CLEMSON, SC -- For the first 36 minutes of action Saturday night, Clemson held Duke star Cooper Flagg in check. In the final seconds, Chase Hunter delivered daggers from the free throw line as the Tigers ended the Blue Devils' 16-game winning streak.
Clemson's big men flummoxed Flagg, who had just four points with six minutes left to play in the game, and they dominated No. 2 Duke in the paint and on the glass, pulling away with a 77-71 win.
"The second half," Clemson coach Brad Brownell said, "that's about as good as we can play."
The performance follows one of the Tigers' worst performances of the season, a triple-overtime loss to Georgia Tech in which forward Viktor Lakhin played just 15 minutes because of foul trouble.
In the aftermath, Brownell preached one word to Lakhin: composure.
"He probably circled that word 20 times talking to me," Lakhin said Saturday.
The lesson paid immediate dividends. Lakhin finished with 22 points, 4 rebounds and 3 blocked shots, and along with Ian Schieffelin, stymied the much-heralded Flagg, who struggled to find his shot.
Clemson outscored Duke 40-22 in the paint and finished with a 36-23 edge in rebounding.
Brownell said he knew Clemson (19-5, 11-2 ACC) could have an advantage near the basket, believing Duke (20-3, 12-1) would put its defensive focus on stopping the Tigers' perimeter shooting.
Schieffelin's dunk with 6:39 to play put Clemson up by five. At that point, Flagg had just four points on a woeful 2-of-11 shooting.
But Flagg followed that with two free throws and a 3-pointer that stemmed the tide after a 15-5 Clemson run.
Flagg had 14 points over the next five minutes, and he had the ball with 14 seconds to go and a chance to tie the score. As Flagg attacked the basket, however, he slipped on a wet spot on the court and was called for traveling. Clemson never looked back.
"He got the advantage downhill, and I'm taking that any day of the week," Duke coach Jon Scheyer said. "But there was a wet spot, and sometimes that's how it goes. But he really made every play in the last couple minutes just to will us."
Flagg's spotty performance -- a gem of a finish Scheyer chalked up to "Coop being Coop" after a shaky first half -- might be a sign of the freshman struggling to push through a physical run of play in recent weeks. Scheyer noted that Flagg, who would've been a senior in high school had he not reclassified, had struggled a bit in practice the past week.
"We put so much on his shoulders," Scheyer said. "I have to help take some of that off because it's that time -- we've got to get his body refreshed, reenergized. We've got to get him back. We know there's more there, and we have to help him recover."
If there was a secret sauce to stifling Flagg, however, Brownell and the Tigers weren't 'fessing up to it.
"We didn't do anything nobody else hasn't done before," Brownell said.
It was simply a good game plan matched with strong execution, Lakhin said. But as the fans chanted "overrated" in the final seconds before storming the court after a win over the No. 2 team in the country, Lakhin said the performance was a prelude to bigger things.
"[Flagg] is a great player," Lakhin said. "We did a good job on him, but he'll bounce back. Hopefully, we'll see him again in the [ACC] tournament and we'll do as good of a job then."