How flipping a coin helped five-star freshman Khaman Maluach end up at Duke

Five-star basketball freshman Khaman Maluach couldn’t decide whether he wanted to play for Duke or Kansas. So, naturally, he flipped a coin.

As his recruiting cycle narrowed down at the start of the year, five-star basketball prospect [autotag]Khaman Maluach[/autotag] couldn’t decide between Duke, the UCLA Bruins, and the Kansas Jayhawks.

On a Tuesday episode of The Brotherhood Podcast, Maluach told sophomore teammate Caleb Foster that, once he narrowed his focus down to those three schools, he kept going back and forth.

“I would wake up in the morning and I’d be like, ‘Oh, I’m going to Duke,'” Maluach said. “And then, at noon, I’d be like ‘Oh, no, I’m going to Kansas.’ And then, before I go to sleep, I’m like ‘Oh, I’ll go to UCLA.'”

Maluach lost some sleep in the process, but he eventually trimmed it down to two schools, the Jayhawks and the Blue Devils. The seven-footer from South Sudan still couldn’t pick one or the other.

So he just flipped a coin.

“The craziest part, the coin fell on Kansas’s side,” Maluach said. “I was disappointed. That’s how I knew I wanted to go to Duke.”

With his decision made, Maluach joined three other five-star freshmen, including top-ranked [autotag]Cooper Flagg[/autotag], in the 2024 Duke recruiting class. The rest, head coach Jon Scheyer hopes, will be history.