Duke All-Decade Team (Duke Lifer Edition): Quinn Cook

Heart and soul of the 2015 champs is the third member of the team

Duke had too many great players for just one All-Decade team, so we decided to split it up into the All One-and-Done team and the All Duke-Lifer team.

So far, we’ve unveiled a pair of players on the All Lifer team of the 2010s:

Grayson Allen

Kyle Singler

Today, we present the third member of the squad—The heart and soul of the 2015 national champions: point guard Quinn Cook.

A McDonald’s All-American, Cook was inconsistent as a freshman but showed flashes of the player he’d become. He had 21 straight assists without a turnover at one point, the second longest streak in school history, and he would have set a school mark for assist-to-turnover ratio if he had enough assists to qualify.

Cook also wore his heart on his sleeve, with chest bumps and wild facial expressions. In his early games, Cook would take off his warm-ups at the opening tip, even though he was starting the games on the bench. When asked why, he explained that he would get so excited when he got the call to go in that he would struggle to take off the shooting shirt and pants.

Cook went on to become one of seven Duke players with 1,000 points and 500 assists and set the school’s career assist-to-turnover record. As a senior, he stepped away from his role as primary point guard to allow freshman Tyus Jones to serve as playmaker. As the veteran presence, Cook earned second-team All-America honors, scoring 15.3 points and sharing team MVP honors with Jahlil Okafor.

After his college career, Cook spent two years fighting for a spot in the NBA before finally sticking with the Golden State Warriors.