Coach K Going Pro?

Say it ain't so. Please say it ain't so. Long time readers of this blog know that I am a huge college basketball fan, especially a Duke fan. Have been since I was about 14 years old. Coach K has been at Duke since 1981. In that 23 years, he has taken Duke to 10 final fours and 3 national championships. He is the unquestioned king of college basketball coaches, and he is revered at Duke. But now the LA Lakers have offered him a huge contract to coach in the NBA, something he has turned down several times before, and he is seriously considering it. Duke fans are on pins and needles awaiting his decision.

I really do hope he doesn't take the job. The only college coach who has gone on to be successful in the NBA is Larry Brown, but he started out as a pro coach initially, in the ABA. All of the other prominent college coaches - Rick Pitino, Leonard Hamilton, John Calipari, PJ Carlesimo, Lon Kruger, Jerry Tarkanian - have been major flameouts in the NBA. It's a totally different game. The psychology of the players is entirely different. A guy like Coach K is successful because he motivates and inspires excellence in impressionable and coachable young men. Those skills don't mean nearly as much when dealing with pampered millionaires. As brilliant as Coach K is as a basketball coach, I don't think he'll be a very good NBA coach and I don't think he'll enjoy it much.

I have some advice for Coach K. You aren't gonna find a Krzyzewskiville in LA. You aren't gonna see the fans spending night after night in a tent to get good seats to the game. The wine and cheese crowd in LA is not going to paint their bodies in the team's colors and jump up and down the whole game, or come up with clever taunts for the other teams. The things that you love the most about college basketball, and especially about Duke University, don't exist in the NBA. You won't have the opportunity to mold 18 year old boys into men, to instill discipline and the virtue of hard work in them. You won't get to watch those young men come together as a team and learn to love each other. You won't have that family atmosphere, where your former players continue to come back to you year after year for fatherly advice, or to help you teach the new guys what it means to be a Duke player. You won't find any of that.

In place of all those things you love will be an 82 game season with little time for teaching, which is just as well since the players on your team already think they know it all anyway. In place of those impressionable young men whose lives you love to impact in so many ways, you'll find million dollar athletes with billion dollar egos and entourages the size of the Cameron Crazies. Not to mention agents, PR people, felony trials and parole officers. You don't wanna do this, K. It will be a decision you will regret deeply.

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A player at my alma mater was recruited by coach K, but decided against Duke because he thought he'd get more playing time elsewhere. He was one of the most gifted athletes I've ever seen personally, but by the time he was senior, the "big-fish-in-a-small-pond" syndrome was so ingrained that he had become an insufferable screwhead.

As far as I can tell, he's not playing anywhere right now. I suspect four years split between Jim Baron and Jan Van Breda Kolff didn't do nearly as much for Caswell as would have even one year under Mike K.

Molding young talent - that he has recruited - is coach K's hallmark. I can't imagine he'd find anywhere near the same level of success in a league so dominated by screwheads.

E