RALEIGH, N.C. — Unusually for a player who makes being in the right place at the right time look unfathomably easy, Cooper Flagg’s face was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Norchad Omier was going to come down with the rebound, but his left arm flailed out and poked Flagg straight in the right eye.

Unintentional and accidental, to be sure, but it still left Duke’s superstar freshman reaching for his face. After everything Duke went through in Charlotte, with Flagg spraining his ankle and being held out of the final two games of the Blue Devils’ ACC championship run, it would have been easy for Duke to think less about Baylor and more about, “Here we go again.”

“He’s a tough guy. I don’t think he was going to come out for a poke in the eye,” Duke guard Kon Kneuppel said. “It didn’t look great. After a couple jogs down the floor, I was like, ‘Dude, you all right?’ He was good.”

But that’s the thing about Flagg, especially as the season has worn on, into the meat of it now. He continues to make the difficult look easy, the treacherous look effortless, the impressive look mundane. Flagg had the television timeout to recover and never missed a beat.

Neither did Duke, which also made things look far too easy. Baylor came out trying to push Duke around like other past NCAA opponents — “trying to punk us a little bit,” Kneuppel said — and certainly had a modicum of success on the glass, where the Bears had 18 offensive rebounds on 44 misses, but none of it mattered in an easy 89-66 win that sent Duke onto the Sweet 16 for the third time in four years.

Tyrese Proctor’s seven 3-pointers were a big part of it, but there’s a metronomic regularity to Flagg’s game that continues to propel the Blue Devils forward. As it turns out, a roster built to complement his skills has more than enough firepower on its own, but Flagg’s at the heart of all of it.

Even after picking up his second foul midway through the first half, Flagg sat for a few minutes, came back in, and not only finished the half without picking up a third foul but scored seven of Duke’s final 12 points to turn a six-point lead into a comfortable 17.

Flagg finished with 18 points, nine rebounds, six assists, a block, only the two fouls — and at times it seemed like he was barely breaking a sweat. That’s an illusion, of course, a product of Flagg’s finely honed skills and their evolution over the course of the season. Being in the right place at the right time is a skill. Getting downhill to the rim is a talent. Finding open teammates is an instinct.

“Sometimes, it’s just easy,” Duke guard Sion James said. “You can tell when Coop’s in a rhythm and his flow because everything just comes really, really easy to him. He’s one of the best basketball players in the world, one of the best in the country. I really enjoy seeing that from him.”

At one point in the first half, during the stretch he played with two fouls, Flagg found himself facing up against V.J. Edgecombe at the top of the key, two of the best freshmen in the country, both of whom considered going to Duke, one of whom did. Their stares contained all the accumulated history of two elite prospects in the same age cohort, and Flagg was ready to add more.

Flagg, with strong “you can’t guard me” energy, or perhaps “you could never guard me” energy, lifted up and fired an easy 3 over Edgecombe. That pushed the lead to 10. Duke never looked back.

“There’s a simplicity to his game,” Kneuppel said. “That’s a credit to him. People talk about a bag or whatever, but he’s really simplified his game, made his reads easier. So sometimes it does look easy for him, because that’s what he’s trying to do. He’s trying to make it as easy as possible for himself to score.”

If Proctor is going to continue his J.J. Redick tribute act — he’s now 19 for 30 from long range in the three games since he started the ACC tournament missing his first 10 attempts — and Flagg remains healthy, very little is going to go wrong for Duke, which in addition to going from strength to strength now goes from one home away from home to another.

Depending on the result of Sunday’s Alabama-St. Mary’s game, it’s possible the other three teams in Newark could all be from west of the Rockies. The Prudential Center, like Madison Square Garden always is, was going to be a pro-Duke crowd anyway, but it could be as blue-swept as the Lenovo Center was this week, or Charlotte was last Saturday when Duke celebrated without Flagg.

“Cooper back these last couple games,” Duke coach Jon Scheyer said, “he’s had a great way about him.”

There’s always been so much more to Duke than Flagg, as the Blue Devils proved in the ACC tournament and Proctor continues to demonstrate.

Poke him in the eye? No, no, don’t do that. You’ll only make him angry.

____

©2025 The News & Observer. Visit at newsobserver.com. Distributed at Tribune Content Agency, LLC.