Jon Scheyer had an NBA door cracked open this summer, but the Duke coach made it clear Monday that he wasn’t ready to walk through it.
Scheyer said on the “Glue Guys” podcast that leaving Durham before he felt the job had been fully seen through would have been impossible for him to live with. It was his clearest public explanation yet for turning down the Dallas Mavericks, who made repeated efforts to hire him during their coaching search.
“I’m at a one-of-one place where not often you get your dream job when you’re 33,” Scheyer said Monday on the “Glue Guys” podcast. “And that’s what happened to me.”
He never mentioned Dallas by name while talking about the NBA interest, but the Mavericks were the team pushing hardest. ESPN reported in June that Dallas had made multiple attempts to land Scheyer, and The Field of 68’s Jeff Goodman later reported that Scheyer had “major interest” in the job before deciding to return for a fifth season at Duke.
Dallas eventually hired Michigan coach Dusty May on June 22, less than three months after May guided the Wolverines to their first national title in 37 years.
For Scheyer, the pull to stay at Duke came down to unfinished business.
“I’m really proud of the start we’ve gone off to and the continuation of what has been built here,” he said. “But I think we’ve got so much left to do. We have so much left to accomplish.”
That feeling has been intensified by the way Duke’s last two NCAA Tournament runs ended. The Blue Devils let a 14-point lead slip away in the final eight minutes of their 2025 Final Four loss to eventual runners-up Houston. Before that, they blew a 19-point lead against UConn in last season’s Elite Eight and fell 73-72 when Braylon Mullins buried a 35-footer with 0.4 seconds left.
Now Scheyer gets another shot with a roster built to chase a national championship again. Duke lost National Player of the Year Cameron Boozer to the NBA, but it brings back several rotation players, added Wisconsin transfer John Blackwell and signed the nation’s No. 2 recruiting class.
Scheyer, 39, has gone 124-25 in four seasons since taking over for Mike Krzyzewski in Durham. The résumé is already crowded: he helped Duke win the 2010 national championship as a player, returned as an assistant coach in 2013 and added another title in 2015. He also led the Blue Devils to the Final Four in 2025 and the Elite Eight last season.
Durham, he said, has become home.
“This is where my family is,” Scheyer said. “I’ve been in Durham longer than I grew up in Chicago at this point.”
There was also a natural bridge to Dallas. Mavericks star Cooper Flagg, who enters his second season after winning rookie of the year, played his lone college season for Scheyer before going No. 1 in the 2025 NBA Draft. Former Duke center Dereck Lively II, who played for Scheyer in 2022-23, is also on the Mavericks’ roster.
Scheyer said the NBA pursuit did more than test him. It clarified things.
Being “presented with something different,” he said, forced him to look hard at what he has at Duke and what still needs fixing. Rather than pulling him away, the process sharpened his focus.
“In some ways, it made me even stronger in terms of my dedication and what we have to do here,” Scheyer said. “I do think you want to double down on what you have to get right.”
He described the whole experience as something that “reenergized” and “refocused” him, especially when it came to Duke’s player-development approach and the culture the program is trying to build.
Scheyer didn’t slam the door on the NBA forever. He acknowledged that it sits at the “highest level” of basketball. But for now, his answer was simple.
“In my own world,” Scheyer said, “I know this is where I’m supposed to be right now, doing what I’m doing with our guys. I love it.”
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