In an NCAA tournament of complaints, Duke and Alabama bring beauty

Washington Post

31-03-2025

NEWARK — The pep bands disembarked all the way from Provo and Tuscaloosa and Tucson and Durham, and they took their places behind the baselines as ever, and they played as adeptly as ever, and they typified the March Madness fabric as ever, except that maybe they should have taken Thursday night off and hopped the trains to Manhattan and then Brooklyn for some college-aged revelry. Maybe they wouldn't have minded the redirection.
It's just that what the East Region Sweet 16 seemed to need Thursday night — and what the Elite Eight bout between Duke and Alabama might need come Saturday night — would be symphonies. That's because after a sports nation really good at grousing spent the early week grousing about this NCAA tournament and its lack of Cinderellas and photo-finishes, Alabama and Duke and even their prey provided a different reason to tune in to men's college basketball.
How about some beauty worthy of violins?
What basketball beauty played in the hockey arena here. Even the statue of Martin Brodeur outdoors might have pivoted to appreciate. Four teams shot 131 for 259, or almost 50.6 percent. With Alabama's 113-88 win over BYU and then Duke's 100-93 win over Arizona, the Sweet 16 had its first twin 100-point games since the holy-mercy Mideast Region of 1970, when Artis Gilmore's Jacksonville Dolphins nudged Iowa, 104-103, and Adolph Rupp's latest wow of a Kentucky bested Notre Dame, 109-99.
Come a Thursday all these decades later, neither game tested the buzzer, but both games vested the gorgeous. Even the box scores told of triumph over the harsh concept of putting a basketball through a hoop while other more-than-capable people try to prevent same.
The star freshman from Maine, 6-foot-9 Cooper Flagg of Duke, so striking in person with his kinetic ease, played 36 minutes with 30 points and 9-for-19 shooting and 3-for-5 three-point shooting and 9-for-10 free throw shooting and seven assists and six rebounds and three blocks and one steal and one measly turnover. His coach, Jon Scheyer, previously an assistant to Mike Krzyzewski, called it 'one of the best tournament performances I've ever coached or been a part of.' The more entrenched Mark Sears of Alabama, a senior who piloted a Final Four berth last year, lent the earlier evening a gorgeous parade of splashes with his 11 for 18 overall and his 10 for 16 from downtown and his 34 points and his — maybe this part is the best — eight assists. His coach, Nate Oats, suggested Sears had played 'chess, not checkers,' given how six preceding games with 5-for-35 long-range shooting might have sent onlookers into a lull.
Gaze at numbers. Alabama had 27 assists. Duke had 20. Duke shot 33 for 55 with offense so efficient it surely couldn't major in freshmen. (It did.) Alabama shot 35 for 66 with offense that surpassed and thus conjured one of the darling tournament moments of all time: Loyola Marymount. The Crimson Tide's unimaginable 25 for 51 from three-point range surpassed the durable record 21 three-point shots No. 11 seed Loyola Marymount made in its 1990 win over No. 3 seed Michigan by 149-115, one of the most astounding final scores in tournament history.
By contrast, Duke, with otherworldly efficiency, shot a sublime 11 for 19 (57.9 percent) from distance.
How so-so.
'They were a machine on offense,' Arizona Coach Tommy Lloyd said without the 'machine' part sounding clichéd.
'That was a fun game,' Oats said of his game earlier, 'if you like offense.'
People do! And so the match between two programs making second straight Elite Eight appearances does look sumptuous. That's even if it won't include the eternal Caleb Love, the Arizona guard and former North Carolina guard who closed out a five-season career frequenting the heights with a good-grief 35 points on 11 for 21 and 5 for 11 from yonder.
That seemed almost subdued given the multi-man deluge Duke (34-3) presented in its 30th win in its past 31, with its mighty accoutrements such as Sion James's 5 for 6 and 16 points or big man Khaman Maluach's 6 for 8 and six rebounds and four blocks and 13 points or Kon Knueppel's 5 for 7 and four rebounds and 20 points. It felt as if the stars had entered the building when they entered at 9:33 p.m. with all their buzz in a land that loves stars, with the biggest star named Flagg.
'His shooting has gotten so much better,' Lloyd said, four months after the teams played in November, a 69-55 Duke win. 'He makes 3 of 5 from three today, 9 of 10 from the free throw line. And just his ability to play-make. They've done a great job. They're a team that they come down, they have a plan, they know what they want to get, and they're able to get it consistently, which is hard to do. We're not a bad defensive team, but they make you feel like it for long stretches today. They've done a really good job creating certainty, and all their young guys have gotten better. Their vets like [Tyrese] Proctor, Sion James — he's impressive — have gotten better.'
In their midst, Flagg operates. At barely 18, he seems supernaturally comfortable in his skin and frame. He wows with spins and assists and know-how while never tipping over into inefficiency. He takes a rebound pass from Mason Gillis and takes a few giant steps and jacks a 25-foot three just before halftime, causing momentum. He wriggles unforeseeably through two defenders to make a lob to Maluach. He staggers out of a near-interception with the ball and makes another lob to Maluach. He pairs all of that with unprepossessing quotations such as, 'They put me in some really good spots tonight.' Scheyer says of it all: 'What I've wanted from him is not to defer. I've just wanted him to fully be him, and I thought he was that. He was in his element tonight. He was him. He had just a great personality. He was loose, talking, competitive, the whole thing. So, yeah, he impresses me all the time.'
Duke led by 19 with 13:12 left, then led by five with 1:33 left, then held nerve with 23-for-27 free throw shooting et al, so that Scheyer said, 'You know, they're not afraid, and you hope to recruit that, but until they get here you don't really know.'
With Sears and his 10 for 16 and Aden Holloway and his 6 for 13, Alabama's 25 threes roared past Loyola Marymount's 35-year record even if Sears's 10 couldn't quite get to the single-game 11 still standing as a March Madness record for Loyola Marymount's Jeff Fryer.
'Yeah,' Sears said in classic launcher dialect, 'even when I was shooting 14 percent my confidence was still high.' Of course, teammate Chris Youngblood said: 'To be honest with you, before y'all talking about 14 percent [in the past six games], I had no idea he was shooting 14 percent because I never really pay attention to — Mark is an incredible player. All I know is when he gets the ball, the defense is collapsing on him, so it doesn't feel like he's shooting 14 percent.' Come pretty Thursday, Sears saw a bucket 'as big as an ocean' even when a pond would have done.
The whole thing had Oats remembering watching Loyola Marymount in 1990, and 'Bo Kimble shooting left-handed free throws in honor of Hank' Gathers, the star who had died just before that tournament. And it wound up a night of gorgeous basketball with Oats saying of his players: 'They're supposed to be off their legs as soon as the media gets out of the locker room. Let's get them back to the hotel. Let's get them off their legs. Let's get the recovery started.'
That's a prudent idea because who knows what beauty awaits Saturday. It might even call for the bands to keep on reveling in Brooklyn.