Coaching Them Up

With a blowout win over Bradley on Wednesday night, Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski won his 877th basketball game in Division I, passing Adolph Rupp for third best in NCAA history. He’s now right behind Dean Smith and a few dozen back of his former coach and mentor, Bob Knight. It is a remarkable milestone, made all the more so by the fact that most of those wins have come in an era that has evolved from four-year recruits to an NBA-like rotating roster of young talent. In fact, Krzyzewski has won all four of his national championships in just the last 20 years.

Such staggering achievement on the sideline (and yes, writing this sentence pains me tremendously, but it’s true) puts Krzyzewski in the conversation as one of the great coaches in any sport. And each of these signpost wins cements his legacy, additionally burnished as it is by uber-successful forays into international basketball, poverty relief and self-aggrandizing leadership centers.

Ironically, about the only thing Krzyzewski apparently fails at is teaching anyone else how to produce winning basketball teams. For all his success in basketball and life, Coach K has been an utter failure at creating successful coaches from his assistant ranks. Unless by “successful” you mean “successful at losing your job.”

Quinn Snyder’s hysterical flameout at Mizzou, Bob “The Builder” Bender’s dead end at Washington, Tommy Amaker’s disappearing acts at Seton Hall and Michigan and now Johnny Dawkins’ less-than-stellar start at Stanford represent a glaringly barren coaching tree. When the biggest bloom on your bush is a be-turtlenecked Mike Brey, you have to just sort of shrug, I suppose.

But no one names practice facilities and scholarships after your ability to birth coaches as good or better than you are. If so, the Herb Sendek Memorial Rec Center on the campus of Miami (OH) University would be jamming all winter. Instead, it’s a place that doesn’t exist. Still, Sendek has a whopping eight former assistants in the coaching ranks at the Division I level. And while none of them have the coif of the former Dukie wunderkind Snyder (nor the “one of his players creepily involved with the school president’s wife” track record), they represent the most florid tree among active coaches.

Sendek himself is a throwback coach, preaching a system approach that places a premium on teamwork and discipline, not individual brilliance. It’s led him to a good career to date, but doesn’t appear well suited to grand-scale success, in part because of a dearth of elite talent. The only two times in which a Sendek-led team made it past the first round of the NCAA tournament, his teams were led by All-American players (Julius Hodge and James Harden). But what assistant coaches learn at the flank of their benefactors is not necessarily mimicry. Coaches develop their own styles once they are allowed to institute their own systems and controls. Several among the “Sendek Eight” are good examples of this, but most clearly Thad Matta at Ohio State.

Matta’s case is an interesting one. In his 10 seasons as a head coach, Matta has won six conference titles and has never failed to crack the 20-win barrier. His 2007 team made it to the championship game, and he’s only missed the NCAA tournament one time — the year after Greg Oden and Mike Conley left and his boys took home the NIT. But Matta doesn’t come across as one of the game’s better coaches. Respected, yes, but not really for his coaching ability so much as for his ability to bring in top tier talent. In a way, he’s almost faulted for bringing in some of the best prep talent in the nation year-in and year-out and not doing more with them. The question remains whether Matta is doing anything more with that talent than it could do on its own.

When you hear the basketball punditry rave about an Izzo or a Calhoun or a Pitino or a Roy Williams, it makes sense. After all, those guys are all current or sure-fire Hall of Famers, and all of them are considered great recruiters who can also coach. But when names like Mike Montgomery, Tom Crean, Jamie Dixon and even Brey elicit breathless mentions by game announcers, it’s puzzling. It appears to stem from the theory that winning with less talent translates as “great coaching.” But last time I checked, recruiting the best players on the floor was as integral an aspect of collegiate coaching as coaching scrubs to success was.

Squeezing more out of less is, of course, an old school metric of coaching ability. It was always the thing defenders of Temple’s John Chaney trotted out as proof of his coaching greatness. I should know; I was one of them. Chaney’s career was marked by his ability to give last-chance kids that last chance, and to teach them life skills as well as basketball ones. But Chaney was also a stubborn system coach, and whatever their talent level, Chaney’s teams always had the appearance of overachieving. Chaney was never able to crack the Final Four barrier, falling in the Elite Eight five times in a 516-win Temple career. There was no denying his ability to coach a game, but while Chaney had recruited a few All-American players — Mark Macon and Rick Brunson come to mind — too many slipped away. Imagine if Chaney had been able to keep Rasheed Wallace, Rip Hamilton or even Kobe Bryant home? Obviously, those are big what ifs, but it’s hard to imagine a Final Four-less career with a couple of those names in the Temple annals.

If the logarithm for success in college coaching is complicated at best and never the same in any situation, recruiting the best players is simply not a part of the equation you can just dismiss.

Just ask Tubby Smith, who, after winning the national title in a thoroughly stellar job coaching another coach’s recruits in season one at Kentucky, was never able to reach the same heights, principally because of poor attention to recruiting. Smith was rightfully lauded for his on-court coaching skill, his off-court works, his good sportsmanship and his squeaky clean program. But he seemed to take extra pride in his ability to find diamond-in-the-rough recruits like Kelenna Azubuike, Gerald Fitch and Chuck Hayes, like a scout digging up some Fernando from the dusty fields of Mexico.

But despite a few impressive regular seasons, Smith, like Chaney, also couldn’t get past the Elite Eight, where too often teams with future NBA draft picks had an extra gear, one more made shot, one extra clutch rebound, than his diamonds in the rough did. As the coach at blue-blooded Kentucky it never made sense why Smith struggled to land the best recruits. It started to seem intentional. Much was said about Smith’s unwillingness to “play the game,” meaning the AAU circuit kabuki dance some coaches excel at. But Smith wasn’t being paid $3 million a season to avoid that game or any other game. He was being paid that much to win that game, as well as every other game. That was his job. Guys like Matta play the AAU game, and they play it well.

And yet, it’s not enough just to win the recruiting game. Because unless you can harness that talent — in Matta’s case six first-round picks in the last five years — guys like Matta will continue to get less credit.

Coaches dismissively regarded first and foremost as “recruiters” are not new to the college game. I recall distinctly my father waving away Hall of Famer Denny Crum’s coaching ability as “rolling the ball out there and letting ’em play.” Clearly, you don’t win 675 games, two national titles and three National Coach of the Year awards by “rolling the ball out there,” but the sentiment stuck that Crum’s superior athletes were capable of winning games that his own strategy could not, games that broke down into playground basketball. It becomes a situation where you’re expected to win more because of the players you’ve brought in.

This is now the domain of Kentucky coach John Calipari, who has taken the mantle of best recruiter in the nation and run with it. Much like Crum, Calipari has an elite stable of thoroughbreds whose skills favor the flashy over the fundamental. And yet, like Crum before him, Calipari’s results speak to a much greater skill than just teaching the best way to bounce pass and to run the picket fence: teaching winning basketball.

Of course, Crum learned up close as an assistant the value of coaching the best talent you could get. Missing from most of the hagiographic memorials of the late John Wooden was the fact that the UCLA coach enjoyed the luxury of coaching most of the best players in the country for a decade, thanks to a combination of his own massive reputation for winning, a sublime location to recruit to and boosterism run amok. All the talk about Pyramids of Success and teaching future Hall of Famers to tie their shoes is nice, but take a few of those guys off the roster and the results are bound to be dramatically different. This isn’t to denigrate the successes of Wooden, far from it. It’s to say that recruiting the best players possible and then getting those players to buy into the program and perform at the highest level is by definition great coaching, not a deficiency of it.

Which brings us back to Krzyzewski. It’s hard to remember now that for his first few years, Duke under Krzyzewski had been decidedly mediocre, if not bad. Then Krzyzewski broke through with a McDonald’s All-American in 1983 (Dawkins), followed by two more the next season. After a pair of second-round tournament losses, the program caught fire, winning 37 games before losing to Crum’s more talented and athletic Louisville team in a nail-biter in 1986. That began parallel runs of excellence for Duke’s head coach and his program.

From 1985–90, the Blue Devils went to four Final Fours in five seasons. In that same span, they also raked in blue chip recruits, nabbing 10 McDonald’s All-Americans. These two runs are, clearly, not unrelated. And yet until Duke took home the 1991 title with a team featuring a remarkable six Burger Boys, Coach K was regarded as the Marv Levy of college hoops — a nice guy that everyone thought was great for the game who “coached guys up,” hoops parlance for getting the most out of less. It seems laughable that one could have six prep All-Americans and be coaching the less talented team, but that was the way it appeared. So what turned Coach K from a very good coach who couldn’t win the big one to soon the all-time college basketball wins leader? It wasn’t recruiting. It was winning with those recruits.

So the next time an announcer goes on and on about Brey or Dixon — or like Dick Vitale did on Saturday about how, having just nabbed his first high school All-American, Crean’s Indiana program reminds him of Duke’s right before Dawkins arrived — remember that until those coaches are not only bringing in Matta-caliber players with regularity but actually winning with them, they’re just another bunch of nice guys in colorful turtlenecks sweating it out until the day the axe falls.

Originally from Kentucky, JL Weill now writes from Washington, DC. His take on politics, culture and sports can be found at The New Deterrence and on Twitter.

Photo by columbuscameraop, from Flickr.