Lee Melchionni left basketball behind a while back, having severed his player-agent ties to the game just over seven years ago and ending his on-court career well before that. Yet he still carries a good bit with him, even at age 37, even as he has settled into his law practice.
“I still am an incredibly competitive person,” the Lancaster County native told me over the phone recently from Atlanta, where he heads a firm called Justice Partners.
That competitiveness obviously manifests itself differently than when he was playing for Mike Krzyzewski at Duke in the early 2000s. It’s more through “executing on deals, things like that,” Melchionni said, for a firm he founded in January 2021, and one for which he now serves as CEO. Its mission, as he described it, is to raise capital so that the firm might “pursue litigation against medical device companies or large pharmaceutical companies that have injured people and failed to warn them beforehand.”
That’s admittedly a wee bit different than game night in Cameron Indoor Stadium.
“Unless you’re using some hardcore drugs or something like that,” he said, “I doubt you’re going to recreate that rush.”
At the same time, he is quite certain that he derived a great many other things from his collaboration with Coach K – that he carried them with him as he left Durham in 2006 and carries them with him still. Things like attention to detail, time management, work ethic and an understanding of the value of teamwork. Also, Melchionni said, “a relentless positivity,” which might be hard to picture when you see Krzyzewski’s scrunched-up face as he chews on a referee.
But that’s Melchionni’s story, and he’s sticking to it.
“I think my experience at Duke really set the tone,” he said, “for the rest of my life.”
Forgive him if he thinks about that a little more lately, since Coach K announced months ago that this season, his 42nd in Durham, will be his last. Assistant coach Jon Scheyer, a guard on the Blue Devils’ 2010 NCAA championship team – one of five Krzyzewski has coached – will succeed him.
As for Melchionni, work has taken him to Duke games on occasion. In fact, he makes sure that it does.
“I go back several times a year, selfishly, because it’s good to take people to games for business,” he said.
He will make it a point to go to several more in the weeks ahead; the Blue Devils, 12-2 following Saturday’s loss to Miami, have seven home dates remaining.
“It’s appointment viewing,” he said.
He doesn’t remember the first time he crossed paths with Krzyzewski, only that he was going to Duke games at a young age. His dad, Gary, had played there before spending two years with the NBA’s Phoenix Suns in the ‘70s. Lee’s older sister Monica played for Duke as well.
“If you cut me open, I think I’d bleed Duke blue,” he told the Sunday News’ Mike Gross in 2000.
Melchionni was then a junior at Germantown Academy, in suburban Philadelphia, having transferred from Manheim Township for reasons he doesn’t wish to discuss. GA was at that point a high-profile school that played a demanding national schedule, and Melchionni flourished. He visited North Carolina as well as Villanova, where his Uncle Bill had played years earlier; Bill Melchionni went on to play 10 professional seasons and win three championships – one in the NBA with the Wilt Chamberlain-led Sixers, and two in the ABA with the Julius Erving-led Nets.
But where Lee was concerned, well, see above.
He played little his first two seasons in Durham but was a rotational piece on teams that went 59-10 and reached the Sweet 16 his last two, shooting well over 40 percent from 3. He parlayed that into a single professional season in Italy, while keeping a hole card in his back pocket – an invitation from uber-agent Arn Tellem to connect when he was done playing. That had been extended when Melchionni tagged along to Tellem’s recruitment dinner with Melchionni’s roommate, center Shelden Williams, the fifth pick in the 2006 draft.
Melchionni spent seven years with Tellem’s Los Angeles-based firm, Wasserman Media Group, while attending law school at Loyola Marymount at night. His clients included not only Williams but Marcus Smart and Danilo Gallinari, who are still in the NBA, as well as Joe Johnson, who enjoyed a long, productive career and was recently (and temporarily) brought back by the Celtics at age 40 to fill the COVID breach.
But by 2014 Melchionni was ready for a change.
“My issues with the agenting business were it’s difficult to rise to the top and basically you exist in a gray area every day,” he said. “And my biggest issue was that people don’t make decisions based on the services you provide, or the price you provide them at.”
Rather, he said, it’s based on dozens of ancillary issues.
“If you’re going to have heart surgery, you’re going to find the best heart surgeon you can,” Melchionni said. “And in the agent world, it’s just different. You go with a friend or you go with this person because they’re quasi-famous and started an agency. Those are some of my issues.”
He spent a couple years at U.S. Trust, a couple more at Structures, Inc., another Atlanta-based firm. And now he has a new venture.
In the meantime, Krzyzewski, who turns 75 next month, has continued along. College basketball’s all-time winningest coach (all divisions) with 1,182 victories, he has also won three Olympic golds as head coach of Team USA, all of which has earned him a spot in the Basketball Hall of Fame.
Melchionni thinks now not just of game nights in Cameron but those days when the bleachers were rolled back for practice and it was just the team, just the coaches, just the work – “the work that’s done in the shadows – the stuff that people don’t see.”
That’s when he picked up many of the things he continues to carry with him. The things that sustain him still.