Former Duke assistant Jai Lucas carving his own path as head coach at Miami
When Jai Lucas left Duke on the eve of the ACC tournament, he left Duke behind. He didn’t watch the team he helped build win the ACC title without Cooper Flagg. He didn’t watch Duke cruise through Raleigh and Newark, crushing Alabama to secure the Final Four berth.
Rebuilding Miami’s program as a first-time head coach occupied the entirety of the 36-year-old’s agenda in March. He had made the unusual decision to leave the Blue Devils midseason to get a head start with the Hurricanes, and could look only forward and not backward, personally and professionally.
Then, on the Saturday night Duke played Houston in San Antonio, he just happened to be back in Durham with his wife and son. And they wanted to watch. Which means the only Duke game Lucas actually saw in the postseason was the only one Duke lost.
“You get busy and you don’t want to have FOMO, so you just kind of follow it on your phone,” Lucas said.
Lucas’ early departure was the inevitable result of a college basketball calendar that doesn’t make a ton of sense, and it was far more important to his future to be able to give his full attention to the transfer portal that opened March 24, in the middle of the postseason, than have a chance to finish what he started as Jon Scheyer’s first hire from outside the program at Duke. The only surprising thing about it is that it hasn’t happened more often, given the high stakes involved.
By last week, when Lucas gathered with his new ACC peers at Amelia Island, Scheyer included, what’s done was done.
“He’s doing his thing in Miami,” Scheyer said. “I’m happy for him. My concern is what we’re trying to do with us, at the end of the day.”
That day, Lucas was in the same position as the rest of the ACC: trying to figure out how to get more teams into the NCAA tournament by, yes, performing better, but also involved in deep discussions about how to more thoughtfully schedule nonconference games to fare better in the NET. That was especially acute after the ACC freed up two openings by going from 20 conference games to 18.
Miami was also, the past two seasons, a big part of the problem. Things fizzled under Jim Larranaga after that marvelous run to the Final Four in 2023, before he suddenly retired in December. Miami finished 14th in a 15-team league in 2024 and 18th in an 18-team league in 2025, the 193rd-best team in the country per KenPom’s efficiency rankings, the third-worst performance by an ACC team since 2018.
Enter Lucas, the son of basketball legend John Lucas, who spent three seasons with Scheyer at Duke and two under John Calipari at Kentucky after getting his start under Rick Barnes and Shaka Smart at Texas. As mentors go, that’s about as strong a pedigree as it gets, but Lucas is also trying to carve his own path at Miami.
“That’s part of having worked for really good head coaches, you see some things that they did, both good and bad,” Lucas said. “You find yourself in the same situation, doing the same thing, or you find yourself in a situation where you say, I remember they did it this way, I didn’t like it. Let me try this instead. So you just kind of take those moments and make them your own.”
That experience is also only worth so much in a college basketball world that changes by the second. The time Lucas spent mining the portal at Duke was almost in a different era than what he found at Miami, because everyone was scrambling to get NIL deals over the line before the House settlement takes effect, if it even does. Lucas still managed to land two top-100 transfers, including Indiana forward Malik Reneau, No. 22 on ESPN’s list, and incoming freshman Shelton Henderson, who had previously been committed to Duke, among others — but not Pittsburgh star Jaland Lowe, who had been rumored to be headed to Miami but ended up at Kentucky instead.
“It’s been wild,” Lucas said. “You prepare for stuff because you think it’s going to be a certain way, but it’s been a little bit different. I think a lot of that’s just been because the portal was different. The market was different. Everything you had seen, everything had changed within a year. So you prepare for what you know, and what you have been going through, and that was just not the same. So you just had to adjust and adapt and pivot.”
It was the same when it came to his former team chasing a national title. Lucas was a part of it, until he wasn’t. He didn’t watch any of it, until he did.
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