ATLANTA -- Duke has a lot of experienced players it can turn to with the game on the line: senior captain and leader extraordinaire Chris Duhon, shooting guards J.J. Redick and Daniel Ewing and All-ACC center Shelden Williams. But with its season hanging in the balance Sunday evening in Atlanta, it was the youngest player in Duke's rotation--freshman sensation Luol Deng--who put the Blue Devils squarely on his shoulders and carried them to the Final Four, showing everyone from Durham to Sudan that he may indeed be The One.
Deng led the Blue Devils in scoring for the second straight game en route to being named the regional's Most Outstanding Player, but ironically it was two plays in which he didn't shoot--or wasn't supposed to, anyway--that ultimately slammed the door on Xavier in one of Duke's closest, and most intense, games of the season.
With the score, and every stomach in the Georgia Dome, knotted at 56 with 3:21 remaining, Duhon penetrated into the lane for a layup, but missed. After a scramble, Deng knocked the ball loose from Xavier forward Justin Doellman and immediately found a wide-open Redick at the top of the key for a game-breaking three-pointer.
"I went up with Doellman and he didn't really box me out, he went for the ball," Deng said. "So what I tried to do was to hit the ball and then get it back, but he held the ball pretty strong and I couldn't get it out of his hands. But then at the last second it came out of his hands so I grabbed it, and I was off-balance [but] I saw J.J. and threw it to him."
One minute later, after Shelden Williams stuffed a Dedrick Finn layup attempt, Duhon again drove the lane, clearly trying to assert himself as Duke's leader and go-to man. Once again, however, his layup rimmed out. As the ball caromed off the rim, Deng skied out of nowhere over a number of players, stretched out his arms and just barely grazed the ball with his fingertips. It was just enough to push the ball back through the basket. With that, Duke had a commanding five-point lead with 1:52 to go, and the valiant Musketeers were all but defeated.
"I just wanted to go out and get the ball," Deng said. "I have no idea even where I jumped from. I just saw the ball, and said to myself I've got to touch it and get it back in there to give us the five-point lead."
The ability to make great plays on pure instinct, at the most crucial moment of the season, is the sign of true greatness, the type of moment that conjures up images of Laettner, Hurley, Hill and Battier.
What makes Deng's heroic performance in the second half all the more amazing is that he had a horrid first half, demonstrating the type of nervousness and hesitation one would expect from a freshman playing on the biggest stage of his life. But rather than pack it in, Deng not only turned it on in the second half, he took over.
"At halftime I had a bad feeling about how I performed," Deng said. "This is the type of game where if you don't let it all out, you're going to regret it for a long time. In the second half I just wanted to go out there and give it all I had."
Deng's performance certainly had visions of greatness dancing through Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski's head, not only for what he did on the court, but in the locker room as well.
"One of the great things that happened in this game, happened at halftime," Krzyzewski said. "We knew that we were going to be in a heck of a ballgame. Luol got very emotional, he was crying, and he just stood up and expressed his feelings to the team that we needed to play outside ourselves. For a freshman to do that...had a tremendous impact on our team. In my time as a coach, whenever I've seen a kid do that, whether it be Dawkins, Hill, Hurley or Laettner, Langdon or Battier, they usually end up doing something really exceptional in that half or game, and that's what happened. His leadership skills came out, and as a result he made those plays. We needed something extraordinary from our guys, and Luol gave us that."
Duke now celebrates its 10th Final Four berth in 19 years under Krzyzewski, and if the Blue Devils are to earn their fourth National Championship in one week, you can be sure their emerging freshman superstar will have an awful lot to do with it.
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