Duke, UNC lack NCAA tournament experience. In this return to ‘normalcy,’ who doesn’t?
The doors of a downtown Greenville hotel had giant Duke logos plastered across them Thursday morning, one of many rebirths of the lost rituals of March, so familiar and yet so novel after their absence.
It’s all back. Players throwing T-shirts into the crowd after the open “practices” that turn into dunk contests. The pep bands playing songs you haven’t heard on the radio in 20 years. Tears. Gasps. Upsets. A frantic Mike Brey demanding Irish whiskey after Notre Dame’s double-overtime win in Dayton.
All of this matters to fans, but imagine how much it matters to players. Denied of a normal NCAA tournament experience for two full years, they’re back into what North Carolina coach Hubert Davis called “normalcy” — and at a 90 degree angle.
“Look, this is a great, great time,” Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski said Thursday of his final NCAA tournament run. “I mean, to see college basketball back at this level of stage again, I’m really honored to be a part of it. I think this is the 36th time. I never would have thought that my first couple years at Army or Duke, but it’s worked out all right.”
The heartbreak of 2020 – especially for teams like the N.C. State women, hoping to parlay a historic ACC title into greater rewards – faded into the inadequacy of 2021, men’s and women’s tournaments that fit the description on the box but were otherwise mostly empty inside.
“Not a good time at all”
The Olympian logistical effort of playing the entire tournaments in Indianapolis and San Antonio mid-pandemic made the tournament possible, but the experience was far from the same. The sum total of North Carolina forward Armando Bacot’s NCAA tournament experience is a few days spent in an Indianapolis hotel, a 70-minute bus ride to Purdue, a disappointing loss to Wisconsin, a 70-minute bus ride back to Indianapolis and a flight home.
“We just sat in that place the whole time,” Bacot said. “That was not a good time at all.”
Thursday’s thumping of Marquette will leave better memories.
Only Leaky Black and Brady Manek remember the before times. Manek has the most NCAA experience of anyone, all at Oklahoma. Last year, the Sooners stuck around a little longer, beating Missouri to advance to face Gonzaga.
“It was strange. We were there the first week and it was weird having to practice and stay at the hotel and not going outside for a couple days at a time, just kind of stuck there,” Manek said. “Everybody’s wearing masks. It was weird. A strange system. Had a really good game and there’s no better feeling in getting a win in the tournament, hopefully getting more than one win.”
A few weeks later, in the dark of the early Indianapolis morning, Gonzaga players walked the two blocks from Lucas Oil Stadium to the convention center to reunite with families they hadn’t seen in months. While Baylor celebrated deep into the night, the Zags had this instead, bittersweet but a celebration nonetheless. Their tears were a tangible mark of the sacrifices everyone made to even have a season last year, let alone crown a champion.
So here we are a year later, spread back out across the country, North Carolina sticking around for the weekend in Fort Worth, Duke in Greenville, and while Duke truly has almost no NCAA tournament experience after COVIDing out of the ACC tournament last March, no one anywhere has very much experience in an actual NCAA tournament, with travel and fans and unfamiliar neutral sites.
A Duke rarity
“I don’t have any tournament experience myself,” said Duke junior Wendell Moore. “I’m just having Coach really lead us through it all. It’s been great because he knows what to do. He’s been here more than anybody. He’s failed. He’s had success. So he knows the ins and outs of everything.”
But even Krzyzewski admits hasn’t had a team with as little experience as this since he got to Duke four decades ago, thanks to COVID elsewhere in 2020 and COVID at Duke in 2021. Asked about his first NCAA tournament at Duke — one-and-out after a loss to Washington in Pullman, Wash., in 1984 — he said it reminded him of this last run.
“That’s what I mean, the newness,” Krzyzewski said. “A Duke team has not had this newness because we’ve been — up until last year, we’ve been since the mid-90s to every tournament.”
There will indeed be few with as little experience as Duke. The Blue Devils have a total of 24 minutes of NCAA tournament experience spread among Joey Baker, Bates Jones (at Davidson) and Theo John (at Marquette) — plus Paolo Banchero’s experience as a 12-year-old ball boy and floor-mopper for the Gonzaga-Iowa in Seattle in 2015, for whatever that’s worth.
Speaking of 2015, Duke’s national champions weren’t exactly overloaded with veterans but could claim 11 games of NCAA experience with Quinn Cook, Amile Jefferson, Matt Jones and Marshall Plumlee. Still, Duke isn’t even the least experienced team in Greenville. Auburn, somehow, has less than Duke – 13 minutes, all from Walker Kessler last year at UNC. This may be the one year that doesn’t matter.
Even if this is the old way of doing things, it all feels new to everyone. It all feels wonderful.
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This story was originally published March 17, 2022 at 6:46 PM with the headline "Duke, UNC lack NCAA tournament experience. In this return to ‘normalcy,’ who doesn’t?."
