Filipowski and Duke Have the Talent. The Question Is Mentality.

By Brendan Marks / The Athletic, New York Times

Kyle Filipowski has had the same Twitter header photo since high school.

Just a picture of Kobe Bryant, next to one of his famous old quotes: “Everything negative — pressure, challenges — is all an opportunity for me to rise.”

Filipowski, a native of New York, isn’t a Kobe die-hard like some hoopers, but that quote has always struck a chord. Why? Because of when he found it, back at Wilbraham & Monson Academy in Massachusetts, and where he was in his life when he did.

Filipowski would eventually become a five-star, Top 5 recruit in the country, but he wasn’t at the time. Midway through high school, Filipowski was stuck on the cusp: aware of his vast basketball potential, but also the personal limitations that might prevent him from reaching it.

He was too emotional. Impulsive. Easily bothered.

“That was a point in my life where I was trying to get a lot more mental fortitude,” Filipowski said. “Better with my mindset going into things, and being OK with feeling anxious in certain situations.”

Some of that is normal teenage maturation. But as Filipowski’s on-court development surged, his mental makeup had to keep up. Who better to look to than Bryant, a basketball icon famous for his “Mamba Mentality”?

“He focused so much on his mindset and mentality,” Filipowski said. “I was a very emotional player.”

Filipowski stopped, catching himself using the past tense. Self-awareness, right?

“I still am today,” he joked, laughing, “but I wasn’t able to control it as well, I think.”

It’s an especially pertinent topic now, as Filipowski and his teammates are on the cusp of returning their men’s basketball program to the Final Four. Duke — the No. 4 seed in the South Region — will take on No. 11-seeded North Carolina State on Sunday in the Elite Eight after upsetting No. 1-seeded Houston on Friday.

And smack dab in the center of it all is Filipowski, Duke’s leading scorer and rebounder, and also possibly the most polarizing player in the entire tournament.

There’s no question that coach Jon Scheyer’s team has had the talent to advance. But the mentality? That’s tougher to tell.

After Duke lost to the Wolfpack in the Atlantic Coast Conference tournament — after the team’s regular-season finale defeat to North Carolina, only the second time all season that Duke lost consecutive games — that mentality was exactly what came into question.

Filipowski, unprompted, brought up last season’s loss to Tennessee in the second round, and specifically how the Volunteers “wanted it more” than Scheyer’s first squad. The same was true, he said, in that loss to North Carolina State. And he wasn’t alone in that assessment; Jared McCain, Mark Mitchell and Jeremy Roach corroborated Filipowski’s sentiment in the postgame locker room, with shrugged shoulders and bowed heads.

Now, as every game could be Filipowski’s last in college — he is projected as a first-round pick in this summer’s NBA draft — how much mental fortitude he personally has could determine how Duke finishes.

Filipowski used to hear things like that — pressure, challenges — and try using them as motivation. Not anymore.

“Over time, I just realized it’s always going to be there,” he said. “Everyone’s always going to have something to say, so it doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t affect me anymore. I’m over it.”

That said, Filipowski isn’t ignorant of the position he’s in. From a strictly basketball perspective, he understands his role: Duke’s leading scorer and rebounder, its offensive focal point, the type of inside-out threat for which few college teams have a capable counter.

But he also acknowledges the rest of it. That he is polarizing, even hated by some. He’s far from the first “villain” ever to play at Duke, but public opinion was not on his side after the court-storming incident at Wake Forest, when he appeared to be seriously hurt but then returned the next game, coupled with the tripping of Harrison Ingram, intentionally or not, in Duke’s regular-season finale against North Carolina.

“I just need to be more patient with myself, not let any negativity get to me,” Filipowski said. “That’s the biggest thing I’ve been working on.”

He will need to, especially as Duke seeks to do the impossible. No team that lost its first conference tournament game, as the Blue Devils did, has gone on to win the NCAA Tournament.

Put all that together, and the Bryant quote makes much more sense: “Everything negative — pressure, challenges — is all an opportunity for me to rise.”

For Filipowski, but also for the team he represents.

“We’re the most dangerous team in the country when we play as good as we can play together,” he said. “So, keeping that the main thing, keeping that the focus, not letting any of that outside noise get to any of us, is the most important thing — because we can really win all of it.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.