UConn freshman Braylon Mullins watched his last shot Sunday night arc toward the basket from 35 feet away. If his eyes had been shut, he still would’ve known, not only from the pandemonium of the crowd and the euphoria of his teammates, but from the wonderful knife-plunge noise of a swish from great distance. Chuh! That’s the best sound basketball has to offer. It’s very much like the sound of Michael Myers jamming a large blade into someone’s chest, which is fitting.
The shot completed an incredible second-half comeback for UConn. It win sends the Huskies through to the Final Four, for the third time in four years, and it sends the top-seeded Duke Blue Devils to hell. The shot also should not have happened. Duke had the ball up two points with exactly 10 seconds left on the clock. Because a 10-second violation is not really a danger under these circumstances—you can afford the turnover if as a result the ball is going to your opponent on a side-out with some tiny fraction of a second left on the clock—Duke accomplished everything it needed from the possession the moment they escaped UConn’s frenzied first trap. The Huskies were just planning to foul a Duke player before too much time had run off, and were prepared to hope for that Blue Devil to miss a free throw. “That was kind of the whole goal,” recalled Mullins, a bussin’ teenager who will now be remembered forever as a hero of March. “But then they made a little mistake.”
They did, indeed. Cameron Boozer gathered the inbounds pass and evaded the trap with a pass back to Dame Sarr. Sarr quickly whipped it ahead to the other Boozer, Cayden, another freshman, near midcourt. If Blue Devils head coach Jon Scheyer had scripted and choreographed this sequence, he could hardly have done better: just six seconds left, the clock running, three Huskies behind the action, and the ball in the hands of an 81-percent free-throw shooter. All Cayden had to do in this moment was dribble in any direction. If he’d swallowed the ball, in the very most literal sense, that also would’ve been strategically fine, if medically inadvisable.
“I turned the ball over,” Boozer admitted after the 73-72 loss. “I cost our team our season.”
Scheyer spent those crucial moments twitching and flinching and pulling weird faces on the sideline, at one point pantomiming what appears to be the act of holding a ball over one’s head. “We just have to secure it, right? We had it,” Scheyer said. “I was ready for a timeout. We’ve just got to hold on.” Whatever instructions Scheyer gave to his players, they could’ve been plainer. An affectless, utterly wrecked Cayden recalled after the game that Scheyer used Duke’s final timeout before the fateful possession to advise his players that UConn would certainly attempt a trap, and that they should “be strong with the ball.”
Cayden accepted the blame for the loss, and that’s how history is likely to record it. He in fact was not strong with the ball: That over-the-top pass to finally crush the press is the kind of thing that sometimes works, and certainly has worked, but it risked a turnover in a situation where having the ball in the front-court was no kind of prize for Duke. If you must throw the ball anywhere, in this situation, simply throw it as high into the air as you can manage. It’s not the most honorable maneuver, but the point is to win the game. The worst outcome is the one Duke stumbled into: a live-ball turnover, with time left for UConn to manage a squared-up and under-control final shot.
It was Mullins who gathered the loose ball near mid-court, and when he fired it ahead to Alex Karaban, it was with the idea that the big senior would take the team’s most important shot of the year. Mullins had missed all four of his three-point tries in the game, and after all is a freshman. “My instinct was just to throw it ahead, I know AK was ahead of me and he had just hit one, so I thought he was about to shoot it,” Mullins said. Karaban was calm and appropriately senior-ish, and instead of rushing a heavily guarded 30-footer from the wing, he pitched it back to the freshman, who could trot comfortably and in rhythm into a clean and comparatively straight-on 35-footer.
Even wide open, that’s a big responsibility for a freshman. “You’ve got to believe it’s going in,” said Mullins, of shooting with confidence when your entire season is on the line. I don’t know whether this helps or hurts, but Mullins did not fully grasp the contours of the moment, nor the drama of what he’d just accomplished. “I’m gonna be honest, I thought it was for the tie.” It was not for the tie. “In my head, I knew there was four seconds.” There were in fact just two seconds.
To be fair, this was one of those thunderclap moments, unfolding quickly enough to catch many by surprise. Bob Hurley Sr., a hoops dignitary and the father of UConn head coach Dan Hurley, told The Athletic that people in his section of the stands needed a few beats to realize what Mullins had done. “A lot of people were sitting there stunned. Then, ‘Oh, jeez, we won this game.'” The gravity of it all settled perceptibly onto the shoulders of Duke’s players, in the moments after Mullins’s resounding chuh: They went from the balls of their feet to slumped and dead-eyed over a slow couple of seconds, as the score and the horrors of the game clock and the improbability of the event congealed into stunned comprehension. The Blue Devils led for a whopping 38-plus of the game’s 40 minutes, including by 19 points in the first half and 15 points at halftime, and there they stood, dead on their feet.
In a delightful moment of playing to type, Duke’s radio announcer found a perfectly Duke-coded focal point in the immediate aftermath of Mullins’s shot. “It’s Mullins up top for the win, oh he hit it, with three-tenths of a second to go,” said Duke director of broadcasting David Shumate, his voice descending in anguish. But then, hope! “Malachi Smith ran off the bench! That should be a technical!” A couple of Huskies players did in fact spend something like one second out on the court, before darting back to the sideline; an absolutely unbearably, unacceptably strict interpretation of the rules might inspire the worst official in history to punish this with a technical foul. The referees in this instance chose a better path; in any case it is hysterical, to me, to think of anyone in the entire arena turning their attention to the UConn sideline at that moment in the hopes of discovering some actionable breach of decorum.
Instead, Duke was left to salvage their season with a heave, which was batted away harmlessly. History will now record this game resolving in the actions of two freshmen who misunderstood the moment: the unfortunate one who made things harder than they had to be, and the other, who was wrong about the score and the clock but right about what mattered most. “I knew that was probably the best shot we could’ve gotten,” said a smiling Mullins, basking in triumph. “That was the shot to shoot.”