Skip to main content
Miami

Miami basketball starts preseason with Jai Lucas stressing growth, chemistry

by: Luke Chaney09/22/25LChaney_
Jai Lucas
(Photo courtesy Miami Hurricanes MBB/X)

Miami’s men’s basketball team began preseason practice on Monday afternoon, marking the official start of the Jai Lucas era in Coral Gables.

There is a laundry list of unknowns about the Hurricanes heading into the 2025-26 season. The coaching staff? Brand new. The roster? Also brand new. Lucas addressed the media before this first practice to shed light on his team.

Lucas first explained his rationale behind the squad that he put together. He utilized several avenues of talent acquisition, including the transfer portal, as well as high school and international recruiting. His objective was to build a roster that can overwhelm opposing teams with its size and physicality.

 “The way I built the team, I really wanted to be and to have great size, so we do have great size, great physicality,” Lucas said. “We should be able to be really good defensively and rebounding, and so the small things I felt that go into winning, I really wanted to attack that right away, especially this first year, so we can kind of check the boxes on those, and then we’ll grow and develop offensively throughout the year, what we’ll look like and what we’ll be, but we have the versatility to play a bunch of different ways, which is exciting.”

Lucas thinks that Miami is further along on defense than it is on offense heading into the preseason. He hopes that his team can hit its stride by the time conference play rolls around.

“We’re getting there. We look like a team more defensively than offensively,” Lucas said. “Right now, if I said we were great, I wouldn’t be as excited as a coach. I want to be our best when we start getting there toward January, February in-conference, toward March. But before then, I still want to be really good, but I don’t want to be peaking right now. I want to peak at the right time.” 

The first-time head coach comes from a defensive background. In his most recent coaching stop at Duke, he served as the Blue Devils’ defensive coordinator, leading a unit that allowed the seventh-fewest points in all of college basketball season.

Granted, Miami may not have the multiple first-round talents that Duke had last year, but Lucas is confident that the roster he constructed can play a versatile brand of defense that is capable of excelling in a multitude of different ways.

“Besides the athleticism and the ability to be switchable, the ability to keep teams out to paint, to limit them to one possession, being able to rebound, but also, I think the biggest thing is we have the ability to press, we have the ability to play zone, we have the ability to switch everything. We have the ability to trap,” Lucas said. “So it really gives me the feeling to do whatever I want with them. So it’s just depending on who we play and what I feel the game needs and being able to go that.”

In addition to meshing on the court, Lucas emphasizes that it’s also important for his team to mesh off the court as well. Miami is full of players who have never played with each other before, so Lucas and his staff have been very intentional in getting their guys to get to know one another on a deeper level.

One of the things Lucas has implemented to achieve this goal is called, “What’s Your Why Wednesday,” a weekly bonding activity that aims to bring together the players and coaches.

“A coach and a player have to go up and kind of explain why they do what they do and what’s their motivation behind doing it,” Lucas said. “So just getting to know each other on a deeper level is important.”

A final thought from Lucas on what he’s looking forward to learning about his team during preseason practice?

“Now just seeing as we start to add pressure situations, like time and score, down two with two minutes to go, down six with four minutes to go, just how they respond and how they react to things like that, I think is really important,” he said. “So just the game situation, game pressure.”

You may also like