It’s really kind of amazing just how much Duke Basketball is now part of the overall sphere of basketball, if you’ll forgive the pun.
In college, you see a number of coaches – Jeff Capel, Johnny Dawkins,
Bobby Hurley, Greg Paulus and Nolan Smith come to mind.
The NBA has executives like Elton Brand, Trajan Langdon and Mike Dunleavy and of course Grant Hill runs USA Basketball and Luol Deng manages the South Sudan program.
The NBA players are where it gets kind of mind-boggling. Just to pick Monday as a random day (try any day, they all work about the same), Tre Jones started for the Chicago Bulls against the Boston Celtics, who will start Jayson Tatum as soon as he’s healthy again.
Jalen Johnson and Luke Kennard led the Atlanta Hawks against the Toronto Raptors, who employ Brandon Ingram and RJ Barrett.
Mark Williams, Grayson Allen and Khaman Maluach all play for Phoenix as the Suns narrowly lost to the Houston Rockets.
Kon Knueppel and Sion James both played against the Oklahoma City Thunder in a big win.
Jared McCain came off the bench for the Philadelphia 76ers against the Denver Nuggets.
And then Kyle Filipowski came off the bench for the Utah Jazz in a loss to the Portland Trail Blazers.
Out of eight total games Monday night, only two lacked any members of the Brotherhood. And of those four teams – the New York Knicks vs. the Detroit Pistons and the Golden State Warriors vs. the – the Pistons are managed by Langdon and the Warriors by Dunleavy.
Duke’s influence over the game – and by extension, that of former Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski – is enormous.
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