Villanova plays Kansas in the early game on Saturday in the Final Four, because of course they’re playing that one first, with Armageddon in the form of Duke-North Carolina in the main event.
College basketball’s most storied rivalry makes its first appearance in the Final Four, and wouldn’t you know it, they picked the year that Mike Krzyzewski is retiring at the end of the season to do it.
Great booking by the NCAA.
Adding to the drama, North Carolina blew out Duke in Coach K’s final game at Cameron Indoor Stadium, prompting Krzyzewski to grab a microphone at the long-planned postgame ceremony to declare the loss to be “unacceptable.”
Continuing with the booking theme, since I write about pro wrestling on the side, it wasn’t linear from there to get us to here.
Both suffered losses in the ACC Tournament, to Virginia Tech, of all teams, but they’ve each gone 4-0 since, and both are clearly playing their best basketball of the season.
North Carolina (28-9) was somehow supposedly on the NCAA Tournament bubble most of the season, which never made sense to me, except that the ACC was severely undervalued, at the expense of the Big 10 and SEC, which are nowhere to be seen this weekend.
The nadir for the Heels (their nickname, not their booking; they’re the faces in this one) came on Feb. 16, when they lost to god-awful Pitt at home.
Since, they’ve lost once, that ACC Tournament semifinal loss to Virginia Tech, and they had to beat two 2021 Final Four teams (Baylor, the eventual champ, and UCLA) to win the East Regional.
Duke (32-6), the heels (lowercase h) here, spent much of the season winning in spite of itself. This one is another talent-laden OAD era Coach K team, maybe his deepest, with four projected 2022 NBA Draft picks in the starting lineup, one as the sixth man, and a five-star sophomore guard who might be the best of the bunch running things.
This group somehow lost at Florida State, lost at home to Virginia, had their doors blown off in Brooklyn by Virginia Tech, but they’ve turned it on in the NCAA Tournament.
OK, they turn it on when they need to, late in games.
The blueprint in wins over Michigan State, Texas Tech and Arkansas in the West Regional was: go up and down with the other guys for 30, 35 minutes, whatever, buckle down and play some defense to get a lead, then hang on from there.
That’s how I expect this one to go Saturday night.
Expect a highly entertaining NBA-type game with some ballers who are on their way to the next level.
The score will be in the mid-40s, give or take, at the half, and will get into the 70s inside of the third media timeout of the second half, before things get serious.
I like Duke in the final seven-plus because Coach K has been pushing the right buttons the past couple of weeks in terms of X’s and O’s.
He’ll throw a zone out of a timeout, run an iso for Paolo Banchero, a pick-and-roll with Jeremy Roach and Mark Williams, get AJ Griffin one-one-on with Brady Manek, something.
The Duke hater in me hates to concede this point, but this Duke team has been the nation’s most talented from opening night in November, and at the risk of this being a freezing cold take in a couple of days, they’re going to cut down the nets Monday night.
Getting ahead of myself there. Saturday night is going to be fun.
Prediction: Duke 93, North Carolina 87.
Story by Chris Graham
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