Durham
In his final season as Duke’s basketball coach, Mike Krzyzewski is veering from recent tradition with an aim toward better preparing the team for its challenging schedule.
Rather than playing its normal home exhibition game against the NCAA Division II reigning national champion, the Blue Devils will play in a closed scrimmage against Villanova on Oct. 23, sources with knowledge of the planned matchup told The News & Observer. Duke will still host a public scrimmage against a Division II team — Winston-Salem State.
The scrimmage against Villanova will be at a gym in the Washington, D.C., area, according to sources.
NCAA rules allow preseason scrimmages between Division I teams but they must be closed to the public and the two schools are not allowed to publicize them or discuss details of the result.
Duke opted to scrimmage the Wildcats rather than playing reigning Division II champion, Northwest Missouri State. The Blue Devils first played the Division II champion in 2007 when Barton came to Cameron for an exhibition in October after winning its national title the previous spring.
Beginning in 2009 with Findlay (Ohio), the Division II champion annually played Duke at Cameron in an exhibition until last year when there were no exhibitions due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
With four players returning from last season’s team and six newcomers in the mix for playing time, Krzyzewski felt facing a Division I team in a closed scrimmage is a better plan.
“This is the first year we’re not playing the Division II national champion,” Krzyzewski told reporters in a press conference Wednesday. “We felt like a scrimmage because we really needed to move along. This team hasn’t played. So we are going to have a scrimmage the third weekend of October, a closed scrimmage. And that will help us.”
After Duke went 13-11 last season and missed the NCAA tournament for the first time since 1995, Krzyzewski and the staff have worked extra hard on team bonding a preparation this summer. Krzyzewski announcing his retirement plans in June, saying he’ll step aside after this season. Associate head coach Jon Scheyer will succeed him as head coach, which allowed Krzyzewski to spend even more time with the players.
The power of relationships and preparation, he told The News & Observer in an exclusive interview last week, is important and a focus for his final Duke team.
“We changed our summer and how we are dealing with our team,” Krzyzewski told The News & Observer.
Duke’s four freshmen arrived on campus in June. They were housed for the summer on the first floor of the Few dormitory building, which is normally reserved for sophomores, juniors and seniors during the fall and spring semesters.
“They each had their own room, a big room,” Krzyzewski said. “We were able to outfit the dorm with Duke basketball stuff. Then we worked with them, along with going to school. And they bonded. They are like brothers. That’s the relationship-building.”
The team’s two transfers, Theo John (Marquette) and Bates Jones (Davidson), arrived in late June. Throughout the summer, the entire team went through eight hours a week of work with the staff that is allowed under NCAA rules.
The closed scrimmage, if it occurs in Washington, D.C. as planned, would be another step in the relationship-building because the team would get an early dose of traveling for an away game it normally doesn’t during the preseason.
The Blue Devils will also play a home exhibition on Oct. 30 against Division II Winston-Salem State at Cameron Indoor. That continues Duke’s tradition of bringing an HBCU team to campus annually for a preseason game.
Krzyzewski likes having a game with Winston-Salem State because of his fondness for the late Clarence “Big House” Gaines, the Naismith Hall of Fame coach who spent 47 years at Winston-Salem State from 1946-93.
“In the history of basketball in our state, a giant figure has been Big House Gaines and what he did to establish,” Krzyzewski said during Wednesday’s press conference. “We actually were friends and I respected him. We are honored to bring Winston-Salem State here and the program they have. It’s a Saturday game here in Cameron Indoor Stadium. It will be a cool thing.”
Duke opens the regular season Nov. 9 against Kentucky at New York’s Madison Square Garden in the Champions Classic.