DURHAM, N.C. — The pass flew over Ryan Young’s head with feet to spare, not an insignificant margin considering Duke’s Northwestern transfer stands 6-foot-10. Jon Scheyer took a step forward with his arms out. His palms were downward, facing the floor.
Settle down.
That was an easy point to make with Duke up 20 on Jacksonville in the second half, but Scheyer’s demeanor was no different when Jacksonville was within single digits in the first half, or the foul count was piling up against Duke in the early going. He called plays. He conversed quietly with his coaches. He looked like he’d been doing this a lot longer than one night.
Scheyer’s full debut as Duke’s basketball coach, as the first person to hold that position on a permanent basis since 1980, seven years before Scheyer was even born, was as notable for his serenity in his new job as the easy 71-44 victory.
This wasn’t the first time Scheyer had coached Duke at Cameron, thanks to Mike Krzyzewski’s occasional absences in his final few years at Duke, but there was still a novelty to it, the beginning of something that might not last 40-something years — what ever does, these days? — but was still tacking to a new and still uncertain course.
“I have a lot of friends who are coaches, obviously, a bunch of them sent me messages to enjoy it — to try to enjoy it, is what they said,” Scheyer said. “It’s not easy, right? You’re anxious. You’ve got some nerves. You’re ready to get out there, start to get going. You’ve put in so much work, you want to see it on the court.
“I just took a moment before going out there. What an opportunity. What a moment. This is a place I’ve grown up in. Playing. Coaching. And to be here, as the head coach, I was not going to be anywhere other than this moment right now.”
So much was so familiar, still the same, as if last season’s fanfare had never happened, picking up where Duke left off after any old season. The band played the same songs. The students went through their usual routine, with new hats for the occasion but otherwise by rote. The Duke players and coaches gathered in the same circle around the bench during timeouts, a manager rushing to set out the folding chair before them the moment the buzzer sounded.
Once they huddled, it was impossible to see a much younger man in that seat.
It was like buying a new house and leaving all the old pictures on the walls, which was the point all along. Duke basketball, and specifically what happens within these walls, is an institution. Scheyer’s year-in-waiting was designed to make the transition from departing legend to promoted protege as smooth as a flight at sunrise. (Wherever Krzyzewski was Monday night, it was out of sight, as he promised more than a year ago he would be when the time came.) And the new coach seemed determined, on the sideline, to create as little turbulence as possible.
With an almost eerie calm, Scheyer stood with hands on hips or arms crossed — no suit, with the staff wearing black pants and pullovers, Scheyer in white Nikes — as the foul count turned against Duke early, as the Dolphins got to the rim with alarming frequency. Or he sat with his old colleague Chris Carrawell to his left, new arrival Jai Lucas to his right.
The rare burst of emotion, a fist slammed into an open hand after a missed layup, stood out for its rarity. If Krzyzewski once stalked that sideline, or sat perched forward on his chair in barely contained intensity, Scheyer watched with almost detached reserve. So there was the first visible alteration in this new era: Krzyzewski’s fire fueled his teams. Scheyer’s professorial stoicism seemed to steady his first.
“That’s the big thing about Scheyer,” Jeremy Roach said. “He’s very calm. He doesn’t want to look too worked up. If he’s worked up, how are we going to feel? He’s always got that calm face, that stone cold face.”
And without injured freshmen Dereck Lively II and Dariq Whitehead, with the outstanding Roach the only player with any significant experience in this uniform, that was probably what the Blue Devils needed Monday more than anything.
When Roach took a 3-pointer with 14 seconds left in the first half, after Scheyer had his hands raised to hold for a final shot, Scheyer showed no anger. It helped that Roach made it. But there was also no reprimand when Scheyer grabbed Roach as they left the court and told him, “I’m glad you made it — you better have made it.”
“At the end of the day, having the freedom is the most important thing,” Scheyer said. “And I think you could see from our guys tonight, Jeremy in particular, he’s not looking over his shoulder. He’s not worried about, ‘Am I going to be judged on this shot?’ We’d rather have him play aggressive, and with playing aggressive there will be some things to clean up. You can’t play basketball overthinking, overanalyzing. So, in that situation, would I have liked him to hold for one shot? Probably. But I’d also rather have him follow his instincts.”
He was greeted afterward at the door to the locker room — the last person off the floor, after doing a postgame television interview, instead of one of the first like his predecessor — with an impromptu shower by his players. Managers were still toweling off the walls minutes later, and Scheyer changed into dry sweats for his postgame press conference.
“This was not the goal of the season to win this first game, the overall goal,” newly arrived grad transfer Jacob Grandison said. “And I wasn’t thinking about it until after the game, that this was Scheyer’s first game. We celebrated it for sure, threw some water on him, said some things, but really it’s onto the next. That’s not the overall goal. We’re on to the next and trying to get him his second win.”
The Scheyer story has yet to be written. It will play out over this season, over how many more there are after it. This was the first sentence in the first chapter, a moment that will be remembered only because it was the beginning, the rest forgotten and washed away by the tide of all the basketball to come.
It started with a win. Everything else is still to come.
