Shorthanded but undaunted, Duke basketball dials up the defense to claim ACC title
Jon Scheyer walked a few paces along the sideline toward center court, and as Louisville dribbled past, he raised his left hand and beckoned to the crowd.
What was Scheyer trying to conjure in that moment? Not just noise, although he got that.
It was more than that. It was whatever reserves of fight Duke had left. Whatever the Blue Devils had learned about themselves in these three games in Charlotte, mostly without Cooper Flagg and Maliq Brown. The hard-learned lessons of a long season. The deep-seated awareness that this team has no second chances left, and no excuses.
“A little bit of everything,” Scheyer said afterward.
J’Vonne Hadley tried to back down Tyrese Proctor, who didn’t budge as Hadley slammed into him once, twice, again. When Hadley did turn and put up a shot, Patrick Ngongba came out of nowhere to swat it away. Duke never looked back.
“They just hit us in the mouth,” Louisville’s Terrence Edwards, Jr., said. “We’ve got to take our hit and we’ve got to bounce back.”
When Scheyer asked for noise, Duke was up two. By the time Louisville scored again, the Blue Devils were up double-digits. That’s also how it finished Saturday, 73-62, as Duke claimed its second ACC championship in three years.
Whatever this team needed, whatever it hadn’t tapped into, whatever it had built, Scheyer raised his hand and with a wave of his wrist summoned it all.
On my command, unleash hell.
Which probably had less to do with him knowing the moment than his team meeting it. His players may have heard the crowd respond but they didn’t need the cue. If anything, Scheyer was sensing their resolve rather than the other way around. Behind him, assistant coach Chris Carrawell was down in a defensive stance like he was 17 again instead of 47.
They could all feel it. Scheyer. The coaches. The players. The crowd that rose in response. There was a championship there for the taking, right then.
“We had to seize the moment and we did,” Carrawell said. “Just being around, you just know. You sense those moments. Let’s go. This is the time.”
By the time Louisville scored again, it was a 12-0 Duke run and Scheyer might as well have been calling for the confetti that would shortly be falling to celebrate the final culmination of a season of ACC dominance, the first No. 1 seed to win the ACC tournament since Virginia in 2018.
The Blue Devils were good enough to beat a should-be NCAA tournament team in North Carolina and a potential second-weekend team in Louisville without Flagg and Brown, and in the case of the star freshman and ACC player of the year, Duke has already indicated Flagg will be ready when Duke begins the NCAA tournament next week as a No. 1 seed.
“We showed we’re more than Cooper,” Proctor said. “We want him to come back straightaway and as soon as possible. But him going out, Maliq going out, it was tough. Getting down to Georgia Tech was tough. It’s just how resilient we are, like I’ve said all year, and how together we are.”
That will start in Raleigh — where in their most recent NCAA tournament game the Blue Devils fell victim to first-degree Mercer — and, potentially, six games over three weeks that will bear extraordinary weight on the legacies of both Scheyer and Flagg.
Can Scheyer get Duke to the Final Four for the first time? And can Flagg cap a remarkable freshman season with a chance to win a national championship?
There’s already one banner to hang. But for Duke, it’s just supposed to be the beginning.
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This story was originally published March 15, 2025 at 11:07 PM with the headline "Shorthanded but undaunted, Duke basketball dials up the defense to claim ACC title."
