SAN ANTONIO — There’s a tiny room with one black leather chair in the bowels of the Alamodome where Cooper Flagg sits for the next six minutes until Duke’s locker room to the media for good. Until the cameras disappear, if only for a moment, Flagg will sit and wait. Until the reused questions about one final late-game play gone awry can get shelved for the night, Flagg will sit and wait.
Nothing can fix this pain, but a quiet room away from peeping eyes can help.
Flagg isn’t alone. His roommate Kon Knueppel is in there, too, but the pain is palpable. Flagg’s anguish was apparent in the postgame press conference, just moments after a Duke collapse that will go down as one of the biggest choke jobs in the Final Four’s illustrious history.
Fair or not, Flagg’s clutch gene just became debate TV’s next draft topic straw man after his go-ahead fadeaway jumper came up just short in the final 10 seconds of Saturday’s 70-67 loss to Houston.
“It’s the play coach drew up,” Flagg said. “Took it into the paint. Thought I got my feet set, rose up. Left it short obviously. A shot I’m willing to live with in the scenario. I went up on the rim, trust the work that I’ve put in.”
The final moment of Flagg’s phenomenal freshman season will be him being hidden in a room with an “authorized personnel only” sign taped to the door. It feels cruel and unforgiving on a night when a coronation felt imminent. Hours earlier, Flagg had earned the prestigious Wooden Award, handed to the best player in college basketball. For 39 minutes, he was just that.
Flagg notched 27 points, seven rebounds, four assists, three blocks and two steals. He became the first player to ever lead his team in points, rebounds, assists, steals and blocks in a Final Four game since the defensive stats became official in 1986. His right-wing trey and enormous swat in an 46-second span felt like Flagg’s next big March Moment and a new staple of One Shining Moment.
Then Duke squandered what was left of its lead — six points — with 34 seconds to go. Houston, a lovable cockroach, simply refused to die. Duke helped it in its cause.
- Flagg and Sion James — impeccable defenders, both of them — busted a switch at the wrong time to free up Emanuel Sharp for an important 3-pointer with 33 seconds left to halve Duke’s lead down to just three.
- Flagg’s questionable over-the-back foul gave J’Wan Roberts a chance to tie and give Houston a 68-67 lead with a pair of stone-cold free throws.
- Tyrese Proctor missed (another) front end of a one-and-one in the final minute of a game.
- Duke’s offense, which ranked No. 1 in halfcourt efficiency entering tonight, had just one field goal in the final 10 minutes of regulation. One!
All that necessary context will be lost while the hot-take artists craft the “Flagg isn’t clutch” retort. You know it’s in the works.
“I’m sure there’s a lot more that I could have done to help our guys at the end there,” Duke coach Jon Scheyer said. “That’s the thing that kills me the most. The amount of game situations we’ve watched this year. We haven’t had the real-life experience all the time, but that’s something I really felt we prepared for. So I feel like I let our guys down in that regard.”
In a way, it was fitting that a sixth-year senior bested the freshman sensation on the sport’s biggest stage. Houston’s captain J’Wan Roberts was up to the challenge with numerous stops against Flagg in closing time, including on Duke’s second-to-last play of regulation. Inside the huddle, Kelvin Sampson, and everyone else in the 68,252-member crowd, knew where the ball was going. Sampson also knew who he wanted guarding him, and it wasn’t JoJo Tugler, the Big 12 Defensive Player of the Year.
“I was there for it; I was not running from it,” Roberts said, like a boxer after exiting the ring. “I feel like he got to his spot but I got a great contest to alter his shot and it was short. I trusted myself in that moment. I didn’t want any help or stunts. I just wanted to guard him and live with the result.”
The end is always unforgiving, but this end in this moment may be hard to recover from. Flagg didn’t admit it Saturday, but this one will stick in his mind forever. He has plenty of incredible, life-changing opportunities ahead of him. But he will never get this chance again.
“Of course, it hurts,” James, Duke’s senior point guard, said in the middle of a devastated and quiet Duke locker room. “He wanted to make the shot just like we all wanted him to. Cooper is the best player in the country. He knows it, we know it. But of course it hurts. I just wanted to pick him up. It just feels incomplete. We wanted to bring (championship) No. 6 back. We were a game away.”
Getty Images
Right down the hall, Houston assistant coach Kellen Sampson couldn’t take the smile off his face after the Cougars took Flagg’s best shot and somehow escaped to face Florida in Monday’s national championship game.
“He’s awesome, man,” Sampson says. “He’s a nightmare-infusing matchup for everybody. First half? He picked us apart with his passing. I don’t have enough superlatives for him. He is a monster matchup problem. It took a guy who has been with us six years and is long, athletic and about it to get in his way. And he still had 25 or whatever.”
The long-term future for Flagg is as sunny as ever. He put a bow on one of the best individual seasons in college basketball history by breaking records left and right. He will go down as one of the all-time freshmen that college basketball has ever housed, and he’s earmarked to be the No. 1 pick in the 2025 NBA Draft.
But the next few hours will be anything but a ray of sunshine. The door opens and Flagg climbs into a golf cart which jets down the hall booking for some semblance of solitude that will be impossible to find.
Flagg’s college career is over.
