INDIANAPOLIS
Duke guard Matt Jones said Jahlil Okafor had a certain look on his face before Saturday’s Final Four game against Michigan State that the big man’s teammates have come to know well.
“You can tell when Jah’s ready to play,” Jones said, “and when he knows he’s the best player on the court.”
But then, the Blue Devils went out on the floor and Okafor proceeded to not touch the ball on their first five possessions as Michigan State jumped to an early eight-point lead. That changed in a hurry during the first media timeout, when it had become apparent the Spartans had no plans to double the potential No. 1 NBA draft pick.
“[Assistant] coach [Jeff] Capel told me to score every time I had it,” Okafor said.
At times it looked like the Chicago native might take those instructions literally, starting with his layup immediately after that timeout. The behemoth who palms a basketball like it’s a tennis ball and spins like a ballerina could have spent the entire game toying with Michigan State’s 6-foot-9 defenders Gavin Schilling and Matt Costello if he’d had a mind for it.
As it was, Okafor settled for 18 points on 7-of-11 shooting, but Duke’s entire team had its way with the seventh-seeded Spartans, brushing off that early deficit to run away with an 81-61 victory.
“The last 36 minutes, we played great basketball,” coach Mike Krzyzewski said. “That's the best we've played in the tournament, and we've played really well in the tournament.”
They’ve played so well, in fact, that now they’re playing for a national championship — against an unexpected and familiar opponent.
“This is the reason we came here,” point guard Tyus Jones said in the Duke locker room roughly two hours before Wisconsin upset Kentucky. “We’ve been working all year to get to this point, so for it to be right in front of us, 40 minutes away, it means everything.”
Duke will play in its ninth national championship game under Krzyzewski on Monday. The Blue Devils go in with the exact same number of wins, 34, as they did in their victories in 2001 (against Arizona) and 2010 (against Butler). In those games, though, they were the consensus favorite. There’s no such thing Monday night.
The fact that a team with two likely top-five picks, Okafor and Justise Winslow, would not be the obvious choice speaks volumes about Wisconsin. But Duke has every chance to win Monday specifically because it has those two.
Especially Okafor.
In the hallway outside Duke’s locker room afterward, Okafor’s jublilant dad and uncle put on an unintentional comedy show for a gaggle of waiting reporters, repeatedly expressing lighthearted indignation that the freshman “only got five votes” for AP player of the year. Now he’ll go up against the guy who won, Wisconsin’s Frank Kaminsky.
Okafor will need to play even better Monday than he did Saturday.
Despite missing the last eight minutes of the first half with two fouls, Winslow wound up scoring more points (19) and grabbing more rebounds (nine) than Okafor. Winslow’s spent this tourney skyrocketing up most NBA draft boards.
But Okafor was the experts’ widely anointed No. 1 pick before the season even started. He is unquestionably gifted but can sometimes be too passive offensively, as was the case in Duke’s previous two tourney games.
The Blue Devils are at their best when he’s demanding the ball, as he did much of Saturday, even if he ends up kicking it back out. And when he throws down a thunderous dunk, as he did in transition following a Spartans miss early in the second half to put his team up 44-27, it can be back-breaking.
“We needed Jah to have a performance like this, and obviously he responded,” Matt Jones said. “When he has a performance like this, as a team we gel better. Hopefully he can do it again Monday.”
They’ll need him to. It’s a big step up from Michigan State’s front line to facing Kaminsky and Sam Dekker.
Duke handled them once already, winning 80-70 in Madison on Dec. 3. Okafor had a modest 13 points that night but helped hold Kaminsky to 5-of-12 shooting. And Dekker scored just five points.
But that was four months ago — practically a whole other season.
More recently, this Duke team has won its first five tourney games by an average margin of 17.6 points. In particular, the Blue Devils have used this run to prove they’ve obliterated any lingering recollection of that time in mid-January when they weren’t a particularly good defensive team. Following back-to-back losses to NC State and Miami, Duke went to Louisville and put on a stifling performance in a 63-52 win. The light bulb flipped.
“It started on the road at Louisville,” guard Grayson Allen said, “and I think you could tell from that game on everyone was emotionally invested on the defensive end — especially Jah. He’s been our anchor.”
Okafor can’t do it himself — he’ll need ample help from Winslow and Tyus Jones — but there’s no overstating the impact such a transcendent player can have in a championship setting.
The nation is not getting the Kentucky-Duke showdown it craved, but it’s still getting quite the compelling matchup of two No. 1 seeds. And Okafor vs. Kaminsky will be the primary attraction.
Stewart Mandel is a senior college sports columnist for FOXSports.com. He covered college football and basketball for 15 years at Sports Illustrated. You can follow him on Twitter @slmandel. Send emails and Mailbag questions to Stewart.Mandel@fox.com.
