The Coach K Way
For all the criticism that Duke men's basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski gets from detractors who criticize his style of play as being basically roll the ball out there and let 'em do what they do, you have to wonder - if it's that easy, why don't more coaches follow along and do the same kind of thing?
To be fair, the critics are oversimplifying the Coach K Way - his offense has its share of Xs and Os and set plays and screens and quick hitters and the rest. But its beauty lies in its simplicity - the emphasis being, as one might learn in The Philosophy of Basketball 101, on proper spacing that allows littles the room to maneuver on the perimeter and bigs the room to maneuver in the lane.
And on the other side of the ball, the focus, again, simply and most pleasing aesthetically, is on effort - which is 90 percent of what it takes to stop somebody; the other half of it, as Yogi Berra might say, being mental.
So exert maximum effort on D, spread the floor on O, recruit kids who will, for the most part, stay four years, and voila, you have Duke basketball.
The hard part for Krzyzewski has to be in keeping things as simple as they need to be kept - because for all the points made for years about how college basketball and pro basketball were beginning to look more like college and pro hockey, nobody ever examined the obvious one, namely, that both games can be and often are overcoached to the point of paralysis by analysis.
So to revisit my earlier question - it is that easy, so why don't more coaches follow along and do the same kind of thing?
- Chris Graham