#1: The Prologue

I want to preface the entirety of this blog by saying that Duke Basketball as we know it today doesn’t exist without Mike Krzyzewski. He is the reason opposing schools sell out their gyms nearly every single time Duke comes to town. He is the reason that the college basketball media conglomerate talks about the Blue Devils ad nauseam whether they’re #1 in the country or unranked, the latter of which happened this past season for the first time in five years. Most importantly, he’s the reason that five national championship banners hang from the rafters in Cameron Indoor Stadium. He’s in the discussion of the greatest coaches of all-time, regardless of level or sport. 

With all that said, he’s also the reason that Duke has struggled to reach a single Final Four since the championship run in 2015, despite an unmatched level of talent running through Durham during that time period. The six recruiting classes Duke has brought in during that stretch have all ranked in the top two in ESPN’s yearly class rankings. Fifteen players from those teams went on to be selected in the NBA Draft, with at least one more set to be selected in the upcoming 2021 NBA Draft this summer. Let’s take a quick look:

1. Brandon Ingram (2016 #2 Overall)
2. Jayson Tatum (2017 #3 Overall)
3. Luke Kennard (2017 #12 Overall)
4. Harry Giles (2017 #20 Overall)
5. Frank Jackson (2017 #31 Overall)
6. Marvin Bagley III (2018 #2 Overall)
7. Wendell Carter Jr. (2018 #7 Overall)
8. Grayson Allen (2018 #21 Overall)
9. Gary Trent Jr. (2018 #37 Overall)
10. Zion Williamson (2019 #1 Overall)
11. R.J. Barrett (2019 #3 Overall)
12. Cam Reddick (2019 #10 Overall)
13. Vernon Carey Jr. (2020 #32 Overall)
14. Tre Jones (2020 #41 Overall)
15. Cassius Stanley (2020 #54 Overall)

As you can see, the roster clearly has not been the problem for Duke. So what has been? Simply put, Mike Krzyzewski and the entire coaching staff have failed this program year after year since 2015. Nobody around the Duke program would tell you Coach K has lost a step, but why is it so inconceivable to consider the thought? After a home win against NC State in March of 2020, Coach K got on his high horse: “I mean, you can question my coaching and what the hell—and then when you do question it… just come into Cameron and look up in the ceiling, and then find out if you should question that.” Clearly he has heard the noise, but he is not above criticism for the failures that have plagued the program for over half a decade now.

Before Jim Boeheim (76) surpassed his record, John Chaney was the oldest head coach in the history of NCAA Division 1 basketball at 74 years old. Dean Smith retired when he was 66 years old on the heels of a Final Four appearance. John Wooden rode off into the sunset at 64 after winning his tenth championship. Coach K is now 74 years old, and it shows. The hair that many joked for years was dyed jet black to hide his age is finally starting to show some gray, with the stress of this past season not helping matters. But losing games is one thing. It was a conversation with Coach K retold by ESPN’s Jon Sciambi and Jay Bilas in the first half of the 83-68 loss to Illinois in December that drew my personal ire more than the loss itself:

Sciambi: Jay, I want to ask you about something that Coach K talked about yesterday and that was the idea that, in the midst of the pandemic, lack of scrimmages and trying to figure out who your team is, he said he really confessed the idea that what they had initially thought his team would be able to do offensively, once they actually got into games and saw their team on the court, he said “oh no, we can’t do that.” He thought they’d be a little more drive-and-kick, maybe be able to play smaller.

Bilas: Yeah, more a perimeter-oriented team that played more motion and didn’t have as many sets. But they’re going to have to play a little bit bigger. Once he saw them, he realized. There were no exhibitions to see it, and he said “look, you can theorize all you want to, but until you see it on the floor, you don’t really know.” But they’re making adjustments now. Everybody’s in the same boat. Nobody had exhibition games. But when you’ve got an older team, you’ve got a much better feeling of what everybody can do.

I shouldn’t even have to explain why this is so frustrating. It’s quite obvious that, as they’ve had the luxury of doing with their more talent-laden teams over the past few years, the Duke coaching staff thought they could just, as the saying goes, “roll the ball out” and expect this Duke team to win games on the backs of their talent. With hindsight, it’s fairly easy to say they were wrong. In fact, it’s certainly arguable that this was the least talented Duke team since the turn of the century, but this isn’t on the players. Every adjustment that the coaching staff made throughout the first two months of the season simply did not work. What’s even worse is there were simply too many occasions this season where the team didn’t even come ready to play until they were down 10-15 points. If you ask Coach K, all of this season's shortcomings were a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and college basketball shouldn't have even been played this year. While he certainly had a fair point regarding the risks taken this season, blaming anything that happened to Duke in 2020-21 on the pandemic is as poor an attempt at deflecting as going after a student journalist following a loss was. The pandemic did affect every team in the country, after all. 

Let’s get back to the big picture. You might ask yourself, “Why is this blog called ‘Save Duke Basketball’”? For the last five seasons, I’ve often likened Coach K’s strategy to coaching/recruiting as trying to hit walk-off home runs in the bottom of the ninth as his career comes to an end. While the team was nowhere close to good enough to capture the title this year, you can rest assured that he’s lining up another swing for the fences next season. As the man who built the program into what it is today, Duke will never show Coach K the door. While he obviously wants the sixth championship ring as a storybook ending to his illustrious career, he’s getting further and further away from it as he gets older and loses the ability to do the things that got him here in the first place. There are at least twenty coaches in Division I right now that could’ve won at least one championship with the rosters that Duke has had in place since the 2014-15 championship season, and that might be an underestimate. Krzyzewski just isn’t one of them anymore, and he’s too stuck in his own ways to realize it.