Duke vs. St. John’s Was the Battle of Dueling Roster Strategies

WASHINGTON — From a roster composition standpoint, Duke and St. John’s couldn’t be more different this season.

St. John’s has embraced the new way of doing things in this era of “unrestricted free agency”: raiding the transfer portal and recruiting older, seasoned basketball players from teams all over the country. Duke, meanwhile, continued to embrace the fountain of youth, with a program built around star freshman and projected top NBA draft pick Cameron Boozer—as well as a few elder players, like junior Caleb Foster, who were homegrown. 

At the Sweet 16 in D.C. on Friday night, the Duke strategy prevailed again. The 1-seed Blue Devils beat the 5-seed Red Storm 80–75, pulling away in the last minute after the two programs traded leads throughout the game. 

“Still a little stunned with what happened, to be honest with you guys,” Duke coach Jon Scheyer told reporters after the game.

Scheyer, an alum of the Blue Devils program himself, took over for legendary coach Mike Krzyzewski in 2022 amid major changes in the college sports landscape. The NIL era began in 2021, but it wasn’t until 2024 that a federal court case forced the NCAA to allow players to transfer as many times as they wanted without penalty. Add in the revenue-sharing era that commenced in 2025, and coaches in college basketball have been forced to re-recruit their entire roster every offseason and dip into the transfer portal to poach other players. 

Many coaches have taken approaches similar to St. John head coach Rick Pitino’s, relying on older transfer players. Pitino embraced the new era completely, utilizing NIL and revenue-share money (largely provided by billionaire alum Mike Repole) to lure a roster of older transfers to Queens. 

“We’re not recruiting any high school basketball players,” Pitino said during last year’s season. “Not this year.” All five Red Storm starters came to Queens through the transfer portal, with the longest-tenured Johnnie in the starting five being Big East Player of the Year Zuby Ejiofor. 

But despite Scheyer’s own newness to the job, and his own youth, he continues to build rosters with a strategy more akin to those of the pre-transfer portal and pre-NIL era.

This past offseason, Scheyer retained the core of his remaining players, mostly avoiding having to rebuild through the transfer portal. (The program does have an advantage over other schools, though: As a fortified blueblood with deep NIL and revenue-sharing pockets coming off another Final Four run, Duke likely didn’t have to clamor as hard as other programs for players to stay.)

Scheyer then recruited five freshmen. The class, led by Boozer, ranked first in the nation. 

On Friday night, Duke started him, along with two other first-years: His twin brother Cayden, as well as Italian basketball player Dame Sarr. Sophomore Isaiah Evans and senior Maliq Brown rounded out the starting five. (Though, earlier this season, Cayden Boozer and Brown were coming off the bench when sophomore Patrick Ngongba and junior Foster were fully healthy.) Another frequent player off the bench: Nikolas Khamenia, also a freshman.

The young bloods delivered against St. John’s as two underclassmen—Isaiah Evans (25 points) and Cameron Boozer (22 points)—led the team in scoring. 

Although the strategy has worked well for the Blue Devils, who came into March Madness with the first-overall seed, it’s hard to say if every team can win with such a young core. After all, Duke may not have won on Friday night if it wasn’t without Foster.

Though he is a bit older, Foster notably isn’t a transfer—he arrived in Durham in 2023 and was part of the 2024–25 squad that made it to the Final Four. A core member of this year’s team, Foster suffered a fracture in his foot during the final regular-season game against UNC, and wasn’t expected to be able to play. 

He was a last-minute addition to the roster on Friday. Scheyer said Foster hadn’t played five-on-five in practice between the injury and Friday, and Foster told reporters he was riding around campus on a scooter. He came off the bench and scored 11. “I wanted to come out and provide anything possible, experience, whatever the team needed,” Foster told reporters after the game. 

Scheyer, who joked with reporters about getting emotional reflecting on Foster’s multi-year journey with the team, said: “I really felt like he was going to will us to victory, and that’s what he did.”

Now, the question is whether Duke can make it back to a second consecutive Final Four—and whether their mostly youthful squad can cut down the nets in Indianapolis.