The clock started ticking on Duke’s 2025 national championship chase in October 2023.
That’s when Cooper Flagg — the nation’s No. 1 recruit of the 2024 class and projected No. 1 pick in the 2025 NBA draft — announced his commitment to the Blue Devils. His signing raised the stakes for Jon Scheyer’s third season at the helm of his alma mater, which climbed even higher when Duke lost to ACC rival NC State in the Elite Eight five months later.
Sheyer knew in order to make a deeper run this season, he would have to find the right players — not necessarily the most talented ones — to complement his superstar freshman.
“I feel my biggest job is roster construction,” Scheyer said after Duke’s win over Wake Forest earlier this month. “I think that’s always been the most important thing as a head coach in college basketball, but especially now.”
In an era when teams are incentivized to build around experience, the Blue Devils didn’t use the portal to load up with transfers for the 2024-25 season. Instead, they signed five of ESPN’s top 50 recruits in the 2024 class, and leveraged the portal to build around Flagg & Co.
The approach has resulted in a regular-season ACC championship, a 1-seed in the NCAA tournament’s East region and one of the strongest campaigns in the past 25 years of college basketball, with player of the year favorite Flagg and a handpicked supporting cast playing its best basketball of the season at the right time.
“This edition of the Duke Blue Devils, they are the most efficient executing team that we played against in the Duke era,” Florida State Leonard Hamilton told ESPN after a 100-65 loss to Duke on March 1. “Not to take away from all the great teams that Coach K had, this team just seemed to be the most connected. In the past, maybe they might’ve had a few more — to say the least — superstars. But this team, every time you make a mistake, they make you pay. They’re very efficient.”
Shortly after Duke’s loss to NC State in the Elite Eight last season, the Blue Devils’ roster was decimated by the NBA and the transfer portal. Kyle Filipowski and Jared McCain left early for the draft; Ryan Young was out of eligibility; and Jeremy Roach, Mark Mitchell, Sean Stewart, TJ Power, Jaylen Blakes, Christian Reeves and Jaden Schutt entered the portal.
Tyrese Proctor and Caleb Foster were the only two players who decided to return.
Suddenly, a team that was expected to compete for a national championship looked nothing like the Final Four squads of recent years — or rosters of other projected contenders — that were filled with upperclassmen.
“There was concern from the standpoint of, looking around, you see the really good teams were really old,” said former associate head coach Jai Lucas, whose new role as Miami head coach will preclude him from staying with Duke through the postseason. “And we knew we really needed a lot of age in the locker room, but not a lot of people have the ability to have three top-10 picks. You’re not going to have a Flagg in the portal, a [Khaman] Maluach in the portal.”
Relying heavily on freshmen isn’t a new concept for Scheyer; he was part of several Duke staffs that landed the top recruiting class of a given year, including the 2014-15 team that won the title with three starting freshmen: Jahlil Okafor, Justise Winslow and Tyus Jones.
But that was a different era of college basketball. And hoping to win a title with a slew of five-star recruits isn’t supposed to be possible anymore. With the explosion of the portal and additional years of eligibility due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the “get old, stay old” mantra has never been more apparent across the sport.
Duke has leaned into its youth, though, and it has paid off. Flagg, Maluach and Kon Knueppel have each started every game this season: Flagg has the strongest case for national player of the year; Maluach is among the nation’s elite offensive rebounders and shot blockers (and shoots 74% from the field); and Knueppel is the team’s second-leading scorer.
And while fellow freshman Isaiah Evans has seen his minutes fluctuate, he averaged 17.3 points in a four-game stretch between Feb. 17 and March 1. Even big man Patrick Ngongba has given Duke quality minutes with Maliq Brown sidelined for various multigame stretches.
So when your freshmen are this good, it makes up for a lot of inexperience. But how you can build around those players is essential — just ask Rutgers, which started two freshmen lottery picks and finished the season 15-17, missing the NCAA tournament entirely.
“I’m not going to sit here and say the recipe moving forward is always six freshmen,” Scheyer told ESPN in October. “I’m not saying that, but I believe in the right freshmen, we believe in the right freshmen with the right experience, the right combination of complementing players.”
The Blue Devils knew three potential one-and-done freshmen wouldn’t be enough to win at the highest level. They didn’t just want to pick off the best scorers or the highest-ranked transfers, though. They needed to find pieces who would fit around Flagg — and be content with it.
“[Playing with Flagg] sounds like a good deal, and you pitch it that way, but some people start asking questions,” Lucas said about the exodus of last season’s veterans through the portal.
And so Scheyer & Co. put as much of a premium on toughness as they did size and versatility when leveraging the portal to build around Flagg and this freshmen class.
“The thing that we’ve been missing — it’s not just physical toughness, it’s mental toughness,” Scheyer told ESPN in the fall. “It was about putting together the best team, not to win your transfer portal rankings or to win any of that. It was about putting together the best team.”
While their three key additions weren’t found on top available transfer lists, two were well-known veterans: Gillis was a consistent rotation player for high-level teams at Purdue, shooting 40% from 3 over four seasons with the Boilermakers. And Brown was one of the best defensive players in the ACC for Syracuse, going for 26 points and 7 rebounds against Duke last January.
And Sion James’ size, experience and ability to get his own shot — he averaged 14.0 points with 38% shooting from 3 at Tulane last season — offered intrigue. After coming off the bench for the first seven games, James was inserted into Duke’s starting lineup, where he has been a consistent asset at both ends of the floor.
“It’s not just his playmaking, [James] is in control of the game, man,” Scheyer said last month after beating Illinois 110-67. “He’s so unselfish, plays at a great speed. Obviously you can look at his assist-to-turnover ratio, not just in this game, but then throughout the whole season, especially the last couple months of play.
“And he makes everybody better. That’s the biggest thing.”
Finding veterans willing to yield the spotlight to younger players — albeit on a national title contender — is a very thin needle to thread, but Duke has done it with James, Gillis and Brown.
James and Gillis were recognized on senior night, when Duke hosted its final game of the season March 3, and they each scored 11 points in a 93-60 win over Wake Forest. After the game, Duke’s freshmen stars reflected on the leadership of departing players.
“They’ve been incredible role models, showing me what to do and exactly how to do it,” Flagg said. “They’ve both taken me under their wings. Their preparation — just everything about them is at such a high level. They treat themselves like pros. I’ve learned so much from them the whole year, and they’ve been team-oriented players the whole way.”
“We’ve relied on them so much,” Maluach added. “I give credit to them for always speaking to us in tough moments, in moments we don’t know what to do. They always speak to us and guide us, through practices or how we take care of our bodies or the way to attack games, especially like two games in three days. They’ve really been guiding us.”
While the experience and leadership of Duke’s returning and acquired veterans go a long way, at the heart of it all is the future No. 1 pick.
“A big part of it is Cooper,” Lucas said. “When your best player … shows up every day like he does and is able to connect with everybody, it makes everybody comfortable and wanting to buy in. It eliminates the egos. It starts and ends with Cooper.”
