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David Hale
CLEMSON, SC — For the first 36 minutes of action, Clemson held Duke star Cooper Flagg in check. In the final seconds, Chase Hunter delivered daggers from the free throw line, as the Tigers ended Duke’s 16-game winning streak.
Clemson’s big men flummoxed Flagg, who had just four points with 6 minutes left to play in the game, and they dominated Duke both in the paint and on the glass, pulling away with a 77-71 win over the No. 2-ranked Blue Devils.
“The second half,” Clemson coach Brad Brownell said, “that’s about as good as we can play.”
The performance comes on the heels of one of the Tigers’ worst performances of the year, a triple overtime loss to Georgia Tech in which forward Viktor Lakhin spent much of the game in foul trouble, seeing just 15 minutes of action in the loss.
In the aftermath, Brownell sat with Lahkin and preached one word: Composure.
“He probably circled that word 20 times talking to me,” Lahkin said Saturday.
The lesson paid immediate dividends. Lahkin finished with 22 points, four rebounds and three blocks, and along with Ian Schieffelin, stymied the much-heralded Flagg, who struggled to find his shot.
Clemson out-scored Duke 40-22 in the paint and finished with a 36-23 edge in rebounding.
Brownell said he knew Clemson could have an advantage near the basket, believing Duke would put its defensive focus on stopping the Tigers’ perimeter shooting.
Schieffelin’s dunk with 6:39 to play put Clemson up by 5. At that point, Flagg had just four points on a woeful 2-of-11 shooting.
But Flagg followed that with a pair of free throws and a 3-pointer that stemmed the tide after a 15-5 Clemson run.
Flagg had 14 points over the next five minutes of action, and he had the ball with 14 seconds to go and a chance to tie. As Flagg attacked the basket, however, his feet slipped out from under him on a wet spot on the court, resulting in a turnover. Clemson never looked back.
“He got the advantage downhill, and I’m taking that any day of the week,” Scheyer said. “But there was a wet spot, and sometimes that’s how it goes. But he really made every play in the last couple minutes just to will us.”
Flagg’s spotty performance — a gem of a finish Scheyer chalked up to “Coop being Coop” and a shaky first half — might be a sign of the freshman struggling to push through a physical run of play in recent weeks. Scheyer noted that Flagg, who reclassified and would’ve been a senior in high school still otherwise, had struggled a bit in practice the past week.
“We put so much on his shoulders,” Scheyer said. “I have to help take some of that off because it’s that time — we’ve got to get his body refreshed, re-energized. We’ve got to get him back. We know there’s more there, and we have to help him recover.”
If there was a secret sauce to stifling Flagg, however, Brownell and the Tigers weren’t ‘fessing up to it.
“We didn’t do anything nobody else hasn’t done before,” Brownell said.
It was simply a good game plan matched with strong execution, Lahkin said. But as the crowd chanted “overrated” in the final seconds before storming the court after a win over the No. 2 team in the country, Lahkin said the performance was simply a prelude to bigger things to come.
“[Flagg] is a great player,” Lahkin said. “We did a good job on him, but he’ll bounce back. Hopefully we’ll see him again in the [ACC] tournament and we’ll do as good of a job then.”