Turning down the Lakers was the best decision Coach K ever made
Rejecting the Lakers in 2004 allowed Mike Krzyzewski to cement his legacy as men's college basketball's GOAT.
This week we dedicate to the G.O.A.T. Across a wide range of sports, we will debate and remember the Greatest Of All Time, and look ahead to who’s next. Follow along here.
Mike Krzyzewski will enter his 45th season as a Division I college basketball head coach later this year with a record 1,132 career wins to his name, along with 12 career Final Four appearances and five national championships. Despite the loss of three NBA lottery picks, Coach K’s incoming Duke squad is once again listed among the favorites to win the national championship, as it is most years.
Krzyzewski will eventually walk away from coaching at Duke in the coming years, but regardless of what he achieves from now until then, he’s undoubtedly solidified his legacy as the greatest men’s college basketball coach of the modern era, with only John Wooden remaining as a challenger for all-time GOAT status.
The college basketball landscape could look entirely different, however, if Coach K had accepted a lucrative offer to succeed Phil Jackson as the coach of the Los Angeles Lakers in 2004.
In June of 2004, a Lakers superteam featuring Kobe Bryant, Shaquille O’Neal, and ring-chasers Gary Payton and Karl Malone was shut down by the Detroit Pistons in the NBA Finals. Days after the series ended, the Lakers announced that Phil Jackson would not return the following season, and the following month, the Lakers sent O’Neal to Miami.
Just a few days before that blockbuster trade with the Heat, Coach K announced that he would not be leaving Durham for Los Angeles to accept a five-year offer reportedly worth $40 million – which, at the time, dwarfed his salary at Duke.
As difficult as it is to imagine Duke basketball without Coach K, it’s similarly difficult to predict how he would have fared with the Lakers. Yes, Coach K proved he could command the respect of the world’s best professionals during his time as the head coach of USA Basketball, but having success with a group of NBA All-Stars is a far different prospect than altering the course of the Los Angeles Lakers in 2004.
Krzyzewski is undoubtedly one of the greatest basketball coaches alive at any level, but his skill and experience don’t guarantee that he’d be successful at the next level. The NBA is a player-driven game, and we’ve seen plenty of examples of great coaches failing to succeed in bad situations. No amount of coaching can turn a bad roster into an elite one, and Coach K wouldn’t exactly be working with impressionable teenagers who are only beginning to see their full potential.
Following Phil Jackson’s exit and the Shaquille O’Neal trade, which presumably would have occurred even if Coach K arrived in LA, the Lakers went on to win 34 games the next season and miss the playoffs for the first time in more than a decade. Bryant willed the team to the playoffs the following year (and averaged a career-high 35.4 points per game in the process), but even Phil Jackson’s return couldn’t save the Lakers from mediocrity in 2005 and 2006.
Jackson guided the team to 57 wins in the 2007-08 season and back-to-back titles in 2009 and 2010. Even if Coach K took over in the summer of 2004, he may not have lasted long enough for the Lakers to assemble a championship-caliber roster.
Robert Deutsch/USA TODAY Staff
Instead, Krzyzewski returned to a team led by J.J. Redick that had just won 31 games and reached the Final Four, and would make another trip in 2006. Six years after rejecting the Lakers, Coach K won a fourth national title, and he went on to surpass mentor Bob Knight as the all-time wins leader in 2011. Sure, if Krzyzewski had been a bust in the NBA, he may have just been able to return to Duke and continue his winning ways – but he never put himself in that position.
Via the Chicago Tribune:
“The allure of coaching in college has no price. It’s one of those priceless things. I’ve never made a decision based on what was going to just make me the most money. It was, to me, what was going to give me the most happiness. And I’ve been really happy at Duke and fulfilled at Duke.”