He’s ahead of Rupp and halfway to Wooden now, and the legend of Mike Krzyzewski took on another layer of luster Monday night in the city where he has taken three of his five NCAA titles. Never in his four previous championship victories had the game’s greatest contemporary coach had to coach like this.
His best player, the freshman center Jahlil Okafor, was rendered inoperative for long stretches due to two fouls, then three, then four. His second-best player, the freshman forward Justise Winslow, was likewise foul-burdened. His senior leader, guard Quinn Cook, would score only six points.
And Duke won 68-63. It beat Wisconsin, conqueror of Kentucky, and broke the Badgers in a way the then-unbeaten Wildcats could not. The Devils trailed by nine points with 13:17 to play. They would win pulling away.
Two freshmen won it for Duke, just not the two you’d have guessed. Point guard Tyus Jones scored 23 points, 19 in the second half, and sub guard Grayson Allen, who averaged 4 points a game, scored four times that many. At a time when Coach K was looking for any combination to override the absence of Okafor, Allen changed the game.
“In some respects, the foul trouble helped us,” Krzyzewski said afterward. “We got some gritty guys in there in combinations we hadn’t had out there very often. I’ll have to watch the tape to see exactly who I had in.”
Allen, for one. He hit a trey to pare the Devils’ deficit to six points. He stole the ball, drove and scored and got fouled and made the free throw to cut it to three. After a Nigel Hayes 3-pointer pushed Wisconsin’s lead back to six, Hayes made two more foul shots. Duke was back in it.
Jones’ jumper and three-point play brought Duke within 51-50. Another Jones jumper tied it at 54. Then Allen drove again — that’s correct; Wisconsin couldn’t guard Grayson Allen off the dribble — to put Duke ahead 56-54. Then a Jones 3-pointer pushed Duke back in front, this time to stay, at 4:06.
Krzyzewski had to do everything in his power to keep this close — burning timeouts, trotting out a zone defense, shuffling lesser lights in and out. He’s not the best in the business for nothing. John Calipari watched his Kentucky team grab a four-point lead Saturday and allowed it to fall apart. Coach K would not allow his team to wilt.
Finally he brought back Okafor, and his two buckets iced it. He spun on Frank Kaminsky to make it 61-58, and his follow of Winslow’s miss pushed Duke’s lead to five. By then the Badgers were done. They couldn’t run their deliberate sets because time was flying, and this seasoned team was reduced to one no-hope shot after another.
Finally, after Wisconsin’s Bronson Koenig missed horribly, Krzyzewski had his team work the clock until Jones — yep, him again — sailed home another trey. Duke by eight. Coach K with five titles to stack alongside his 1,000-plus victories.
Having won that many games and championships, there’s no shock in seeing Krzyzewski outcoach somebody. But the master class he conducted this night left Wisconsin’s Bo Ryan — who’d outflanked Calipari, the Associated Press coach of the year, two days earlier — grumbling about the calls made against his Badgers.
Krzyzewski had Allen and Jones drive at the bigger and slower Badgers — and yes, draw fouls — because his post presence was on the bench for nearly half the game. (Okafor played 22 minutes.) Fouls called against Duke could have given Wisconsin the game; the Badgers weren’t good enough to take it.
Thus did Coach K annex Title No. 5, giving him one more than Adolph Rupp and five fewer than John Wooden, and it must be noted: Wooden won all 10 of his in a 12-year span; Krzyzewski took his first in 1991, almost a quarter-century ago.
“The ability to adapt is the key to everything,” Krzyzweski said. “The last decade, having the honor and the ability to coach our nation’s team has helped me adapt even more.”
He’s 68, a grandfather nine times over, and he’s coaching two teams and has never been better. “Coach has been making this not about his fifth but our first,” Cook said, but how can we separate the two? Duke basketball is Mike Krzyzewski, and Mike Krzyzewski is without living peer.
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