The details around Jai Lucas’ exit from the Duke basketball team are becoming public.
Reports surfaced in February that the associate head coach would be taking the head coaching role at Miami once the season ended, but it was later revealed that Lucas would be departing Durham much sooner than anyone had anticipated.
Due to the ever-changing landscape of college athletics, Lucas left the Blue Devils following the completion of the regular season and did not coach the team during its postseason run in order to have the Hurricanes ready to operate once the transfer portal opened.
The original plan was for Lucas to remain with Duke until its entire season but that changed a week before the end of the regular season, he revealed on Jon Rothstein’s podcast.
“When it first kind of happened and I took the job, my plan was to stay [at Duke] the whole time and be with them for the rest of the season,” Lucas said.
Miami not making the ACC Tournament also played a factor in Jai Lucas not staying with the team.
“It would’ve just been six more weeks of me being away and not being able to start the program and build a team,” he added. “I still talked to everybody throughout the tournament and still talk to them today.”
Despite Lucas’ contact, he did not watch the Blue Devils leading up to its run to the Final Four. In fact, the only game he watched of Duke in the NCAA Tournament was its loss to Houston in the Final Four.
“I didn’t watch any game until the Houston game,” he recalled. “And I only watched the Houston game because I was home, and my son wanted to watch the game.”
“Watching the Houston game, it was the first time where it was really tough because, you know, you’re just saying stuff and yelling at the tv and different things to different players and things like that, so that’s what I didn’t watch it.”
After the ACC revealed its 2025-26 conference opponents, Duke will not be playing Jai Lucas and the Miami Hurricanes in the regular season with the only potential meeting between the two sides would come in the ACC Tournament.
The Blue Devils have hired Evan Bradds from the Utah Jazz and former Duke player Tyler Thornton, who was an assistant coach at Howard, to its coaching staff this offseason.