Jon Scheyer’s Coaching Career In Perspective
Scheyer is off to the best two-year start in Duke history
One of the things that’s kind of bothered us about the Transition is that Jon Scheyer has, in our view, taken a lot of unjust criticism.
To an extent it’s inevitable. He played for Mike Krzyzewski, considered by many to be the greatest college basketball coach of all time. Some even argue he’s the greatest coach in the history of team sports.
And of course Scheyer was Coach K’s assistant, so people just naturally expected that nothing would change except for who is at the top of the enterprise.
That’s ridiculous though. Scheyer is not and cannot be a clone of Mike Krzyzewski. He has different ideas and different strengths and weaknesses. He needs to run his program his way.
That said, and all the criticism aside, take a look at where Scheyer stands in his second season in comparison to every Duke coach since Eddie Cameron. He’s succeeding at a pace that no one else has ever done this early in their Duke career. Look at what his predecessors did in their first two seasons:
- 30-10 - Eddie Cameron
- 33-19 - Gerry Gerard
- 44-19 Harold Bradley
- 39-17 Vic Bubas
- 37-19 - Bucky Waters
- 10-16 - Neil McGeachy
- 26-27 - Bill Foster
- 27-30 - Mike Krzyzewski
- 48-16 - Jon Scheyer
You’ll notice a couple of things immediately. First, Gerard, Bradley, Bubas and Waters were fairly close. But Scheyer has a minimum of seven games left. Assuming Duke doesn’t go out in the first round of the ACC Tournament and the first round of the NCAA Tournament, you can reasonably expect Duke to play at least 9-10 more games so he’s got room to expand his already impressive career start.
Keep in mind too that Cameron and Gerard started in the Southern Conference when Duke was primarily a football school and basketball wasn’t nearly the focus that it is today.
If you accept Bubas as the start of the first modern era, he had a brilliant run at Duke and was close to Scheyer’s level of success. Waters was too but only lasted four years for several reasons. First was the difficulty of following Duke’s greatest (up to then) coach. Segregation was also ending and that changed everything in the ACC and beyond. And Waters came across as a bit militaristic and the early 1970’s was the wrong time for that.
Foster was the first coach of the current modern era and he was able to recruit Black players like Gene Banks and Vince Taylor and transformed Duke Basketball.
Mikę Krzyżewski took over after Foster left of course, and he was 27-30 in his first two seasons.
Here’s a key difference between his start and Scheyer’s: Coach K had three starters from an Elite Eight team in his first season - Banks, Taylor and Dennard.
In his first season, Scheyer had just two significant players from the K era: Jeremy Roach and Jaylen Blakes. He also had significant injury problems last year with Dereck Lively, Dariq Whitehead and Jeremy Roach all missing time, and some this year as well.
You can certainly argue (correctly) that he inherited a powerful brand from Coach K...but so did Kyle Neptune at Villanova. His current record with the Wildcats is 32-27.
When you look at the totality of what Scheyer has accomplished in his first two seasons, when you consider winning 27 games despite the near total overhaul of the roster last season, the immensely successful recruiting, overcoming injuries in both seasons and the insanely difficult task of replacing an absolute legend, what he’s done so far is incredible - and incredibly promising.