D.J. Burns keeps facing the music and dancing

Led by their XXL star, North Carolina State breaks down the door to the Final Four.

D.J. Burns Jr.

Before D.J. Burns Jr. began playing the rest of college basketball like a violin, he did the piano and alto saxophone. His mother Takela says he plays the game to the same beats. Every year there is a player like this, and there’s a team like North Carolina State, that makes its own music, that hears something no one else does, except Burns and the Wolfpack have turned this into a Grateful Dead marathon concert that will be entering its fourth weekend. They’re going to the Final Four in Glendale, Az. this weekend, and Burns seems bound to take his children home.

State lost 14 games in the regular season. No team has done that and reached the Final Four. No 11th-seeded team has ever won a Final Four game, either. The closest was UCLA in 2021, when Gonzaga’s Jalen Suggs drilled a half-court shot at the buzzer. But when you play the game for nearly five months and you allow 68 teams into your playoff, it’s never too late to learn a chorus. The Wolfpack eliminated Duke on Sunday, 76-64, in the finals of the South Region, and now have won nine consecutive elimination games.

Burns, who is 6-foot-9 and weighs somewhere between 290 pounds and the Taj Mahal, scored 29 points in 29 minutes and hit 13 of 19 shots. It’s what happens when the opposition chooses to play him straight-up and deny him the chance to use his passing radar when double-teamed. The problem was that Duke didn’t stop anybody else, as State followed up a 21-point first half with a 55-point second half, and Duke shot 11 for 33 in that second half and watched its own inside threat, Kyle Filipkowski, foul out. It’s not like the Wolfpack sneaked up on its Piedmont neighbor. This was the third Duke-State game in March, and State had won their ACC tournament quarter-final, 74-64.

Yes, this is quite a reversal for a team that seemed likely to get Kevin Keatts fired, but there is nothing fluky or ethereal about it. The Wolfpack has already won the Pick Six and the Daily Double. No reason to go home now.

State had lost seven of nine games when the ACC tournament started in Washington. Any Wolfpack fan who says he or she packed for five days is not to be trusted. The Wolfpack immediately fell behind Louisville, 25-11, and allowed Skyy Clark to score 36 points. It somehow won that game, then knocked off Syracuse. From those humble beginnings, State has been much more Godzilla than Cinderella.

It needed a buzzer shot by Michael O’Connell to create an overtime that it won over Virginia in the semifinals. But Duke was ranked 11th and 13th when it lost to State. North Carolina was fourth ranked. Marquette was eighth. Texas Tech was 22nd. The Wolfpack won all those games with minimal stress. The only game that prompted heavy breathing was an overtime win over Oakland, the one time State was expected to win.

There is a formula working here. In the streak, State is averaging only 15.5 three-point attempts. It pounds the half-court and has gone to the free-throw line 62 more times than its victims, and it has committed more than 10 turnovers only once, against Marquette. It had only five giveaways against Duke.

State’s best players have been at it long enough to value each possession. They also are immune to surprise. Casey Morsell played his 138th college game Sunday. O’Connell played his 129th, Burns his 159th, D.J. Horne his 157th. It was the 100th game for Ben Middlebrooks, who had transferred from Clemson and risked missing out on the Tigers’ surge to the regional final in Los Angeles. Instead Middlebrooks got big second-half minutes to play alongside Burns on Sunday, blocked three shots, hassled Filipkowski, and seemed to absorb almost every loose ball. All of them, including Keatts, seemed to know it was coming.

Burns’ quality is not a surprise either. His quantity, or frequency, is. He was the third best high school player in South Carolina, behind Zion Williamson and Ja Morant. Tennessee won the recruiting battle, but coach Rick Barnes put him in “fat camp” and redshirted him. Burns gave it a try, but he transferred to Winthrop before he ever played for the Volunteers.

At Winthrop, Burns played for Pat Kelsey, who just got the Louisville job. Burns helped Kelsey win a conference title and played an NCAA tournament game against Villanova. Then he transferred to N.C. State and was a threat in every game until the oxygen debt came due, which sometimes happened before the first time out. The coaching staff lined him up with nutritionists, steered him out of the kitchen after midnight, and got him out of his beanbag chair and into a real bed. But Burns is still heavy, and he has only played more than 29 minutes once, during the win streak. No, Burns is becoming a commodity because of his innate feel and touch, because of the same unhurried precision that made Zach Randolph a prominent pro, except he smiles more. As strength coach Pat Murphy has said, Burns combines a polar bear’s frame with a ballerina’s feet.

In Glendale, Burns will meet other big fellows who escaped the cookie-cutter, Purdue’s Zach Edey is finally in the Four, having dropped 40 points on Tennessee Sunday, then snipping down the nets in Detroit without needing a stepladder. Connecticut’s ominous Donovan Clingan will be in the other semifinal, staring down at an Alabama team that wouldn’t have subdued Clemson without 6-foot-10 Nick Pringle and 6-foot-11 freshman Jarin Stevenson.

Remember when the shot clock came along, and people were telling you that it would erase the possibility of an upset from college basketball? Instead the game is more volatile than ever. The Wolfpack players would tell you they’re not a good example of that volatility, that there was always a powerhouse team inside them, waiting for its cue. They’ll be carrying that tune to Arizona, with no static at all.