Road to Duke
The recruiting class of 2004 was supposed to belong to other people. Shelden Williams was the headliner, the 6-foot-9 shot-blocker from Midwest City, Oklahoma who would become the most decorated defender in Duke history. Sean Dockery was the flashy point guard from Chicago. Lee Melchionni was the sharpshooter from Germantown, Pennsylvania. And David McClure — a 6-foot-6 forward from Ridgefield, Connecticut — was the one nobody outside New England was talking about.
Born on April 1, 1986, in Danbury, Connecticut, and raised in Ridgefield, McClure attended Trinity Catholic High School in Stamford, where he became the most dominant player in the state. Over four years, he compiled a record of 101-7, won three FCIAC tournament championships, and led Trinity Catholic to a 27-0 record and the Connecticut state title as a senior. He closed his prep career on a 52-game winning streak. As a senior, he averaged 16.2 points, 10.4 rebounds, and 3.1 blocked shots per game. Over his career at Trinity, he scored 1,367 points (fourth all-time), grabbed 1,186 rebounds (second all-time), added 389 steals and 321 blocked shots — numbers that earned him Gatorade Connecticut Player of the Year, the Connecticut Coaches Association Player of the Year, and the inaugural Dave DeBusschere Award from the New York Knicks' MSG Network.
Nationally, he was ranked 71st by RSCI, 13th among small forwards by Insiders, and 21st by Rivals. His final choices came down to Duke and Notre Dame. Mike Brey, the Notre Dame coach who had been a Krzyzewski assistant, could offer more immediate playing time. But McClure's high school coach, Mike Walsh, convinced him to visit Durham before committing. McClure was sold. He called Coach K directly on June 2, 2003, to give his verbal commitment. He later explained the logic with the quiet certainty that would define his career: he wanted to learn from "the teacher, not the student." He was the first Connecticut player to attend Duke since three-time Academic All-American Mike Gminski from Monroe in the late 1970s.
At Duke
What followed was a five-year Duke career shaped more by what David McClure endured than what he produced on the stat sheet. The numbers — 124 games, 2.2 points, 3.1 rebounds, 48 percent shooting — don't tell you about the six knee surgeries.
As a freshman in 2004–05, McClure played 31 games with three starts, averaging 1.7 points in 7.4 minutes. A modest debut, but he was a freshman on a team that won the ACC championship. Then the first knee went. Left knee surgery wiped out his entire 2005–06 season. He spent the year rehabilitating, watching from the bench in street clothes as Duke won another ACC title without him.
When he returned for 2006–07 — technically a sophomore by eligibility — McClure had his breakout. He started 11 of 33 games and averaged 4.2 points and 4.9 rebounds in 21.7 minutes per game. He was second on the team in steals, offensive rebounds, and blocked shots, shooting 49.1 percent from the field. Against UNC Greensboro, he racked up a career-high 7 steals with 11 points and 9 rebounds. He was, as advertised, a player who could guard multiple positions and do the dirty work that wins games.
Then came the moment. On January 25, 2007, against 17th-ranked Clemson in Cameron Indoor Stadium, with the game tied at 66 in the final seconds, Jon Scheyer found McClure cutting to the basket. McClure caught the pass and laid it in as the buzzer sounded. Duke 68, Clemson 66. Cameron erupted. It was the biggest shot of McClure's life, and it came from a player who most fans thought of as a role player at best.
But the knees kept betraying him. Right knee surgery before the 2007–08 season cost him the first two games, and when he returned, freshmen Kyle Singler and Taylor King had claimed his minutes. He averaged just a point per game in a diminished role. As a senior in 2008–09, his minutes rebounded somewhat — 16 per game, 50 percent shooting, a career-high 1.1 assists — but he was no longer the player he had been as a sophomore. He grabbed four rebounds and a steal in 14 minutes against West Virginia in the NCAA Tournament, his last meaningful game in a Duke uniform.
Five years. Three ACC championships. Six knee surgeries. One buzzer-beater. A career that never reached the ceiling everyone saw in Stamford but was defined by something more durable than talent: the refusal to quit.
After Duke
McClure went undrafted in 2009 and didn't receive an invitation to the Portsmouth Invitational Tournament. But Quin Snyder — the former Duke player and coach, now running the Austin Toros in the NBA D-League — drafted him with the 60th overall pick in the fifth round of the D-League draft. McClure played one season in Austin, averaging 2.4 points in 13.4 minutes per game, his surgically rebuilt knees holding up just enough to keep him on the court.
From there, he went overseas. He played four seasons in the Lithuanian Basketball League, suiting up for Nevezis and Siauliai. On March 31, 2012, he scored a career-high 23 points in a road win over Rytas Vilnius. He could still play. But his knees — six surgeries total, including two on each knee during his final playing season — eventually made the decision for him.
The transition to coaching came through the Brotherhood. Chip Engelland — the Duke walk-on from the Foundation era who had become the most respected shooting coach in the NBA — met McClure at a Duke fantasy camp and helped him get his foot in the door with the San Antonio Spurs. Working under Gregg Popovich, McClure served as a player development quality assurance assistant for two seasons, spending time as a video coordinator for Spurs assistant Ime Udoka and helping Manu Ginóbili recover from a stress fracture.
In 2016, Nate McMillan hired him as a player development coach with the Indiana Pacers. The players noticed immediately. Monta Ellis told the Indianapolis Star: "When he first came in, he made his mark, set his standards, and everybody went with it." Paul George and Myles Turner both credited McClure with their development. He was promoted to assistant coach before the 2018–19 season and helped Indiana to three straight playoff appearances.
In 2019, Taylor Jenkins — who had been an assistant on Snyder's staff in Austin when McClure was a player there — hired him as an assistant coach for the Memphis Grizzlies. The circle closed: the Duke role player who couldn't stay healthy enough to make the NBA as a player was now coaching in it. In Memphis, he mentored Xavier Tillman on managing chronic knee pain — drawing directly from his own six-surgery experience — teaching Tillman the daily routines of stationary biking, weight control, and medical collaboration that had kept McClure on the court long after his knees should have ended his career.
Where Is He Now
A coach sits on an NBA bench in Memphis, watching a young player work through a pregame knee routine that he designed from personal experience. The routine involves 30 to 40 minutes of stationary biking, careful weight management, and constant communication with the medical staff. The coach knows every detail of that routine because he lived it — through six surgeries, five years at Duke, one season in Austin, four years in Lithuania, and every step of the long road from player to coach.
David McClure's path through the Brotherhood is one of the most quietly remarkable in the program's history. He arrived as a Connecticut state champion with a 52-game winning streak and left five years later with three ACC titles, a buzzer-beater against Clemson that Cameron Indoor has never forgotten, and knees held together by surgical thread and stubbornness. He couldn't make the NBA as a player, but he made it as a coach — with assists from Chip Engelland, Quin Snyder, Gregg Popovich, and Taylor Jenkins, every one of them connected through the web of relationships that Coach K's program spins.
"It's been a whirlwind," McClure wrote when he left the Pacers for the Grizzlies in 2019. "I truly feel blessed every day."
He turned 40 on April 1, 2026. The knees are what they are. But the career — from Stamford to Durham to Austin to Vilnius to San Antonio to Indianapolis to Memphis — is still climbing.