Jai Lucas dishes on transition into new era of Miami basketball

Jai Lucas has some big shoes to fill at Miami, but the Hurricanes have to feel they have the right guy for the job.

Lucas was a highly regarded assistant before Miami poached him, but this is his first head-coaching gig. As he tells it, it feels a bit different.

"You know, it’s been good. I’m not complaining at all, but it is different. It’s a lot more talking… that’s the biggest part," Lucas said, according to Daniel Hager of On3. "The biggest thing that I’ve been able to do (and I wanted to do) was hire a really good staff. In doing that, it’s given me the ability to delegate a lot of stuff and not feel like I have to coach everything. I am having to coach a lot because we are all new.”

Lucas is replacing Jim Larranaga, who went 274-174 in 13-plus seasons in Miami before he retired just 12 games into the 2024 season, citing exhaustion and the changing landscape of college sports. Larranaga took Miami to the NCAA Tournament six times and won two ACC regular-season titles. In 2022-23, he took the Hurricanes to the Final Four. 

Lucas, 36, is the second-youngest head coach in the ACC behind Florida State's Luke Loucks, who is 35. Having a strong and experienced staff around him will be especially important.

One of the main assistant coaches on his bench is Andrew Moran, who has strong ties to the high school scene in Miami. He was named the 2025 Naismith National High School boys basketball coach of the year as the head coach at Christopher Columbus High School. He guided the Explorers to four-straight Florida Class 7A state championships, and he boasted a 145-34 overall record as a head coach.

Moran is also the program's director of player development.

Lucas also brought in Russell Springmann as an assistant coach, who was the head coach at Oral Roberts for the past two seasons.

Ultimately, both Lucas and the Miami program are in a transition period. He's figuring out how to be a head coach, while the players and staff around him are trying to figure out how he wants to go about playing winning basketball.

He seems to be confident in the people around him, though, and that's half the battle.

“Most of my staff I’ve never worked with and the players are completely new, so my terminology is different from what they’ve had and it’s just the little details of that. I had the benefit of being able to hire a good staff and have good players and a good group of guys. That’s made the transition — so far — easy," Lucas said.

Lucas spent the last three seasons at Duke, where he became head coach Jon Scheyer's top assistant. He was on the staff for two seasons at Kentucky before that, and he started his career coaching at his alma mater, Texas.

He was a player himself. Lucas started his career at Florida, where he was named to the SEC All-freshman team. He finished at Texas, where he helped lead the Longhorns to two straight NCAA Tournament appearances.