SAN ANTONIO — Eight months removed from the traumatic accident that permanently damaged his vision in his right eye and derailed his hopes of making the NBA, Jon Scheyer received a harsh reminder of how tough the road ahead would be.
He wasn’t quite the same player with the Rio Grande Valley Vipers that he’d been while leading Duke to a national title the previous year.
It wasn’t just that his confidence had waned. Or that his trademark court vision and feel for the game had been compromised. His lack of peripheral vision made it hard for him to see screens coming when he was on defense. He would slam into them at bone-rattling speeds, then drag himself to his feet.
“At times it was very hard to watch,” said Minnesota Timberwolves coach Chris Finch, then the head coach of the Vipers. “He was getting hit by screens that you saw coming but he couldn’t see coming. He was so tough that he wouldn’t be defeated by that, but you could feel the frustration coming from him.”
In those days, Scheyer’s eye injury was a devastating blow, the worst thing that had ever happened to him. It cut short his playing days after three nomadic seasons of professional basketball and robbed him of the chance to pursue his NBA dreams.
Nowadays, Scheyer sees it differently. Were it not for his eye injury, he would never have gotten into coaching in his mid-20s. That set him on a path toward taking over for Mike Krzyzewski at age 34, for winning 89 games in his first three seasons and for guiding this year’s freshman-laden Blue Devils to the Final Four this weekend in San Antonio.
“To have to say he was done playing, I know it killed him,” said former Duke teammate and close friend Brian Zoubek. When you have an injury and you’re a shell of your former self and every day you’re reminded of that by playing not to the level you want, that’s a very, very painful thing to experience.
“But if it weren’t for the eye injury, Jon wouldn’t be coaching Duke right now. It turned out to be a blessing in disguise.”
Jon Scheyer the basketball player
Two weeks ago, one of Scheyer’s former rivals on the Chicago basketball scene shared a story about the Duke coach’s willingness to play against anyone, anywhere, Patrick Beverley, the ex-NBA player turned podcaster, told ...
