News reports this week have Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski signing up for a second tour with the Olympic team.
Prediction: K will be out of Duke before the opening tap of the next Olympic basketball tournament.
Simply, there is no where to go but down for him at Duke, where he has not been able to attract top talent since Roy Williams took up shop eight miles down the road. Look, there are just so many sons of NBA basketball players and coaches to go around. K has not landed a big man prospect since Elton Brand, who left early, and Carlos Boozer, whose draft value was destroyed in K’s guard-oriented system. He was not able to hold on to Eliot Williams this offseason and his interest in all-but-certain one-and-done John Wall tells you a lot about how his recruiting is going.
The top players no longer have to buy into the team-comes-first concept that K peddles ( a concept that took a big hit when he turned his back on the university during the lacrosse scandal). They realize it’s a business, the same way K does, and it has changed the playing field. The question is at age 62, can K adjust? Does he still even want to?
I wrote about this two years ago in ESPN Magazine as K headed into his first Olympics.http://sports.espn.go.com/espnmag/story?id=3373328. Not much has changed.
K’s recent failures at recruiting and the resultant early exits in the NCAA tournament are hurting his “brand,” something he has worked tirelessly to polish and promote. Losing in the first weekend of the NCAAs can only tarnish the image. Winning gold medals gets you endorsements.
You figure it out.
1 Comment
July 14, 2009 at 12:43 am
Hey sir,
My first thoughts when I heard he would be coaching in 2012 was that he would use that as his career cap- I would be surprised if he leaves Duke before then. He’ll probably be there at least through the 2010-11 season.
It’s very weird that this decade started with Duke as the most loaded program in the country- Battier, Boozer, Duhon, Dunleavy and Williams. I don’t think a single guy on Duke’s current roster would even crack the top 7 of the 2001 championship team.
Simply put, the Duke program is not what was at the beginning of this decade. A combination of a failure to get high level recruits or decent big men, and talented guards who cannot compete physically on the defensive end in the ACC (Paulus, Scheyer) has led to that team’s downfall.
It’s odd to say of Duke, but that team needs a new face to lead them. While the presence of Williams at UNC has surely been a detriment to K’s program, I think you can point to the Duke-VCU tournament game a few years back as the nail in the coffin. The game showed what Duke has become under K in the past 6 or 7 years- a soft team that can be punked by a scrappy, athletic bunch. Not pretty.