D4 EZ M2 THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, MARCH 27 , 2022
ncaa tournamentpumping like after the Texas
Tech game had been clinched. He
just shook hands and started off
the celebration in the simplest,
most humble manner possible.
It was another win for the
record books. But what mattered
most is that he had figured out
this group.
“They are really a good group
of kids, and they’re becoming
men,” Krzyzewski said Friday.
“How lucky am I?”
On Saturday night, he climbed
a ladder once more, snipped the
final piece of the net and took
down the twine. From up high,
he looked at his players and
mouthed, “I love you!” Then he
turned in every direction and
thanked the crowd.
Finally, the coach moved
gingerly down the ladder, his
surgically repaired hips and
knees just sturdy enough to
manage. The crowd chanted, “We
want six!” The legendary coach
simply wanted to hug his players
and staff another time. He did so,
one by one, walking on blue and
white confetti with every step.could develop a team over
several seasons, but for quite a
while, that hasn’t been possible.
Unlike other older coaches, the
75-year-old Krzyzewski doesn’t
complain. He just talks to
himself and meets the players
where they are.
“When you only have them for
a year, you’re trying to avoid as
much adversity, but in the last 10
days or so of the regular season
and the tournament, we
experienced a very deep level of
adversity,” Krzyzewski said. “And
in some respects, it really helped
us. I would rather not have
experienced it, but I think it
helped us. It hurt. They grew
together, and we all took
responsibility and figured out
what was wrong, and then we
tried to correct it. It was actually
in some respects a good thing,
but that usually happens over a
period of time.”
As his 17th Elite Eight
appearance concluded with a
record 13th triumph and Final
Four appearance, the coach was
noticeably calm. No fist-Razorbacks defense and refusing
to settle for contested jump
shots. They were balanced, with
four players scoring in double
figures, led by freshman A.J.
Griffin’s 18 points.
Duke closed the first half on
an 8-0 run to take a 45-33 lead
into the locker room. It increased
the lead to 18 points in the
second half. It was a thorough
dissection by a team that looked
as if it was running out of steam
at the beginning of March.
With the way the Blue Devils
played Saturday and the tough
tests they have survived
throughout the NCAA
tournament, they suddenly look
like the favorite to win it all. It
seems Krzyzewski, a master of
adapting to the times, is helping
another young team with
multiple future NBA draft picks
peak at the perfect time.
His greatest talent is the
ability to manage people, to lead
with empathy and establish an
exacting standard. It’s fitting
that this team has found itself.
Earlier in his career, the coachbefore Saturday’s Elite Eight
game.
“When I said unacceptable, it
wasn’t that they were
unacceptable,” Krzyzewski said.
“It was the result was
unacceptable, and I wanted to
make sure that that was not
misconstrued by them, and so
we’ve kind of — it’s part of
growing together, growing up,
and I take responsibility for
that.”
It took some time after
Krzyzewski’s self-talk. Duke lost
to Virginia Tech in the ACC
tournament final. It had to win
an intense game against
Michigan State in the round of
32 and then survive another
highly physical competition
against Texas Tech in the
Sweet 16.
On Saturday at Chase Center,
Duke saved perhaps its finest
game of the season for the Elite
Eight. Against an outstanding
defensive team in Arkansas, the
Blue Devils were deadly efficient,
shooting 54.7 percent from the
field, attacking the teeth of thesan francisco
— For his long
goodbye to have a
glorious ending,
Mike Krzyzewski
needed to get real
one more time.
And he knew just
the person he had
to talk to: himself.
Beneath all the love and
appreciation Coach K has felt
during his farewell season at
Duke, something was off late in
the year. His Blue Devils, blessed
with talented underclassmen
again but low on experience and
continuity, were laboring when
they should have been playing
their best. The coach sensed it
before the struggles became
obvious. Then he watched the
team lose his finale at Cameron
Indoor Stadium to rival North
Carolina. During the ACC
tournament, Krzyzewski began a
period of introspection.
“I got to do something,” he
said to himself. “I got to help in
some way.”
Three weeks later, Krzyzewski
has Duke in the Final Four for a
13th time, back to the only stage
sturdy enough to provide an
appropriate exit. With a 78-69
victory over Arkansas in the
West Region final, he didn’t just
keep his Duke fairy tale alive. He
completed the task of figuring
out his last team and steering the
Blue Devils to reach their
potential. Now he will get to play
for a chance at a sixth national
title.
But as only Coach K can, he
corrects anyone who tries to
make it all about his accolades.
He prefers to celebrate the feat as
his current team’s first Final
Four berth and its chance to win
it all for a first time. During the
ACC tournament, he calmed all
the emotions and quieted all the
noise so that he could hear his
own voice. And it told him to
lock in and do an even better job
of something he has been
focused on all season: living in
the now.
Krzyzewski thought about
tweaks in strategy, but mostly he
wanted to alter his approach. He
wanted to connect better, be
more earnest in addressing them
and coach them harder after
reestablishing those deep
relationships.
“It’s had a really good impact,”
Krzyzewski said. “Like when we
lost [to North Carolina] at my
whatever you want to call that
day and I looked and I saw my
team, I felt really bad for them. I
felt really bad that we lost.”
He called the loss that day
“unacceptable” during a
postgame address to the crowd.
He clarified what he meantWith coach and team in sync, Duke i s looking like the team to beatJerry
BrewerEZRA SHAW/GETTY IMAGES
“We all took responsibility and figured out what was wrong,” Coach Mike Krzyzewski said of the Blue Devils ending a late-season slump.the refs.
Duke went ahead 22-14, and
then Arkansas, a batch of fighters
if not necessarily shot makers,
scratched back to within 37-33 two
minutes before halftime. That’s
when the talent resumed its glit-
tering.
Paolo Banchero, the 6-10 moun-
tain of grace who went to Duke all
the way from Seattle, opted for a
three-point shot from the top,
then rained it in. An Arkansas shot
rattled out. Krzyzewski called a
timeout 57 seconds before half-
time, perhaps sensing opportu-
nity, and soon Wendell Moore Jr.
missed from the baseline, but Wil-
liams plucked a great rebound
from the aftermath, then fol-
lowed. It was 42-33, and it was
teetering.
Then Arkansas missed another
shot — it would go 13 for 32 to
Duke’s 17 for 31 in the first half —
and here flew Duke, up the court
and over to Trevor Keels, who let
fly from the left of the top as the
last seconds drained. That thing
dunked in, and Duke led 45-33,
and Arkansas seemed to lack the
mustard to overhaul that.
The Razorbacks, who finished
fourth in the SEC but tied for fifth
in the country at the end, did show
their strong stomachs. The used
their energy to crowd within 53-48
and force Krzyzewski to call a
timeout with 13:13 left on the way
to that 13th bridge.
Out of that timeout, Duke con-
ducted the kind of play that dou-
bled as a perfect demonstration of
its superiority. Banchero took the
ball on the right and took his
statuesque body to the paint on
the right, and there wasn’t any-
thing anyone could do about it. He
made a layup, and soon AJ Griffin
made another, and soon the
mighty Williams helped himself to
another of his three blocks.
Soon the score went to 63-48,
and Duke looked like Duke again,
streaming toward New Orleans
for its coach’s last exit.had removed No. 1 Gonzaga on
Thursday, the Blue Devils looked
like such a polished Duke team
that Krzyzewski didn’t even have
to give all that much instruction towith Texas Tech in the Sweet 16 —
and looked as if it gained some
oomph from those.
By the time of their region final
with the Razorbacks (28-9), whoglittering talent. It faced two
March Madness crises — a five-
point deficit to Michigan State
with five minutes to play in the
second round and a furious tusslegot his 10th: in closing.
The one-season retirement tour
of Duke’s 75-year-old coach, which
took on potholes in thumping
losses to North Carolina at home
in a bummer of a Krzyzewski fare-
well March 5 and to Virginia Tech
at the ACC tournament March 12,
will conclude by “crossing the
bridge,” as Krzyzewski calls it, to
the “Mecca,” as Krzyzewski called
it Friday here.
“I know what’s on the other side
of the bridge,” he said before say-
ing of his very young players:
“They don’t. They can only look at
it. So it makes me want it more for
them.”
They will cross the bridge to-
gether, with 7-foot-1 Mark Williams
towering after his 12 points and
12 rebounds against Arkansas, and
they will cross 47 years after Army
went 3-22 and hired a new coach
(and would go 11-14) and 42 years
after Duke saw a coach leave for
South Carolina and hired that
same new coach, who would spell
his name for reporters at the intro
(and would go 17-13). They will
cross for the first time in seven
years for Duke and Krzyzewski, af-
ter narrow Elite Eight losses to
Kansas in 2018 and Michigan State
in 2019. From 3,500-seat Gillis
Fieldhouse, where Army beat Le-
high, 56-29, on Nov. 28, 1975, all the
way to another giant football sta-
dium next Saturday, when multi-
tudes will know how to spell
“Krzyzewski” without looking.
Krzyzewski will coach a game that
might just tear the state of North
Carolina off its moorings and leave
it floating in the Atlantic. Duke
(32-6) will play either North Caro-
lina or Saint Peter’s in a national
semifinal in the Superdome.
It will do so because Krzyzews-
ki’s final group of prized recruits
took the geezer on a four-win re-
covery tour through Greenville,
S.C., and San Francisco by digging
out its moxie to go along with itsDUKE FROM D1
Blue Devils book place in Krzyzewski’s 13th and final Final FourEZRA SHAW/GETTY IMAGES
Paolo Banchero (5) had 16 points and seven rebounds as Duke took down Arkansas in the E lite Eight.BY CHUCK CULPEPPER
Just seven days after Memphis
lost a dazzling 82-78 duel with
No. 1 Gonzaga and signaled that
fourth-year coach Penny Hard-
away might resume the pro-
gram’s prominence, the Daily
Memphian and the Commercial
Appeal of Memphis reported
that the program faces major
NCAA charges. Those include
four at Level I and two at Level II,
the direst levels in the infraction
designations.
The two Final Four teams in
the Tigers’ rich basketball his-
tory each had their records va-
cated by the NCAA, a national
semifinal appearance in 1985
and a runner-up finish in 2008,
the latter an overtime loss to
Kansas in which Memphis was
on the cusp of a title, leading by
nine points with two minutes
left.
In this latest difficulty, the
NCAA also charged the program
with “lack of institutional con-
trol,” as well as with a failure to
cooperate with the investigation
and with obstructions, according
to the reports. It charged that
Hardaway, who played for Mem-
phis before his 14-season NBA
career with four all-star appear-
ances, “failed to demonstrate
that he promoted an atmosphere
of compliance within the men’s
basketball program.”
Memphis, in turn, issued a
denial of wrongdoing to the
NCAA.
According to both the Daily
Memphian and the Commercial
Appeal, the alleged infractions
occurred between May 2019 and
February 2021. The documents
the publications reviewed fea-
tured many redactions. They in-
clude three charges — one a
Level I and two Level IIs — that
implicate Hardaway, who has
gone 85-43 in his four seasons at
the helm. The notice of allega-
tions arrived at the school in
July, according to the reports.
Some of the issues — but not
all — are rooted in the case of
James Wiseman, at present a
second-year player for the Gold-
en State Warriors after he be-
came the No. 2 pick in the
2020 NBA draft. Memphis had a
drama in its 2019-20 season with
Wiseman’s eligibility, stemming
from Hardaway’s payment to
Wiseman’s family of $11,500 in
2017 while Hardaway was coach-
ing youth basketball in both AAU
and high school programs but
was also deemed a Memphis
booster.
That season, Wiseman played
in only three games, averaging
19.7 points and 10.7 rebounds,
before an NCAA suspension end-
ed his season.
This March, as the Tigers
ended their 22-11 season, Hard-
away told reporters in Portland:
“I told the guys before the game,
ever since I’ve been a coach in
AAU I’ve been a storm chaser. I
chased all the tough teams in
AAU and high school, and now
on this level we want to play the
best, and Gonzaga is the num-
ber-one overall seed in the tour-
nament. We got what we wanted;
we just came up a little short. But
I hope this shows people that
Memphis is back, where we were
in prominence years ago. We’re
getting it back to where it needs
to be.”
Reports:
Memphis
faces major
infractions
Hardaway’s program
is charged with ‘lack
of institutional control’LM OTERO/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Penny Hardaway, who played
for Memphis, has gone 85-43 in
four seasons as Tigers coach.