NEW YORK—Two years ago, the ball always seemed to find freshman Tyus Jones’ hands when games were on the line.
Frank Jackson was not as heralded as the Blue Devils’ former starting point guard coming out of high school, but showed Tuesday he might have the same clutch gene as the one that delivered Duke its fifth national title.
The freshman guard scored all 11 of his points in the last 10 minutes of the game as Duke gradually clawed back from a double-digit hole, knocking down the biggest shot of his young career with 20 seconds left. Duke was trailing 75-72 when sophomore guard Luke Kennard drove into the lane and fired a pass to Jackson a couple of feet beyond the 3-point line on the left wing.
Jackson calmly buried the triple to tie the game, eliciting a huge response from the Blue Devil bench.
“Luke made a good drive, and as soon as he kicked it back, I was ready to shoot it,” Jackson said. “It felt good leaving my hand.”
Kansas point guard Frank Mason III responded with a game-winning pull-up jumper on the other end with 1.8 seconds left, but nobody in the crowd of nearly 20,000 people at Madison Square Garden would have expected the game to come down to a last-second shot as the second half progressed.
The Blue Devils were playing stagnant offense and lazy defense as they watched the game rapidly slip away from them, and Jackson’s poor play was one of the biggest reasons why.
He played 15 minutes in the first half, which is hard to tell from looking at the rest of his numbers at halftime—zero points, zero assists, zero rebounds, zero steals, zero fouls and just two shot attempts, both misses.
“I didn’t want to play the way I did in the first half. I kind of let my team down,” Jackson said. “I can play a much better game, but I know my teammates trust me.”
After more of the same in his first few minutes of the second half, the Alpine, Utah, native suddenly started to make plays all over the floor.
Jackson pulled down his first rebound of the game with 9:26 remaining on the offensive glass and drew a foul on the Jayhawks’ star freshman Josh Jackson—his fourth of the game—six seconds later. Frank Jackson sank both free throws to get on the scoreboard.
Duke still trailed by 10 when Josh Jackson fouled out with a little more than five minutes remaining, but Frank went to work again to chip into the lead. He cut to the basket and made a reverse layup after a feed from Matt Jones with 4:33 remaining to cut the deficit to 67-59, and with 3:04 remaining, he drilled what would be the biggest shot of his career for about two and a half minutes.
Kennard drove baseline and found Jackson in the left corner, where he swished the triple as Mason III hit his arm during his release for a foul. When Jackson knocked down the free throw, he had chopped an eight-point deficit in half with one play.
“He showed great maturity. He did a great job of calming down and finding his spots and making big plays for us,” graduate student Amile Jefferson said. “He did a great job down the stretch of being poised and of hitting big shots.”
Jackson’s final statline was modest—11 points on 3-of-5 shooting with three rebounds, no assists and two turnovers. He was one of five Duke players that scored in double figures, and ultimately, it was not enough to get the Blue Devils the win.
But when Duke needed a spark to get back into the game, Jackson played with no fear on the biggest stage of his career.
“He plays with a ton of confidence, and that’s what we need out of him,” junior Grayson Allen said. “He’s not scared of making big plays.”
After averaging 19.5 points per game against Marist and Grand Canyon last weekend and being named ACC Freshman of the Week, Jackson faced his first adversity as a Blue Devil against Kansas.
His team could have folded and lost by double digits. Instead, the 6-foot-3 guard went toe to toe with one of the best backcourts in the nation in Mason and Devonte’ Graham and even outplayed them for a very brief stretch of the night in crunch time.
With no timetable on the Blue Devils’ other three five-star freshmen returning to the court, Duke will need more of the same from Jackson as it looks to bounce back from its first loss this weekend against Penn State and either Cincinnati or No. 21 Rhode Island.
“He played more like a freshman in the first half, but it’s a pretty big environment against a great backcourt,” Duke head coach Mike Krzyzewski said. “He was very good in the second half, and it was just a matter of getting that level of experience. We have confidence in him.”
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