The same Duke uniform was hanging in his closet that had hung in his father's. David O'Connell wore Duke blue from 1973 to 1976 — a hyper-athletic guard who fought through knee injuries to suit up for Bill Foster in the years just before Mike Krzyzewski arrived in Durham. Forty years later, his middle son would put it on. The genes had been handed down. The fit at Duke was never going to be coincidence.
Alex was born June 2, 1999 in Baltimore, Maryland and raised in Roswell, Georgia. His mother Crystal and David raised three boys: Brady, the youngest. Shawn, the eldest, would grow into a 6'8" forward who'd later play at Georgia Southern. His uncles played at Notre Dame and Xavier. Alex was the middle son who grew tall, kept growing, and started filling up high school stat sheets at Milton High School in suburban Atlanta.
The summer of 2016 was the moment. O'Connell played for Team United on Nike's EYBL Gauntlet circuit and finished in the top 25 nationally in three-pointers made, averaging 14.1 points per game. He was invited to the NBPA Top 100 Camp, where he averaged 9.5 points. The recruiting rankings climbed: 247Sports moved him to No. 68 overall, ESPN to No. 85, Rivals to No. 55. Nine high-major programs offered scholarships. Louisville, Syracuse, UCLA, Connecticut, Miami, Texas A&M, Georgia Tech, NC State, and Ole Miss all wanted him.
Duke offered on a Wednesday night in late August 2016. He committed before the weekend was out.
"It was the right school and it was where I felt comfortable," O'Connell said. "Plus it's Duke basketball." He acknowledged the family history but insisted it wasn't the deciding factor: "It didn't impact my decision. It will be awesome to continue the legacy. I chose Duke because it was the right school." His father had worn the Duke uniform forty years earlier. Now Alex would wear the same one. The first commit of Duke's loaded 2017 class — the class that would end up bringing Marvin Bagley III, Wendell Carter Jr., Trevon Duval, and Gary Trent Jr. to Durham — was a 6-foot-6 sharpshooter from Roswell who had grown up watching his father's old Duke film.
"I think I could do really good things there," O'Connell said in 2016, before he had even arrived. "I could do just the same thing as Grayson Allen or Luke Kennard does now."
He arrived in the fall of 2017. He would spend the next three years discovering that doing the same thing as Grayson Allen or Luke Kennard — being the floor-spacing wing on a top-five Duke team — was harder than it looked when those guys made it look easy.