time, but that’s something I really felt we prepared for. So I feel like I let our guys down in that regard. I’ll cross that bridge the next couple days. Right now I’m just hurting for our guys, want to be there for them.”
