DURHAM, N.C. — Duke coach Jon Scheyer is not leaving for the NBA. He said so Monday on the Glue Guys podcast, three months after the Dallas Mavericks pursued him during their coaching search and then hired Dusty May.
The hosts raised reporting that the NBA had chased him over the summer. Scheyer never named a team in his answer.
“I wouldn’t be able to live with myself, not seeing this thing through,” Scheyer said. “I mean, that’s just the bottom line. And I’m at a one-of-one place where not often you get your dream job when you’re 33.”
“I’m really proud of the start we’ve gone off to and the continuation of what has been built here,” Scheyer continued. “But I think we got so much left to do. I just think we have so much left to accomplish. This is where my family is. This is home for me.”
Shane Battier, Alex Smith, and Ravi Gupta have hosted Glue Guys since September 2024. Battier played at Duke from 1997 to 2001 and won a national championship there as a senior, nine years before Scheyer won his.
“In some ways it made me even stronger in terms of my dedication and what we have to do here,” Scheyer said. “Because I think when you’re presented with something different, it makes you be critical of the position or the place you’re at. Although I don’t feel like there’s a lot to be critical about here, I do think it makes you want to double down on what you have to get right. And so for me, it re-energized me, refocused me.”
“The NBA is obviously the highest level of whatever you can do,” Scheyer added. “But in my own world, I know this is where I’m supposed to be right now doing what I’m doing with our guys.”
The Dallas Mavericks’ Coaching Search And The Duke Connection
The Mavericks and coach Jason Kidd mutually agreed to part ways on May 19, two weeks after Masai Ujiri was named president of basketball operations and alternate governor on May 4. Ujiri said the next day that the call was his alone, and called it “a very, very tough decision.” Kidd went 205-205 in the regular season and 22-18 in the playoffs over five seasons in Dallas, reaching the Western Conference finals in 2022 and the NBA Finals in 2024.
Dallas finished 26-56 last season and landed the ninth overall pick in the 2026 NBA Draft. Nico Harrison was fired as president of basketball operations in November, nine months after trading Luka Dončić to the Los Angeles Lakers.
ESPN’s Brian Windhorst said on “First Take” that Dallas made multiple attempts to hire Scheyer during the search and that Ujiri wanted a college coach. “Obviously, the Cooper Flagg connection there, that played a role,” Windhorst said.Jeff Goodman of The Field of 68 reported on June 22 that Scheyer had “major interest” in the position and had opted to stay.
Dallas hired Michigan coach May the same day, one day before the draft. May had won the national championship at Michigan in his second season there. Duke’s men’s basketball account posted a childhood photo of Scheyer in a Blue Devils shirt within minutes of the news.
Cooper Flagg played one season for Scheyer. Dallas took him with the first overall pick in the 2025 NBA Draft, and he averaged 21.0 points, 6.7 rebounds, and 4.5 assists across 70 games as a rookie. He won Rookie of the Year on April 27. He made the All-Rookie First Team on May 20. His 51 points against Orlando on April 3 made him the youngest player in NBA history to reach 50.
Dereck Lively II played for Scheyer at Duke in 2022-23 and is also on the Dallas roster. The Mavericks exercised his fourth-year team option for 2026-27 last October. Lively appeared in 7 games last season before undergoing a season-ending procedure on his right foot in December.
Jon Scheyer On Duke’s Roster Rules And NIL
Duke returns guard Caleb Foster and center Patrick Ngongba II this season. John Blackwell arrived from Wisconsin and Drew Scharnowski from Belmont through the transfer portal.
“Usually it’s the guys that are at one or two places,” Scheyer said of the transfers Duke pursues. “They’ve had the same core group for a period of time. And the second thing kind of goes opposite what you would think I would say, but they also have independence.”
“I don’t care who you are, Zion Williamson, Cooper Flagg, Cam Boozer, you name it,” Scheyer continued. “You’re going to go through some tough times.”
“Not one player on our roster was guaranteed a starting spot, minutes,” Scheyer added. “Playing time is not based on your NIL contract. It’s not based on your mock draft ranking, your high school ranking. It’s based on what is fact. And what is fact is what you do in practice. How do you impact winning? We call it the 98%. All the times you don’t have the ball in your hands during the course of a game, what are you doing?”
Scheyer said the staff changed its summer approach after his second season, when the team bonded over an easy few months and he decided that was the problem.
“You don’t bond by doing really fun, really nice things all the time,” Scheyer said. “You bond by doing hard things together.”
The staff built an internal analytics database over the past several months and ran a vote on what to name it.
“Somebody suggested Shane and we voted and Shane won,” Scheyer said. “So the internal database that we’ve been using in the last couple of months is Duke Shane.”
Jon Scheyer’s Duke Record And Contract
Scheyer, 38, is 124-25 in four seasons. Duke has lost seven games over the past two years, and Scheyer said every one of them was a one-possession game inside the final minute. He won the ACC Tournament in 2023 and again in 2025. Duke reached the Final Four in 2025 and lost to UConn in the Elite Eight on March 29 at Capital One Arena in Washington. The school extended him through the 2030-31 season before last season, a two-year addition that put him under contract for six years in total.
“I’m a history guy. I was a history major at Duke,” Scheyer said of researching the job before taking it. “I started looking up successions, any examples I could find in the world of business, sport. And the more that I looked it up, the more daunting I felt it was. There’s not many examples you can look to where, man, this went really well.”
“It’s important not to change too much too quickly,” Scheyer continued. “When you watch Duke basketball play, I think there’s a feeling that’s associated with that, the grittiness, the unselfishness. I want that to remain.”
“I felt we were in a great place until NIL happened, transfer portal happened,” Scheyer added. “Man, we got to change.”
“I want to be a McDonald’s All-American, I want to win a national championship, and I want to make the NBA,” Scheyer said of the three goals he set as a high school freshman. “And so the third thing didn’t quite happen for me, but I got the first two.”
An eye injury in NBA Summer League ended the playing career. Scheyer went to training camp with the Clippers, then played for Maccabi Tel Aviv, for Gran Canaria in Spain, and in the G League in McAllen, Texas. He came back to Durham as a special assistant in 2013.
“I don’t necessarily believe in everything happens for a reason,” Scheyer said. “But I do believe that if you make the most out of the cards you’re dealt, you can do things you wouldn’t have done otherwise.”
Duke opens the 2026-27 season against Michigan State on Nov. 10 in Chicago.
