GREENSBORO, N.C. — When Jeremy Roach arrived at Duke as a top-25 prospect in 2020, he had to have envisioned nights like Saturday, nights when he’d lead the Blue Devils to a championship with winning plays in dramatic moments; nights when he’d have the ball in his hands with the fate of such a championship in the balance; nights when his head coach might stop himself in the middle of a nationally-televised interview to offer the highest of praise.
That’s what Jon Scheyer did here in the Greensboro Coliseum late Saturday night. He was up on a makeshift stage after Duke’s 59-49 victory against Virginia in the ACC tournament championship game, and there was blue and white confetti all around, and the Blue Devils were already wearing the championship swag — t-shirts, hats — the ACC provided. And there was Scheyer, the first-year head coach, living his own dream moment when he told ESPN’s Holly Rowe:
“I’m proud of this guy right here, man. You should talk to this guy.”
And that was when Scheyer turned toward Roach, the junior guard from Washington, D.C., and shared the stage. To understand the significance of the moment was to understand the relationship between the coach and player, and the journey they’d traveled together over the past five years. The bond Roach and Scheyer share now began in many ways at one of Roach’s lowest moments, when he suffered an ACL injury during his junior year of high school.
All of a sudden he couldn’t play. All of a sudden his future was in doubt.
And there was Scheyer, on the other end of the phone one day, offering reassurance. There are moments in life that remain vivid years after they happen; words that are not forgotten, and for Roach one of those times came when Scheyer called him after Roach suffered that injury. Roach recited the conversation on Saturday night, replaying what Scheyer, then a Duke assistant, told him.
“I’m still with you. I’ve got your back,” is what Scheyer said, as Roach remembered it. “Even with this injury, we’re still with you; we still want you to come here.”
“That meant a lot to me,” Roach said, now reflecting. “But when your coach has this much confidence in you, you’ve got to rise to the occasion.”
Well how was this for rising to the occasion: 23 points, which is more than Roach had scored since arriving at Duke, with 19 of those points coming in the second half and 13 of them coming in the final five minutes when, every time Virginia made things mildly interesting, Roach answered with points that quashed the drama.
There came to be a rhythm to the sequence, a familiar cadence in the final minutes. When Virginia cut Duke’s lead to seven, Roach made a couple of free throws to push the lead back to nine. When Virginia made it a seven-point game, again, Roach responded with a jumper. When Virginia then made a 3-pointer, Roach responded with a three-point play. It was a four-point game with 46 seconds left, the result still in doubt, before Roach essentially iced it with four free throws.
Ballgame. Championship. Cue the confetti.
“He’s Jeremy Roach,” said Tyrese Proctor, the freshman guard who is Roach’s backcourt mate, “and he’s built for these moments.”
Well, he is now, it seems. It took a while for Roach to get there.
Finding consistency
His freshman season was marked by typical freshman inconsistency, like when he scored a season-high 22 points in a loss at Virginia Tech and then went scoreless in back-to-back games not long after. It was that kind of year for him, and for Duke, which labored through that strange pandemic-altered season and didn’t make the NCAA tournament.
Then came last season, and all the ballyhoo surrounding Mike Krzyewski’s farewell, when Roach was benched midway through it only to undergo a postseason renaissance in which he became one of the Blue Devils’ most consistent players during their run to the Final Four. In both of his first two years, Roach waited his turn and watched as others who’d been as highly-recruited as him, if not a little more so, cycled through the program.
Roach arrived at Duke in the same recruiting class as Jalen Johnson, who decided midway through his freshman season that he’d had enough of college basketball, and that he’d skip the rest of it to prepare for the NBA draft. Then, a season ago, another crop of high-end freshmen arrived — Paolo Banchero and A.J. Griffin and Trevor Keels — and departed after a season.
In college basketball, it has become unfashionable for once-highly-recruited prospects to stick around. The arrival of the NIL era has changed that dynamic, somewhat, but there’s a reason why only a few other top-25 prospects from the Class of 2020 — Roach’s class — remain in college. Roach isn’t old, only 21, but on this particular Duke team, with seven freshmen, he’s something of an elder statesman, a guy who can regale his young teammates with plenty of grizzled tales.
He’s not the loudest of leaders but he has developed a voice, and he used it with effectiveness during a players-only meeting after Duke suffered through a 22-point loss at Miami in early February. The contents of that meeting remain “sacred to the team” and thus are a secret, said Ryan Young, the graduate transfer from Northwestern. Yet he acknowledged that Roach helped lead “a long talk about what the season means to us and what we have to do as a team to achieve our goals.”
“That’s a primary example of the way that he’s been able to harness us all together and bring us closer,” Young said.
Another example happens before every game, when Roach leads players-only film sessions. It’s the sort of thing that Roach would’ve been too young to do his freshman season, and perhaps too inconsistent — at least on the court — to do even last season. Now, though, he has ascended into the kind of role that Scheyer believed Roach would fill when Scheyer stuck by him all those years ago.
‘He’s earned my trust’
Like Roach did, Scheyer also thought about the past on Saturday night, after the most important victory of his young career — after the most important victory any of these players had experienced in college. Scheyer had come to trust Roach “100 percent,” Scheyer said, and it wasn’t always a guarantee that would come to pass.
“He’s earned my trust,” Scheyer said. “We’ve been through a lot of battles together, man. Been through a lot of battles. Been through a lot even before he got here.”
There was the injury in high school. Then the ups-and-downs of Roach’s first two seasons. During Roach’s lower moments last year, his future with the program came to be in doubt. Krzyzewski, though, re-inserted Roach into the starting lineup, and then Roach became a key part of Duke’s NCAA tournament success. Even so, he endured two of the most difficult losses in school history — the defeat in Coach K’s final home game and then the loss in the national semifinals.
Both came against the same North Carolina team whose supporters, thanks to those two victories, claimed that the rivalry had come to an unmerciful end. The Tar Heels began this season No. 1 and with all the expectations, while Duke remained something of an unknown entity entering Scheyer’s first season as head coach. About five months later, it’s UNC on the wrong side of the NCAA tournament bubble and Duke with the ACC’s automatic tournament bid, after Saturday.
Roach became the kind of steadying presence, and reliable leader, that the Tar Heels lacked. And it was those losses to UNC a year ago that in some ways forged Roach, and prepared him to carry a considerable burden this season.
“Last year — I learned so much from last year,” Roach said as Saturday night was turning into Sunday morning. “I mean, from Coach K. He’s taught me so much. I think that’s why I’m in this position right now, just from the stuff I learned from him. And I’m just so grateful for that.”
Roach finds a scoring touch
It is not by chance that Duke’s nine-game winning streak has coincided with perhaps Roach’s best sustained stretch of play since arriving in Durham. He has successfully transitioned into playing off the ball more, a move Scheyer and his staff made after Roach missed three games with an injury in January. That allowed the coaches to see what Proctor could do at point guard and, when Roach returned, healthier, he proved more valuable as the primary two-guard.
During this winning streak, he has turned in scoring performances of 17, at Syracuse, 19, against Virginia Tech, and 20, during a close victory against N.C. State. Then came the outburst in the conference championship game Saturday night, and against Virginia’s suffocating defense, no less. Roach didn’t make it look easy, necessarily — few things ever are against the Cavaliers — but he took advantage the chances that came his way.
His two 3-pointers in the first five-and-a-half minutes of the second half helped Duke extend its lead to 14 and, for a short while, it looked like the Blue Devils might coast. Instead, Virginia kept chipping away ... and chipping away ... until Roach delivered answers again and again throughout the final five minutes. It was the kind of stretch toward which he’d been building for years; the kind that might’ve seemed improbable in Roach’s lower moments. And yet he kept persevering.
“He was beat up for a part of the year, really, for like 10 games,” Chris Carrawell, the Duke assistant coach, said during the Blue Devils’ postgame celebration late Saturday night. “He really was. And he was playing through it. And then he finally got healthy.
“And then now you see the Roach we thought we would see all year.”
That was the Roach who, late here on Saturday night, Scheyer stopped his postgame national TV interview to praise. That was the Roach who climbed a ladder and cut down a piece of the net, and then looked around searching for any of his teammates who hadn’t yet done that. He’d been so busy celebrating, and doing a couple quick interviews, that he was among the last of Duke’s players to make the climb. It was perhaps the only time this season that Roach followed his teammates instead of the other way around. On Saturday night, he led them to an ACC championship.
It’s been a long road for this team, and much longer still for him.
