Coach K wins for one reason – great players.
If you haven’t seen it yet, Google or YouTube Mike Krzyzewski’s commencement speech at Duke last weekend. It was amazing that a basketball coach, even a Hall of Famer with the most wins in NCAA history, would be the featured speaker on graduation day, but Coach K has reached God-like status at a school he called the “best university in the world.” We shouldn’t copy anything from another school, because we are the best, Krzyzewski said.
It was an excellent speech. He went through the processes he uses to win national championships and Gold Medals – find your heart, build a team and play to win. He said that’s how Duke won the 2015 national championship and joked that he might wear his graduation robe coaching at the Final Four NEXT season. He also said that setting standards, not making rules, was how he led the U.S. to two Olympic Gold Medals and hopes to do it a third time in Rio this summer with another NBA all-star team.
Mike Krzyzewski. (Photo by Todd Melet)
All well and good, but Coach K forgot the most important aspect of his obsession with winning. He wins when he has the best players. That may be because he’s a great recruiter and has built a championship program, but he wins when he has superior talent. He did not mention his team last season that bowed out in the NCAA Sweet Sixteen because it was not one of his better Duke editions.
Clearly, he acknowledged the American Olympic team has the best players in the world and that coaching them through three Olympiads is an honor, even though it has angered college and pro coaches for more than a decade. College coaches think it gives him an undeniable recruiting advantage, and NBA coaches believe they can coach their own players just as well as he can, if not better.
Coach K has a 75-1 record coaching international basketball and he has done a wonderful job making representing their country important again for NBA players. So criticizing him in public seems unpatriotic. He’s checkmated the world, so who can argue?
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