Dan Hurley solving Duke’s Cameron Boozer plan proves how far Jon Scheyer has to go

In the NBA, there’s this idea that a team has to take its lumps in the playoffs and build up the battle scars before it can break through and win a title. With the turnover of college basketball, there isn’t time for a team to go through that, but there is for a coach. Just four years into his tenure at Duke, Jon Scheyer has already amassed quite a few. 

After last year’s final four meltdown against Houston, Duke collapsed again in the second half of the Elite Eight on Sunday in Washington, D.C., and thanks to an inexplicable turnover from Cayden Boozer and a last-second game-winning three from UConn freshman Braylon Mullins, fell short of its shot at redemption. 

Scheyer has grown since taking on the impossible task of following a legend, replacing Coach K. His brilliant Cameron Boozer defensive game plan in the first half proved that. He had Dan Hurley, a two-time national champion, looking helpless to solve the riddle. But after halftime, Hurley found his solution, and Scheyer never punched back. 

There’s a gap between the good and the great coaches in college basketball and, at least for another year, Scheyer finds himself on the wrong side of that chasm. Kelvin Sampson proved that last year, and Hurley did it again on Sunday. 

Dan Hurley found a way to attack Boozer, and Jon Scheyer didn’t have a counterpunch

Duke, the No. 3-rated defense by KenPom this season, held Duke to 29 points in the first half, even with Caleb Foster and Patrick Ngongba nursing foot injuries and Maliq Brown battling back spasms. One of the biggest reasons for that success is what Scheyer did with his best player. 

UConn is never going to be a team that just comes down the floor and runs a pick-and-roll with its best players. For Dan Hurley and his lead offensive assistant, Luke Murray, nearly everything happens away from the ball, with multiple complex actions working to get an open shot, and working deep into the shot-clock if they have to. 

The name of the game against UConn is to chase shooters through the maze of screens that Hurley and Murray attempt to create. Cameron Boozer is many things at 6-foot-9, 250 pounds, but he’s not equipped to chase Alex Karaban around the floor for 40 minutes. So, Scheyer didn’t ask him to. Instead, he put Boozer on UConn’s point guard, either Silas Demary Jr. or Malachi Smith. 

UConn’s primary ball-handlers rarely attack off the dribble and hardly even do it in isolation, so the best way to protect Boozer’s relatively slow feet in a game of blistering off-ball movement was to keep him on the ball. Then, with Duke’s lengthy and athletic wings chasing Karaban, Mullins, and Solo Ball, they disrupted passing lanes, forced shooters deeper off the three-point line, and contested everything. Karaban started the game 0-5 in the first half. 

Then, coming out of halftime, Scheyer continued to play the hits. He kept Boozer on UConn’s guards. How could you blame him after the first half Duke had defensively? However, once UConn proved it understood how to attack Boozer, either by having Demary or Smith drive downhill, putting them off the ball, or getting Boozer to switch onto a wing or Tarris Reed Jr., before initiating the action, Scheyer didn’t adjust. 

Demary hit multiple threes in the second half, shaking free of Boozer.

Smith drove him on a closeout for a layup, and Karaban’s lone three of the game came in the final minute when UConn pushed the pace enough to get Boozer cross-matched. 

Boozer was a good defender this season, and statistically, one of the best in the country. However, his strengths are using his frame to cut off drivers and his ability to anchor in the post. Unless he was going to defend Reed, who has a significant height advantage, there really wasn’t anywhere else to hide Boozer against UConn’s style of offense. 

Maybe all Scheyer could do was hope that Boozer punished UConn enough on the other end to make up for it. Or maybe he, like me, didn’t have the answers when Dan Hurley did. Scheyer is getting there. He’s close. But he’s not on Hurley’s level, and that’s where you need to be to win it all.