ANAHEIM, Calif.—Thursday night’s loss to Oregon marked the end of a long season for Duke, but for Marshall Plumlee, the clock ran out on his five-year journey as a Blue Devil.
With Amile Jefferson applying for a medical redshirt to be eligible to play next season, Plumlee is the lone graduating player from this year’s Duke squad and the only player guaranteed not to be back in the fall. At 23 years old, the graduate student has several years on many of his teenage teammates and opponents, and served as an elder statesman and mentor for several young Blue Devils who passed through Durham.
The Warsaw, Ind., native redshirted his freshman year, the 2011-12 season in which Duke was upended by 15th-seeded Lehigh in the first round of the NCAA tournament. Plumlee has been through the highest of highs and lowest of lows in his time as a Blue Devil, from the shocking first-round defeat to 14th-seeded Mercer in Raleigh to last year’s national championship run through Indianapolis.
As the final seconds ticked away and the Ducks held onto their double-digit lead, it dawned on Plumlee that all of this was coming to an end.
“Yeah, it sunk in,” Plumlee said of walking off the court for the last time. “You try to keep the finality in the back of your head as you play so that you play with an extreme sense of urgency, but it wasn’t enough tonight.”
That sense of urgency has been Plumlee’s calling card all season, and he emerged as the vocal leader of a team filled with younger freshmen still learning the ropes. The Blue Devils found themselves trailing at halftime in their first-round contest against UNC-Wilmington, and it was Plumlee who delivered a motivational speech at halftime to galvanize the team to a eight-point win.
Plumlee more than backed up his words on the court in Providence, R.I., tying leading scorer Grayson Allen with a team-high 23 points and flushing home eight dunks to carry Duke past the undersized Seahawks.
There would be no such heroics Thursday against Oregon, though, and Plumlee finished with just six points and five rebounds against the formidable Ducks tandem of Chris Boucher and Jordan Bell down low. The normally stoic Plumlee appeared visibly upset after the game and as the game became further and further out of reach, the captain shared a few words with Duke freshman Luke Kennard on the court.
“He’s emotional. Right there at the end, the game was kind of out of our hands at that point, and he was just emotional and he knew—it was his last game of the year,” Kennard said.
Plumlee’s development as a player is perhaps the biggest reason why the Blue Devils found themselves in the Sweet 16 in the first place. During his first four seasons on the sidelines, Plumlee never saw more than 24 minutes on the floor and never averaged more than three points or rebounds per game. He was almost exclusively a role player, a big body to throw in down low to give the starters a breather and perhaps rough up opposing post threats.
Much more was expected of Plumlee this season, and those expectations were only heightened after the injury Jefferson suffered in December that ended up claiming the rest of his season and the slow development of five-star big man Chase Jeter.
And despite many who doubted his physical abilities, Plumlee more than lived up to those expectations. He shattered his career-highs with averages of 8.3 points and 8.6 rebounds this season, and pitched in seven double-doubles as the Blue Devils’ main post threat. With only a seven-man rotation and an bare cupboard in terms of frontcourt reinforcements, the 7-foot center stepped up his physical conditioning and logged 30.5 minutes per game—more than ACC Player of the Year Jahlil Okafor did last season—and only played fewer than 30 minutes twice during the gauntlet of conference play.
The dramatic improvement from the youngest Plumlee was not lost on Duke head coach Mike Krzyzewski, who called him the team’s most important player several times during the season and had nothing but the highest of praises for him after Thursday’s loss.
“No kid has improved more in one year in my 36 years here at Duke than Marshall,” Krzyzewski said. “He was as important a player as we could have especially after Amile got hurt, the amount of minutes, the situations that he was put in. He had a fabulous year for us, and that's what I'll remember.”
With his collegiate career now in the books, Plumlee will turn his attention to pursuing a professional career with the NBA. He managed to juggle a full basketball schedule while participating in the Army’s ROTC program in college, and last January went through an Army contracting ceremony at Cameron Indoor Stadium.
Plumlee said Wednesday he plans to continue his professional basketball career but still maintain his commitment to the armed forces, and remains undecided as to whether he will enter the U.S. Army Reserves or the U.S. National Guard. He said he could not have asked for a better leader than Krzyzewski—a West Point graduate—to guide him through his five years in Durham, and the two shared a long embrace after the game, for the last time on the court as coach and player.
“At this point in my career, he knows me extremely well. He knows the right things to say and tells me what I need to hear, even if I don’t want to hear it,” Plumlee said. “There’s some personal words that I’ll keep between just us, but I’m so grateful I had the opportunity to play for Coach K and I’m so proud of how much better he’s made me as a person and as a player, and I’m not going to stop improving. This isn’t the end for me.”
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