It's starting to appear that Mike Krzyzewski will end up the US Olympic men's basketball coach once again.
In a recent press conference, Coach K had put all doubt away that he was looking at the NBA, but said he would be involved in US basketball in some manner. When asked about his thoughts on the celebration in which the Olympic team put their gold medals about his neck and repeating as the coach, K started "it will not be the same experience." He followed by saying that he was looking forward to being involved in the team's camp in Vegas in which players such as Brandon Roy and Blake Griffin will be joining the US training roster which has around 30 players.
Back to ACC basketball, where the question comes back as to how will this affect Duke? In the same press conference last week, Coach K said "this has only helped Duke University." Duke fans may see things slightly differently as the Blue Devils recruiting hasn't seemed nearly as measured and balanced as it has in the past. Yet another example sees a team weak in the paint in 2008-09 turn into a team with no guards in 2009-10.
Here is Duke Basketball Report's take on the effect on Duke...
The main question for a lot of people is: what about Duke? Well here’s our take. Coach K has been incredibly loyal to Duke, and incredibly good, too. If he wants to take on the Olympics again, we would hope Duke fans would return that loyalty.
Secondly, it may well be that the exposure is helping a great deal in recruiting. Although it didn’t help with Kenny Boynton, as Billy Donovan took advantage of K’s absence to work on the kid, Andre Dawkins, Tyler Thornton, Josh Hairston have all committed, and Harrison Barnes is a possibility. That’s a pretty good class, and it was assembled with the Olympics going on.
And it can’t hurt to tell a kid, "you know, I was talking to LeBron about you…" or whatever.
DBR says the same things we heard after Coach K accepted the job initially, but has there been a pay off?
