Three seasons after taking over for the coaching legend, a new era in Blue Devils basketball is reaping the rewards in the NCAA tournament.
Hard as it might be to follow a merely successful coach and keep things rolling, the theory goes, it’s even more of a Sisyphean task to come in after a legend. There are a handful of coaching titans who not only set an impossibly high standard for results, but who have conditioned their fan bases to think there is only one way to win and win big.
Blue Devils counterpart Jon Scheyer has been in much the same territory. Burdened with expectations and good teams, he’s fallen short in the month of March twice in trying to measure up with Krzyzewski. A second-round exit to the Tennessee Volunteers in his first season can probably be accepted given the freshness of an initial trip to the NCAA tournament. A talented team losing a halftime lead to an 11-seed and their local rival, the NC State Wolfpack, in last year’s Elite Eight, less so.
In reaching the Blue Devils’ 18th Final Four in program history, though, they had to do so with Coach K nowhere near Newark. Much of that comes down to the presence of Scheyer’s star pupil and the East Region’s Most Outstanding Player, Cooper Flagg. His movement against Alabama on Saturday saw him often pull a second defender when he drove the lane, only for fellow freshman center Khaman Maluach to receive an alley-oop to flush down several times on his way to 14 points. Flagg’s ability to help swing things along the perimeter also led to plenty of open looks for Kon Knueppel and Tyrese Proctor as well.
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