How’d the first year as HC for Duke go?

John Shire won an ACC Championship in year one. That ain't a bad start.

And he joins us on the Adam Gold Show. Coach, absolute pleasure to talk to you. Let me, let me just ask you about the decompressing of the season. Did you get a chance to get away?

Are you planning on it or is it just, it is 54 weeks a year that you've got to basically be on? To be honest, I haven't decompressed fully. There's of course, reflecting that you do, you get a chance to think about the things you really liked, which I liked a lot that we did. And of course you need to think about things we have to do better, but you can't do those things if you don't have really good players. So this time for us has been focused on getting our core guys back. And I'm really happy about when you can retain, you know, the group that we've had that the core group is a special thing and making sure we are looking, whether it be in the portal, which we're very selective with and making sure our high school guys are good, ready to go here.

John Shire is with us. All right. So there's a bunch of things I want to talk about, talk to you about, and that was one of them. Do you feel like you have to re-recruit your own players or because you build relationships in a, in a certain way, you basically, you're not going to have too much trouble keeping guys here rather than go to the, you know, it's the league that is more of the the problem for you guys. Do you have to re-recruit your own guys though?

I don't call it re-recruiting them. I think it's continuing to have honest, transparent conversations, just like we do during the season. And, you know, the, the end of the season gives you a chance to tell each player what your vision, what your vision is for them the next year, what they have to continue to work on. And just like anything, if all of a sudden you don't believe in that vision anymore, or you're looking for something different, say it, we'll talk about it. And I'll always support a guy if they feel that way. But it's just continuing to have the conversations we've had from the recruiting process all the way through to this moment right now.

Sorry for that. Yeah, you know, it's all, everything's cool. I was actually reading a quote from Tom Izzo the other day, and this is not about whether or not Tom Izzo is right or Tom Izzo is wrong. The transfer portal obviously bothers a lot of coaches who have been doing this for many, many years because we have over, I think there were over a thousand players that hit the transfer portal, including players that just had successful years in other spots. How do you view the portal in terms, in those terms, in the magnitude of it?

Well, it's a lot. And you know, for us, Adam, so far, we haven't had anybody go into the portal. We haven't taken anybody from the portal. I think we're, probably we've done the least amount of work in there. Now, can that happen? Sure, of course it can. But I think it tells you about the foundation that we built here. I do know people don't wait for guys to go in the portal. I mean, that stuff is happening all the time where, you know, coaches are calling our guys and, you know, it's, there needs to be more definitive rules with all this stuff, but that's the world we're in.

And you have to base it off relationships and also have an opportunity for these guys to play a big role here. Do you think it's worse in terms of the recruiting players off other teams' rosters? Do you think it's worse today or is it maybe just a little bit worse, but it's always been going on?

I think it's the worst today. Then I think it's worse today than ever because one, everybody wants, you know, immediate success. And I understand that I wanted immediate success, but that doesn't happen for everybody. And so the quickest way in a lot of people's minds is to go elsewhere to get it. And so if you have somebody else calling you saying, hey, you can get it here, it's intoxicating. But, you know, I'm really proud of the conversations that I've had, that our players have had with us. There's no secrets, you know, everything's been transparent and on the table. And as long as that's the case, you know, we'll figure out the right solution for each individual and their family, what's best for them.

John Shire is with us here. Was it hard to stay patient for you as a coach this year, knowing that you have a good roster and you know you should be good, but for various reasons, injuries, players slow to develop in the way that they wanted to develop, was it hard for you to be patient and just kind of let the season go at its own pace? Hard is the understatement of the century. It was almost impossible for me to be patient.

You know, I'm a very impatient person. And so, you know, the circumstances forced me to be that way. You know, I'm proud of the way we handled it.

And it put us in a great spot in the year to compete with anybody to, you know, pursue, well, we did win a championship, but to make a run in the tournament. But no, patient and me, if you ask my friends and family, we've never worked well together, except for this year. So now you have me intrigued because, I mean, not that we're, that we hang together, but I feel like I know your personality. I've known you for a long time. I don't see you as an impatient person.

So give me an example of John Shire being impatient. Oh, well, you honk at people in traffic. Oh, yeah. Chicago. Yeah.

All the time. We got places to go, but I think the biggest thing I'm, I'm impatient. I'm impatient.

Just what, like I was saying about, you know, our players, I'm impatient for the results that I want. You know, I wanted to marry my wife and she was, you know, putting me off for a little while and just stay persistent in an appropriate way. But I was very impatient until she finally agreed to go out with me. Does she, so she turned you down at first? She did. She did. Yeah.

Multiple times, if I may say. Just making you work harder. That's all right. That's all things, all things in life that are worth achieving, worth attaining are worth working hard for. Nothing in my life has happened immediately.

There, there wasn't, whether it was in high school, college professional route, I always had to overcome some failures before reaching the mountain top. And that's all right. If it's the case here, we're going to get there.

All right. Well, let's, let me ask you about the players who declared one way or the other. Did anybody surprise you with their decision? I think we all knew that Derek and, and, and Derek were both going to go. That was pretty much decided from the beginning, but did anybody surprise you with what they decided to do?

No surprises. I just think it's, I hope people realize in today's day and age, the, the mature decisions that Tyrese, Mark and Flip made, you know, Flip was going to be a first round pick, no question about it. And he felt he had more work to do and he wanted to be more ready. I want to pursue winning championships.

That doesn't happen in today's day and age of college basketball. Tyrese, who has gotten a lot of attention from the NBA to say about a week after the season, I'm coming back is a big statement. And also talks about his maturity, where he could have waited until May 31st and he knew what he wanted. And again, he didn't want to just get there. He wanted to be ready and be put himself in the best position.

Mark, the same thing. So I really give those guys a ton of credit. I think it's mature decisions says what they're all about, and they're going to have long-term careers because of it.

John Shire is with us. First of all, anybody wearing number 30 for Duke got to win a national championship before he leaves school. That's the, I thought that was the rule.

I could be wrong, but I thought that was the rule. I saw your, your assistant Chris Carowell. I guess this is back either in late, probably late January, when our kids played against each other in a middle school basketball game. They killed us, by the way.

Actually it was a competitive game, but they pulled away late. And I asked him about Tyrese. He says he's this close to getting it and when he gets it, it's going to be beautiful. What was that light bulb like for Tyrese? Did it coincide with Jeremy's toe injury? I think that might have had some to do with it where he was, he knew he had to play a certain way for us to win. But I really think it was just the progression he made throughout the whole season. He probably went through the worst shooting slump he's ever been in his life.

He just continued to stick with it. And I'll tell you what, the thing that you talk about surprises, his defense, the, he was as good as any defender in our league. And so not just doing it on offense, but on defense coming here a year early, that to me was, I mean, Seawell hit on the head. He was this close and took it even further than I thought he could because of his defense this year. Was that the John Shire influence or the Chris Carroll influence, the defense? I don't know if either of us can take full credit for it. As collectively as a staff, Jay Lucas has done an amazing job being our defensive coordinator and making sure we're, you know, we've had a top 20 defense this year, all season, most of the season. And that was, that was our bread and butter this year.

We had to rely on our defense. I want to ask you about something that Jay said, and I don't know if he said it a couple of weeks ago, or if I just read it a couple of weeks ago, who knows? But he talked about, there's a phrase called unintended consequence. And the unintended consequence in a good way of the name, image, and likeness era is that it may convince a lot of players who might not be first round picks, might be borderline picks or second round picks who are still willing to go to the league, might convince them to stick around a little bit longer. You get the sense that that's ultimately going to happen, that it will give some financial incentive to stay as opposed to a financial incentive to go.

You know, it's, I mean, look, I'm sure it's happened. But I think for the most part, it's happened with guys who probably weren't going to get drafted. And, you know, for our guys this year, they were going to get drafted. And so to make that decision, NIL was not the main reason they made a decision, they made it over the ability long term, you know, to be able to set themselves best up for success. But I do think it's a good thing if you can get some really good players back in college, the better talent there is, the better the games and, you know, the better our product will be.

So it's been really good. You just need to figure out where it's going to continue to go and how we can get our handle on all that. You said at the very beginning that you have to kind of evaluate what you did well, evaluate what you didn't do well. If you had one or two things to do over again for you, not necessarily for the team, but for you, what would they be? You know, I'm not done reflecting yet. You know, I could give you a better answer once I know who our team is going to be next year. And I want to rewatch, you know, all of our games and really break it down at a deeper level. But I could definitely tell you some things, but I'm not going to jump the gun and tell you two things now and then tell you two different things later. But I am far from perfect. You hope you bet a thousand with the decisions you make.

And that's never going to happen. I've sat next to the best coach to ever do it. And he was damn close to batting a thousand, but even him, there's decisions you analyze and change and take back. So for me, I think it's about getting that number as high as possible overall, whether it be a roster decision, a substitution play calls, of course, there's always things you that go into that. I talked to Rod Brind'Amour four times a week, but my role covering the hurricanes. So I get a chance to talk to a head coach and I think a pretty good one about how he views each game.

And it's it's an incredible grind. And what I have understood over the now three or four years that I've been doing this is that he is way more concerned with process than results. At some point, the results also have to be there and, you know, game in, game out.

But he thinks that the process is way more important. So this is a roundabout way of asking you if you considered your two trips into the state of Virginia on the out as you're coming back wins at Virginia and at Virginia Tech because the way your team played. I didn't consider them wins, but I each game we lost or even the games that we won that I didn't feel we played as well.

I tried to really just paint a picture and tell a story about the process. I couldn't agree more with with Rob and what he's talking about, because for us, I felt like it was coming, you know, in the Virginia game was the probably probably the best example. You know, we put ourselves in a position to win despite having 22 turnovers. And so for me, after the game was pretty simple, just painting that picture and it clicked and those habits start to kick in.

And we went on an amazing run, you know, to finish the year. How did how did Kyle Filipowski not get to the free throw line in both places? Yeah, in both situations. How I'm going to I'm actually going to blame you here. How did you allow that to happen? Yeah, I think I was blamed.

I wish I wish I had more control. No, it was unfortunate situations. You always have to reflect and I don't know if we would have played the same way after that game. But of course, it set us up in a position to have a little extra motivation for the ACC tournament. But, you know, those were definitely unfortunate situations. You guys played great at the ACC tournament.

It was dynamo. I hope I hope you guys are celebrating that because even even though I think the rest of the country viewed the ACC as a mid major this year, I still think that was a pretty, pretty doggone good performance. Final thing, really.

I mean, I've got so many things, but I don't want to dominate your whole day. But I know we'll talk again. I know coach had, you know, good friends in the profession, long friends, Jim Boeheim and others. We know how close they were. And he became close with Roy and all of these guys. Who are your guys? Who are John Shire's coaching friends? Yeah, I've been fortunate in my playing career to be alongside some pretty good coaches. You know, I played for Chris Finch, who's now the head coach of the Minnesota Timberwolves. Played for him in McAllen, Texas.

You know, I keep in touch with Chris. But for me, I look more at other young coaches in the game. You know, actually, the other day I spoke to Will Hardy, you know, who I think is the youngest head coach in the NBA, you know, coach for the Jazz.

Yeah. But there's been some really good connections I've had just to younger first time head coaches. Tommy Lloyd and I have developed a good thing. You know, we started a home and home series against each other this year. He's one of the bright young coaches in the game. And so I could give you a handful of guys, but I'm sure him and Boeheim did not develop that relationship over one year.

It was developed over a long time. And so I have to be in this a lot longer to develop some of those relationships. All right, man. I appreciate your time. Go to the beach. Do something. Get away from it.

Because, well, I mean, it's always there. You got recruiting and all sorts of stuff going on. But I appreciate your time. It's good to catch up and I'll see you soon. Thanks a lot, Adam.

Thanks for having me. It's John Shire. He is the head coach at Duke. I think he had a great year one.

Yes. Wild, right? Hubert Davis had a great year one. It ended like the entirety of the year. If you just took it in chunks, it wasn't awesome. But the end for Hubert was amazing, right?

Mm hmm. The win at Cameron, the run in the NCAA tournament. Coming that close to winning a national championship. John's year was different, but in a lot of ways, really similar.

Really similar. Yeah. So hope is year two. I mean, I love Hubert.

I absolutely love Hubert Davis. I hope John Shire's year two goes a lot better than Hubert Davis's year two. And we have no idea how it's going to play out.

No idea at all. Anyway, good for Coach Shire to hang a banner in year one. They are ACC champions. Can't ever take that away.