The old canard that Duke basketball doesn’t produce good NBA players has long since been demolished. A regular-season NBA game usually has at least one former Blue Devil playing, sometimes three or four.
But what we haven’t seen is former Duke players winning NBA titles with some regularity, certainly not playing key roles on title teams.
That is not going to be the case this season. Jayson Tatum and Boston will square off against Kyrie Irving, Dereck Lively and Dallas in the 2024 finals. Tatum and Irving are undoubted stars and Lively is headed in the right direction.
But it is surprising how infrequent this is. Irving is the only former Duke player to be anything close to a star for an NBA champion. Irving’s 3-pointer that broke an 89-89 tie with Golden State in 2016 with less than a minute remaining is considered one of the great clutch shots in game seven history.
But that’s about it, even for great Duke players. Jack Marin, Mike Gminski, Johnny Dawkins, Christian Laettner, Grant Hill, Elton Brand, Corey Maggette, Carlos Boozer, Mike Dunleavy, Chris Duhon, Luol Deng, J.J. Redick, Mason Plumlee (still active) and Tyus Jones (still active) all played at least nine seasons without winning it all or in most cases even sniffing a title.
Some of this can be attributed to the fact that players like Laettner (third pick), Hill (third), Brand (first), Dunleavy (third), Deng (sixth) and others were drafted by the kind of lousy teams that end up drafting high.
Nothing Laettner did or could do was going to turn mid-90s Minnesota into a title contender.
So, who drew the long end of the straw?
Dahntay Jones (Cleveland 2016) and Jack White (Denver 2023) were marginal contributors to title teams. In fact, Jones only played the final regular-season game for the 2016 Cavs, scoring 13 points after spending the bulk of the regular season playing for Grand Rapids of the D-League.
Jones scored 17 points in 15 playoff games for the Cavs and didn’t play a second in game seven of the finals. White played 17 games for Denver in 2022-’23 but didn’t play in the postseason.
Jeff Mullins was the first former Duke player to win a championship, 1975, to be exact. Led by Rick Barry, the Warriors swept the heavily favored Washington Bullets.
Mullins was near the end of his career in 1975. But he still averaged 8.0 points per game in the finals and had an 18-point game against Chicago earlier in the playoffs.
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