`Whatever it takes’: How Duke basketball overcomes being one coach down in NCAA tourney
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2025 NCAA Tournament
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One of the NCAA Tournament’s toughest challenges is winning after the quick turnaround between same-weekend games.
Earning a national championship requires securing six wins, three of which have to come with only one day of rest.
No. 1 Duke is in the midst of it again, preparing to face second-seeded Alabama on Saturday night, about 45 hours after it defeated fourth-seeded Arizona, 100-93, in the wee hours of Friday morning at Prudential Center.
This year the Blue Devils have an added challenge: They are making their run down a coach after one of their top assistants, Jai Lucas, left on March 9 for his new job as Miami’s head coach.
Where Duke used to spread scouting duties and planning among Lucas, Chris Carrawell and Emanuel Dildy, that three-man rotation is 33 percent smaller. Instead of two assistant coaches watching Alabama play BYU on Thursday night ahead of Duke’s game with Arizona, only Dildy sat on the sideline to gather information on both teams. That’s what happened in Raleigh last weekend when Baylor and Mississippi State played, with Duke preparing to face the winner.
“You sleep a lot less now,” Dildy said Friday, “especially once you get in the tournament play, with how quickly the turnarounds are. You do feel impact when you’re down a guy. But Coach Carrawell is a veteran assistant that’s done it a long time. We have a great support staff that does advance scouting for us and helps us get all the information that we need. So we’ve made it work. We’ve done a good job with it.”
‘The obstacle is the way’
Does head coach Jon Scheyer like it?
No. The phrase “not ideal” has been thrown around often.
Has Duke let it affect its play negatively thus far?
No again. The Blue Devils (34-3) carry a 14-game winning streak into their NCAA Tournament East Regional final game with Alabama (28-8).
The team has blue rubber bracelets they wear, which have “the obstacle is the way” printed on them. If something pops up to throw them off their journey, they find a way to power through, over or around.
“We have this business working-like approach,” Duke graduate student forward Neal Begovich said, “where it was like, all right, that’s the next thing that’s happening. Nothing we can change about it. Got to go to practice that day and start getting better. So honestly, it didn’t really feel like much of a distraction.”
Of course, losing Lucas did remove a major voice from the locker room. Lucas joined Duke as an assistant coach in spring 2022 as Scheyer was taking over the program following Mike Krzyzewski’s retirement. He helped recruit, build and coach this Duke team into a national championship contender.
“Obviously, it’s been different not having Jai,” Duke junior guard Tyrese Proctor said. “I mean, I love him, and I’m proud of where he’s at now. We still keep in contact. He always messages me. He’s my dog for life.”
Needing a new coach after Jim Larranaga’s abrupt retirement in December, Miami quickly focused its search on the 36-year-old Lucas. By late February, he was their choice, and the Hurricanes needed him to take over as soon as their season ended so he could start building next season’s roster.
‘Everybody has stepped up’
Scheyer understood why Lucas had to leave and, even if he didn’t like it, he remains close friends with Lucas. While that was all going down, Scheyer and Duke athletic director Nina King met and discussed how Duke would cope.
“We had a lot of conversations,” King said. “It wasn’t like one time and, `OK, this is what we’re gonna do.’ We just talked through a lot of possibilities.
“He’s a young coach. But I would also say nobody has ever gone through and that was the hard part too. There was no kind of script how to handle this, or how has it worked well or not well? You didn’t have anything to compare it to.”
First, Scheyer insisted he would take on more of the work. Secondly, Duke staffers who aren’t full assistant coaches, like director of player development Justin Robinson, special assistant to the head coach Mike Schrage, director of scouting and analytics Zach Marcus and his brother, video assistant Trevor Marcus, would all pitch in with scouting reports.
Of course, former Duke point guard Will Avery, in his second season in the new lower-level assistant coach position the NCAA now allows, is helping a great deal. Avery works with Duke’s guards as Lucas did previously. Scheyer does some of that as well.
“Naturally,” Scheyer said, “everybody has stepped up. All of those guys have stepped up and helped. The fact you’re playing in the NCAA Tournament, you have two games a week, so Emanuel and Chris, for me, have been just really key guys with handling all the scouting with help from the guys you mentioned. Our video team has done an incredible job, too.”
‘It’s been … seamless’
Scheyer said all that on Wednesday, the day before Duke beat Arizona, 100-93, in a game that finished so late the Blue Devils didn’t leave Prudential Center until the early hours Friday. Scheyer returned to the news conference podium Friday afternoon, admittedly having gotten very little sleep as Duke prepared for Alabama.
He’s not the only one.
“It’s not a lot of rest,” Carrawell said Friday. “It is work. But hey man, when you’ve got (the) group we’ve got, it don’t matter. You make it happen. Everybody just wants to succeed because of the group. Man, whatever it takes. So, like, no sleep? Cool. Don’t eat? Cool. When it comes down to it, we want to prepare these guys the best way we can. Bring them energy. Just all rally around each other.”
After Duke won three games in three days to capture the ACC championship, King stood on the Spectrum Center’s confetti-covered court amid the celebration after Duke’s 73-62 win over Louisville in the final. She remarked on how the Blue Devils did it without league player of the year Cooper Flagg and top reserve Maliq Brown, both out with injuries that occurred in the same game two days earlier.
Then she was reminded of Lucas’ absence.
“Oh I had forgotten about that in the moment,” King said. “There were a lot of oh (no) moments, and then I thought, oh my gosh, now we have one more. I mean, that’s who Jon is. He’s steady and navigated it well.”
In a season where the obstacle is the way for Duke, the obstacle of playing the season’s most important games without a trusted assistant coach has proven no obstacle at all.
“It’s been as seamless as could be when you miss somebody like Jai,” Scheyer said. “Jai is obviously great with what he’s done for us and what he’s going to do going forward. But it’s been very seamless, with Chris and Emanuel stepping up and all those other guys being ready to go.”
This story was originally published March 29, 2025 at 6:00 AM.
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