DURHAM, N.C. — On Saturday afternoon, Jon Scheyer played his walk-ons.
Which, normally? Big whoop. It’s customary for college basketball coaches, when their teams get up big, to give guys on the end of the bench a little burn.
But on Saturday, Scheyer inserted his deepest reserves with over two minutes left, up 27, against the No. 11 team in the country, Virginia — supposedly the Blue Devils’ biggest challenger in this season’s much-improved ACC.
Not even a top-15 team, one which entered this weekend 25-3 and winners of nine straight, could hold a candle to what looks more and more like the scariest team in college basketball. That’s no anomaly. Neither could the nation’s then-No. 1 team, Michigan, a week ago. Nor could any of the other eight ranked teams that No. 1 Duke has mowed down this season.
And “mowed down” is indeed the right terminology. Including Saturday’s 77-51 detonation of the Hoos, Duke has won its last 11 ACC games by double-digits and its last three by a combined 107 points, the most-lopsided three-game margin in conference history. Zoom out a little, and Duke’s five ranked wins by double-digits this season — over Kansas, Louisville (twice), Clemson and now Virginia — are the most by any program in the nation since 2001-02.
This Scheyer guy might be able to coach a little, huh?
Especially after losing all five starters, including national player of the year Cooper Flagg, to the NBA.
“Ideally we’re not losing five guys to the NBA every year,” Scheyer joked, “but hopefully we are, at the same time.”
And while Scheyer’s players, like sophomore Darren Harris, are obviously biased on his behalf, they do kind of have a point: “He’s the best coach in the country, honestly.”
The drumbeat of that argument is only going to get louder from this point forward. And not wrongly so.
For all the talk before and during this season about how this Duke team pales in comparison to last year’s, which swept the ACC regular-season and tournament titles en route to the Final Four, the side-by-side comparison is looking increasingly familiar. Consider: Last season’s squad outscored opponents by a staggering 39.29 points per 100 possessions, the second-best net rating ever in KenPom’s 29-season history of analytics tracking (behind only 1998-99 Duke). But after Saturday, the current Blue Devils have officially surpassed that Flagg-led team, with a 39.56 net rating.
That’s marginal but also monumental.
No, this particular squad does not deploy five players who will be selected in this summer’s draft, nor is it even guaranteed to have multiple lottery picks. But it has now won its 15 league games by an average of 19.5 points. That’s just as overwhelming as last year, when the Blue Devils’ average ACC margin was 23.2 points per victory but against a much more formidable conference slate.
At the center of it is Scheyer, the 38-year-old who has proven as adept at navigating modern college basketball as any coach in America.
That begins, as it did a year ago, with roster construction. And while Scheyer deserved credit for the team he built around Flagg, he similarly deserves praise for the way he replaced Flagg, Kon Knueppel and their complementary cast of college all-stars. For the second straight year, Scheyer identified the best incoming freshman in the sport — this year, Cameron Boozer, who “only” had 18 points, nine rebounds and four assists against the Cavaliers — and empowered him to become one of college basketball’s best players.
If anything, landing Boozer despite a late charge from his hometown school, Miami — which also hired Boozer’s lead recruiter at Duke, Jai Lucas, as its head coach last March — spoke volumes about Scheyer’s continued excellence as a recruiter.
But that’s about where the comparisons in roster-building end.
Unlike the summer of 2024, when he signed older transfers like Mason Gillis (from Purdue) for much-needed experience on a younger roster, Scheyer did not add a single rotational transfer ahead of this season. The only one he attempted to bring in, former Washington State wing Cedric Coward, ultimately went straight to the NBA, where he became a lottery pick and is now averaging 13.3 points and 6.2 rebounds per game against grown men. That should have left Scheyer in a crunch on the wing, scrambling for a replacement … except he already had a backup plan: Italian wing Dame Sarr, whose point-of-attack defense has been integral to Duke leading the nation in adjusted defensive efficiency.
Sarr had also visited Kansas last summer and was deep in discussions to join Bill Self’s team when Scheyer came calling.
Well, look where he wound up.
And look at how Duke has thrived, despite being one of just six Top 25 teams not currently starting at least one transfer.
“Our staff was incredibly determined to be back in this position this year, and you can go about it one of two ways,” Scheyer said. “You can either double down on the guys that have been in your program, the guys that are committed to you — or you can look elsewhere. And I think one of the best decisions we made, in that time period in … April and May, is doubling down on the guys that were in our program.”
That lean into retention specifically focused on five players — Isaiah Evans, Caleb Foster, Patrick Ngongba, Maliq Brown and Harris — who had been at Duke for last season’s Final Four run but didn’t necessarily play major parts.
Evans would’ve been Duke’s sixth drafted player had he opted to go to the NBA but instead returned for a larger role as a sophomore. On Saturday, it took Virginia almost 15 minutes to score as many points as a team (14) as Evans singlehandedly poured in over the first 10:18. The 6-foot-6 sharpshooter finished with a game-high 19, including five of Duke’s 12 made 3s.
“Obviously last year’s team was a great team, but that’s not this year’s team,” Evans said. “We’ve got things that we want to aspire to do ourselves.”
Ngongba arrived on campus with lingering foot issues dating back to high school and didn’t even play in nine of Duke’s first 15 games last season, in what was a de facto redshirt year. He had a steady 11 points and five rebounds against Virginia’s tremendous frontcourt. The Cavaliers entered Saturday seventh in Division I in second-chance points, with 14.8 per game, but Ngongba played a huge part in limiting them to just eight such points at Cameron Indoor, not to mention the Hoos’ fewest points overall this season.
Harris is the rare developmental player these days to stick around at a blue-blood program. His minutes have been more sporadic this season, but after scoring 16 points at Notre Dame earlier this week, his back-to-back first-half 3s against Virginia were a key reason why Hoos coach Ryan Odom called timeout with 5:48 left before intermission and his team already trailing 28-12.
“You could say we have talent or whatever, but I think one of the hardest things in coaching is managing all the talent, managing egos, and I think that (Scheyer) does a great job of that,” Harris said. “And, I mean, we’re winning. It’s kind of simple. A lot of teams are talented, but they don’t have the same record as us.”
Only three others at the high-major level have as many wins as Duke’s 27: Michigan, UConn and Gonzaga.
The coaches of two of those teams — Dusty May at Michigan and Dan Hurley at UConn — are, like Scheyer, deserving of national coach of the year recognition. So too are Fred Hoiberg (Nebraska), Tommy Lloyd (Arizona) and Travis Steele (Miami of Ohio), and probably a handful of others. Scheyer is also up against some historical trends when it comes to postseason individual honors; Mike Krzyzewski won his fifth and final ACC Coach of the Year award in 2000 — after which he won two more national titles.
But if Duke keeps grinding teams to dust like this, it’s going to be impossible to ignore the architect of one of college hoops’ championship frontrunners.
If it isn’t already.
“He’s different. The whole staff is different,” Brown said. “They don’t get a lot of the flowers they deserve because it’s Duke. … They deserve more flowers than they got.”