“I thought they took a deep breath,” their retiring coach said of his glittering band of NCAA first-timers, who helped their coach improve to 98-30 in March Madness and avoided any hint of what befell fellow No. 2 seed Kentucky on Thursday night against Saint Peter’s, or any hint of what befell Krzyzewski himself on a few odd occasions through the years involving Lehigh, Mercer, VCU.
Coming 13 days after a thumping loss to North Carolina in the celebrated Krzyzewski’s home finale and six days after a thumping loss to Virginia Tech in the ACC tournament final, this win happened on a floor on which another Duke team seeded No. 2 met a demise, in 2017, against Frank Martin’s Final Four-bound batch of South Carolina Gamecocks, so voluminous is Krzyzewski’s Madness past.
“I mean, Duke is a very, very talented, athletic group,” Fullerton’s Damari Milstead said when asked to give advice to Duke’s second-round opponent coming Sunday. “So good luck.”
In this old song played again early Friday evening, Krzyzewski’s team had more skill and more options than a game opponent, the Big West champion Titans (21-11) who withstood a 72-71 fracas against top-seeded Cal State Long Beach in the conference tournament final near Las Vegas. It left Krzyzewski with only two complaints, about a glitch in the entry at Bon Secours Wellness Arena in this impressive big town, and about a floor that had some issues.
As the players warmed up, the crowd had not yet filled the joint, with long, thick queues having formed outside during the cleanup from the opening two games, in which Auburn beat Jacksonville State and Miami edged Southern California. It perhaps made things odd for players from both sides.
“If there’s some way in the future they could change that,” Krzyzewski said in this last of his 36 NCAA tournaments. The crowd eventually filled the place so it could revel in various Duke plays and then, just after the horn, in the finish of the Illinois-Chattanooga cliffhanger on the big screen.
Then the floor caused some concern, particularly in the first half when Duke forward Wendell Moore Jr. slipped twice in a row on the same offensive possession, causing him to check on himself while Fullerton ran down to score to pare a deficit to 31-23.
“Then that damn floor was slippery, I mean, on both ends,” Krzyzewski said, soon joking, “I know it wasn’t the shoe. Nike called me and wanted to make sure it wasn’t the shoes.”
His team managed to ride its hyped-recruit stars like Paolo Banchero, that former ballboy in a Seattle regional, and it managed to pass the ball around ideally so that 17 points could go to Banchero, 15 to Mark Williams, 13 to Moore, 12 to Jeremy Roach and 10 to AJ Griffin. Williams made five assists, nifty for a 7-footer.
All contributed to Duke’s first shot at an NCAA tournament since 2019, when it left the floor sad in Washington after a regional-final donnybrook against Michigan State, and all got used to the feelings.
“Obviously,” Moore said, “we had no idea what to expect.”
“Just actually playing and being out there,” Banchero said, “it’s just a real surreal experience.”
“A special moment,” Moore said.
They had one built-in advantage from the start, those sequoias in the middle to put the trembles into some of the shots. With Williams at 7-foot-1 and Banchero at 6-foot-10, a Titans team that looked beautifully coached found resistance even after its beautifully crafted plays yielded the kinds of shots a coach might draw up. At least Fullerton had the defense for which it is reputed among careful students of college basketball.
“Coming into this game and competing against Duke was a complete honor and privilege,” ninth-season coach Dedrique Taylor said, “but compete is exactly what our guys did.” He spoke of “obviously being a part of history with ‘Coach K’ and how important he is to college basketball and how impactful he has been to success and what he’s meant to our game.” With a group of mature players and transfers led by graduate student and former Tennessee player E.J. Anosike, who shared a long hug with Taylor with 2:14 left as the coach let his bench players get some Madness minutes, Fullerton had reached Taylor’s second NCAA tournament, the other coming in 2018.
The other guy, of course, has been going since 1984 in these things, and here he went into another fray of brackets. The half-full crowd gave Krzyzewski a big cheer upon his pregame introduction. Then the coach saw that things had gotten better lately.
“Just a lot better,” he said of defensive communication, for one thing. “And the effort, the effort. We played hard. They played really hard. I mean, they’re an older team. You’ve got four starters back, four grad transfers [on Fullerton]. Throughout the year, it’s probably the oldest teams that my teams have ever played against. There’s something about that when you’re playing against guys — they’re men. They’re men, and they’re playing hard, and they’re well-coached.”
He said of his defense, “We’ve been a really good defensive team” — with an ACC regular season title — “but the last four games we were a really bad defensive team.”
And he called his home farewell weekend “screwy” and said, “There wasn’t really a time to recalibrate. I thought we did that this week.”
A questioner suggested it might be good to put this game in the past so that Krzyzewski could “relax.”
“Well,” he said, “that’s not happening.”