Jon Scheyer’s evolution as a player may offer clues to his approach as Duke coach
READ MORE
The power of ACC basketball
UNC’s win over Duke, and NCAA tournament championship appearance, along with the NC State women’s Elite 8 run, capped a historic and memorable season — one of the Triangle’s best ever. ACC basketball had it rough this year, but these appearances played a part in renewing faith in it. Here’s a closer look at how the league turned a “down year” into something spectacular halfway through March.
Expand All
ACC basketball finds success in NCAA tournament, renews faith in conference clout
The 2021-22 college basketball season among best ever for UNC, Duke and NC State
Jon Scheyer’s evolution as a player may offer clues to his approach as Duke coach
ACC Now podcast: Leonard Hamilton on Final Four and his NIL, transfer portal concerns
By the time Duke landed back in Raleigh on Sunday afternoon, the school’s website had yet to be updated with the change in basketball coaches, but the transition of power was effectively, if not officially complete.
This was Jon Scheyer’s team now, a new era at the end of a long farewell.
It’s probably not the scenario in which Scheyer intended or expected to take control, Mike Krzyzewski’s 42-year tenure at Duke ending in the Final Four, but also under the cloud of North Carolina playing for a national championship instead — under a first-year coach and former star at his alma mater in Hubert Davis, no less.
Given the overwhelming and oversized personality of his predecessor, there remains some mystery about how Scheyer will navigate not only that void but his own path going forward. There may be clues within his evolution as a player at Duke some 15 years ago as to how he might emerge as a coach, in his own way and in his own spotlight.
After all, if few expected Scheyer to be Krzyzewski’s chosen successor upon his departure from Duke, no one expected Scheyer to be the kind of point guard capable of carrying a team to a national title upon his arrival at Duke.
“I always felt like when coach initially recruited me, he recruited me as a shooting guard who could play some backup point,” Scheyer said. “He never said I was going to be the starting point guard. It’s funny, I always viewed myself as just a really good player who could do whatever you needed him to. I always felt like in a different life, I could be a stretch four. That’d be a really good position for me. I was just five inches too short or whatever it was.”
There have been few indications of what Scheyer’s coaching style will be even during his understudy appearances when Krzyzewski was taken ill this season, although he put the ball in Paolo Banchero’s hands at the end of Duke’s narrow win over Wake Forest when Krzyzewski had not in similar situations. But his Duke career moved along on a path that was anything but linear, even if it ended, unlike this season, in a championship.
His intelligence, adaptability and versatility allowed him to evolve into something else entirely, and as an assistant coach, he was as clued into cutting-edge analytics as anyone on Duke’s staff. And in his year in residence, he has been able to continue to recruit at the same high level as Krzyzewski had, all of which suggests he may be able to undergo the same progression as a coach that he did as a player.
Scheyer came into Duke a shooter in the Chris Collins mode — he broke all of Collins’ records at the suburban Chicago high school they both attended — and was asked to do something different in each of his first three seasons at Duke; by the fourth, he and Krzyzewski had both figured it out.
He may not have looked like the kind of basketball player who could play just about any position, but that ability turned out to be the difference for Duke in 2010, when it delivered Krzyzewski his fourth national title. A spot-up shooter and starter his freshman year, Scheyer was asked to come off the bench as a sophomore — two seasons in which Duke failed to make it out of the first weekend of the NCAA tournament or play for an ACC title.
It was midway through his junior year when Duke’s revolving door at point guard — Greg Paulus, Eliot Williams — finally landed on Scheyer and everything clicked. The Blue Devils won 10 of their final 11 games before a third-round NCAA tournament thumping by Villanova, picking up the ACC title along the way.
There was no mystery about Scheyer’s role entering the 2010 season, and his ability to distribute the ball to versatile scorers like Nolan Smith and Kyle Singler — while remaining a deadly outside shooting threat himself — propelled Duke all the way to an ACC regular-season and tournament double, and a win over Butler in the national title game.
“Jon Scheyer had a tough freshman year, and then a junior year where Villanova killed us in the NCAA, and then he won a national championship,” Krzyzewski said.
Eleven years later, Scheyer’s responsibilities would morph again, upon the announcement of Krzyzewski’s impending retirement. And now, with that farewell season as coach-in-waiting complete the program Scheyer helped to a title as an evolved, engaged senior enters a new and uncertain future with a freshman coach facing even higher expectations than Davis did at Carolina.
This much appears likely: Whatever Scheyer is now, he probably won’t be at this time next year.
This story was originally published April 6, 2022 at 5:55 AM.
