Houston comes back from dead to take down Duke, advance to national title game

LJ Cryer led Houston with 26 points as Cougars shocked Duke with nine points in final 33 seconds to upend Blue Devils and reach national championship game for first time since 1984. (Photo by The Associated Press)

By Sam Federman (@Sam_Federman)

SAN ANTONIO — Duke wouldn’t let Houston be comfortable.

Whether it was Caleb Foster and Patrick Ngongba coming off the bench and blitzing ball screens for a few minutes in the first half to change up the look, or Cooper Flagg and Khaman Maluach protecting the rim with four combined blocks and a bunch of key plays, the Cougars just couldn’t find a rhythm.

“They made it tough on us,” Mylik Wilson said. “They’re the tallest team in the country, so every position, they’re taller than us. They’re a great defensive team.”

But uniquely, Houston doesn’t need a rhythm to score points. It doesn’t need to create offense to have a good offense. All it needs is a hoop on either end and an opponent to defeat.

“When you put 40 minutes on the clock,” J’Wan Roberts said, “and you put Houston against whoever, they’re going to get our best shot.”

And much of the time, Houston’s best shot is a bad shot. Sometimes those bad shots go in, and on most of the others, the Cougars grab the rebound.

On Saturday night, they rose from the ashes, charging from 14 points down with no reason to believe to defeat one of the great teams in recent college basketball memory. Houston clamped Duke down, and made play after play down the stretch to defeat the Blue Devils, 70-67, and advance one game away from the program’s first-ever national championship

The separating factor for this Houston team versus past iterations under Kelvin Sampson is the three-point shot. The Cougars don’t take that many, but when they do, they make a higher rate than anybody else in the sport. And that showed on Saturday night. LJ Cryer kept Houston in the game, stepping into contested threes for the entire first half and through the early second half. He was the only reason why Duke couldn’t bury Houston early on.

Later in the game, it was Emanuel Sharp and his quick release launching and hitting shots, including one with 30 seconds left to cut Duke’s lead to three.

“We got the best guards in the country,” Milos Uzan said. “Eman and LJ can go get a basket whenever, and you don’t need to draw up a play for them. I feel like the way we pride ourselves defensively, we’re gonna find a way to get a basket.”

And he may be right about that assertion, even if their games don’t speak up the way other guards do, they’ve done exactly what their team needs them to do to win every single night.

Following Sharp’s three, Wilson got a steal on the inbound, dribbled out to the right wing, and unloaded a three-pointer. It didn’t fall, but JoJo Tugler flew in from the short corner with vigor and dropped the hammer on a putback slam, cutting the lead to one.

That was Wilson’s only three-point attempt of the night. He played just eight minutes. But he didn’t think twice about taking it.

“I just gotta shoot it,” Wilson said. “But JoJo just shows how we do things in this program (with the offensive rebound).”

Houston’s shooters keep shooting because they know that the Cougars will get the ball back. It’s a cheat code for shooter confidence.

But what J’Wan Roberts has done is no cheat code, it’s his pure work ethic that has driven him from a 51 percent free throw shooter last season to Saturday night, where he gave Houston the lead with two key free throws in the final 20 seconds of the game.

“We had our kids make 150 free throws seven days a week,” Sampson said. “I don't think J'Wan missed a day from June 2nd until we left on Wednesday. So Tuesday night, I looked at what he shot from the free throw line with his 150 makes. He shot 87 percent. That was his highest percentage he ever stopped. When he started this, he was at 66.”

So when he stepped up to the line in the biggest spot of his life, he was cool as a cucumber.

“I wasn't really nervous at all,” he said. “Because of all the work that I put in, just believing in it and trusting myself. I try not to get sidetracked by how big the stage is.”

While Duke couldn’t smell the blood in the water, Houston found every possible way to keep this game alive. Steals, offensive rebounds, threes, pressure, and so much more put an immense amount of strain on the Blue Devils’ process.

For Duke, it was a new late-game experience. But for the Cougars, it was just another night.

Houston had a similar comeback against Kansas at Allen Fieldhouse in the final seconds. Even though they don’t stack points like the nation’s most explosive offenses (they still rank 10th nationally in offense, but don’t do it the same as some other teams), they can never be counted out.

“You just have to keep fighting,” Uzan said. “We’ve got so much belief in each other. The beauty about this team is nobody ever loses faith.”

And there’s just 40 more minutes and the Florida Gators standing in the way of that faith being rewarded for eternity.