Duke Basketball’s Patrick Ngongba II Is ‘Like a PG in Some Ways’

Duke basketball head coach Jon Scheyer has talked about Patrick Ngongba II’s impressive abilities to impact winning ever since the former five-star recruit out of Paul VI Catholic High School (Va.) arrived in Durham as a freshman ahead of the 2024-25 campaign. But now that Ngongba, who was on back-to-back 35-win Blue Devil squads, is a seasoned junior fresh off a brilliant performance in Sunday’s 90-84 road exhibition win over the Kansas Jayhawks, Scheyer has dialed the praise up a notch.

“He controlled the entire game, his passing, his scoring, his rebounding, defense,” Scheyer said in Duke’s postgame press conference after the 6-foot-11, 250-pound 20-year-old tallied a game-high 28 points, 10 rebounds, and two blocks against the Jayhawks, not to mention his team-high four assists and highly efficient shooting clips of 9-for-12 from the field, 1-for-2 from downtown, and 9-for-10 at the charity stripe.

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“I could go on and on. I don’t want him to get too big of a head. So, I’m going to stop right there.”

Although Scheyer did temporarily stop talking about Ngongba, he continued to rave about the preseason All-ACC First Team selection when asked about Ngongba’s improvements as the “offensive hub” for the Blue Devils this go-round.

“I’ll just say, with Pat, not often do you get to be on a multiple-year journey with a guy as talented as Pat is and as good as he is,” Scheyer explained. “And he’s just a winning player. And I think his feel for the game, he understood that tonight it was more scoring and more decisiveness, and it totally changed our team. It totally changed our team.

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“He’s so smart. He’s like a point guard in some ways, the way he sees the floor. And then, his ability to protect, his ability to switch, he’s rare in terms of a big guy that has that much versatility.”

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Publish date : 2026-10-26 00:22:00

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