Coach K's retirement tour is my personal nightmare
and a perfect way to tee up my Q&A with WSJ's Ben Cohen!
In the modern landscape of college basketball, preseason narratives tend to stick around until the buzzer sounds on the first Monday in April. There’s just not enough attention on the regular season to disrupt this—Gonzaga was the focus wire-to-wire last season, and Zion Williamson was the focus a few years before that. No one really bothered to talk about anything else the entire year, unless they absolutely had to. It’s inevitable, if frustrating for college die-hards.
This year’s narrative, from gate-to-gate, will be the retirement of Coach Mike Krzyzewski. Three five-stars are inbound, and all season we’re going to hear about them winning one last ring for the K-man. It’s going to be extremely tiring for those who love Coach K, not to mention the folks (who shall remain nameless!) who lowkey despise him and thought the time might never come when he’d give up the keys to USA Basketball.
Anyway, before I descended too far into irrational thought, I decided to reach out to my old friend Ben Cohen, a new father and a rational, but curious, thinker. (Cop his book Hot Hand, a great, surprising and sneakily funny read! His work in the Journal is can’t miss also).
He provided the context that I did not know I needed!
How surprised by the timing of this announcement were you?
BEN COHEN: So for as long as I’ve been thinking about Duke basketball and writing about Duke basketball and talking to my friends about Duke basketball, there has always been a discussion about, “Who is K’s successor?” The retirement itself was always seen as five years away, if that.
That was because, when you're talking to recruits, you want to work in five-year cycles. So his retirement was always seen as not particularly close. And, in retrospect, in 2006, in 2008, in 2010, it actually wasn't particularly close, you know? But it has long been a parlor game, like who was going to be the person who replaced him. When Johnny Dawkins left in 2008… Johnny D was always seen as the guy. When he went to Stanford, it was like, okay, well, I guess he is putting the Duke job at risk!
Then it was Wojo and Collins. I forget who left first, but those guys were on the bench forever next to Krzyzewski. After Wojo and Collins left, it was Jeff Capel. And the job was seen as his to lose. It was a really curious decision for him to leave Pittsburgh in 2018 because I think people around the program and people who read the tea leaves on this stuff thought that he wanted the job.
It was his, and when he left, it seemed clear that Krzyzewski was not retiring anytime soon. That was the big takeaway from Capel leaving. The reason there has been such a robust discussion about who was next is because there was never a strong candidate to replace him. It almost always felt like you were like having to take a chance on somebody, whether it was going to be someone whose head coaching record elsewhere wasn't quite what you would expect it to be the next Duke coach or whether it was going to be some assistant who had never coached anywhere else.
Right. But people were definitely pitching big-name coaches as potential Coach K replacements.
BEN COHEN: That of course brings us to the ultimate pipe dream, which was Brad Stevens in 2010. And I think people thought about that idea because Duke and Butler had some sort of shared history and that Brad was so clearly like a brilliant coach, that if he stayed at Butler, whenever Krzyzewski did decide to leave, then he might come to Duke. So they might go outside the family and hire Brad. It became obvious to me that that was not going to happen as soon as he had any sort of modicum of success with the Celtics, because you're never going to leave an NBA job for Duke. So anyway, that leads us to the point where like, there was not, there was no clear successor.
Nobody really knew when it was going to happen, or who would replace him. And really the first time that I started to think it might be now was like maybe a few months before it actually happened. Some people mentioned that he was not going to retire before this season, because apparently the freshman class is awesome. Coach K still lives to coach the best players and was never going to leave that class before he got a chance to coach them.
Between 2006 and 2015, what everyone always said was that there would never be a retirement tour. He would just slip away like a shadow in the night and it would be a farewell. Obviously that did not happen.
So I thought, if he was going to retire, he was going to do it in advance, because he was not going to be recruiting kids he couldn’t coach. And if he did it in advance, it was going to have to be a top assistant, because you were never going to get anyone to leave a head coaching job to be an assistant under him. And so, it had to be Jon Scheyer.
Now, if it was four years ago and Scheyer was not seen as ready to be the assistant, I think he probably just wouldn't have retired yet. But now it had to be the guy who was just underneath him as the associate head coach, which is super weird for me considering I was in the same college class as John. The person who is taking over this job is the same age as me, and was on the freshmen campus at the same time as me.
What’s Scheyer’s deal?
BEN COHEN: What I've always heard about John is that he's just sort of a basketball savant. I have to say, watching his press conference, I've just never… I'm used to thinking about him and hearing him talk to reporters as a 19-year-old. He's very clearly a different person now.
One of the weird things about coaches in general, whether it's in the NBA or in college basketball, is that I'm still not entirely sure what they do every day. I’m not sure what exactly makes a good coach. That’s one of the things that's so hard to evaluate a coach's job based on anything other than wins and losses, which might not really be like the best metric to tell whether they're actually good at what they do, you know, if he can recruit and if he can get the best players there, which probably has never been harder than it is right now.
I think there's another question that I think Duke is going to have to deal with and Carolina's going to have to deal with and Kansas has dealt with over the last decade—what is it that you want out of your basketball team? The national champion is decided in an essentially random way. Do you want to win conference championships every year? Do you want to win a national championship every five, 10 years? Do you want to have a program that does not embarrass you on a nightly basis? I don’t know what the most valuable thing is anymore. Kansas always dealt with that with the Big 12 streak versus whether you’d rather have a handful of national championships and miss a few tournaments. I don’t know.
So, I don't know what it is at Duke. When they revitalized the football team a decade ago, I think clearly the mandate was clearly, like, “let's not be the worst team in the country.” Let’s be competent and good and have one really good and fun season every few years. And that's totally enough. I don't know if that's enough in college basketball. I think it's really hard in a sport where you can be the best team in the country for six months and have one bad shooting night in March. And suddenly your season is deemed a disappointment. It's super weird. The best team in college basketball very rarely wins the championship and yet coaches and teams are defined by what they do in March. And that is the more I think about it, especially covering the NBA, which usually does crown the best teams to champion. I don’t know how to negotiate that cognitive dissonance.
We talked about this a little bit, but there’s clearly some value in going to college for a season from a marketing perspective. Thirty nights on ESPN beats streaming the G League on Twitch. So let’s talk about the Zion argument.
BEN COHEN: Zion did not need Duke to be the number one pick in the draft. But before Zion came to Duke, he was not the number one pick in the draft. He was not the most marketable player in a generation. Like he was not ZION yet, on ESPN in front of Barack Obama. He was an Instagram sensation who was made by cable television and social media platforms.
And now you have the NIL.
BEN COHEN: It's going to be super lucrative, and some guys are going to make a whole lot of money.
The other thing that I think is strange about the G-League and the Overtime League is that any of these leagues, the amount of money that they're paying players is like substantial from zero. But if you're the number one pick in the draft the next year, you're making $10 million a year. You’re signing a contract that’s worth $50 million. And three years later, you have a contract that's worth $200 million. Being able to make a hundred thousand dollars or $500,000 or a million dollars is obviously a huge help for almost any kid that could sign up for that. But there’s still some value to be added by college basketball.
But, if Zion Williamson waits a year and just goes to Duke or, or wherever he goes, and doesn't get heard and doesn’t build a reputation there… he got so much bigger by going to Duke. The other thing about college basketball is that they're clearly trained to be professionals, but being a freshman on a college campus when you're like the best player on the basketball team, like, it's pretty fun. It’s OK to be 18-years-old and go the lousy college bar and, you know, drink $3 Bud Lights and have everybody look at you. That seems to me better than living in an apartment at the Walnut Creek G League campus.
Circling back to Coach K… I can’t get over that Roy Williams is not doing a victory lap but Coach K is. I certainly thought it would be the other way around!
BEN COHEN: I think it has less to do with either their personalities and is entirely to do with the recruiting class that Duke has coming in. At the end of the day, Coach K could not pass up the opportunity to coach these guys.