http://www.rantsports.com/ncaa-bask...is-the-greatest-basketball-coach-of-all-time/
Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski Is the Greatest Basketball Coach of All Time
Duke's First ACC Tournament Championship Under Coach K | Coach 1K Moments
<!--
-->
<!-- <script> if (window.cpc != true)** jQuery.get("http://www.rantsports.com/pv/?id=120452", **} ); } </script>--><header class="article-header">
By Michael Woolfson <time class="updated" datetime="2015-01-25" pubdate=""> on January 25, 2015</time>
Anthony Gruppuso-USA Today Sports
</header>
Notching 1,000 wins seems like an unfathomable number for a coach in college basketball, but on Sunday afternoon
Mike Krzyzewski reached that milestone when
Duke beat
St. John’s 77-68 at Madison Square Garden. This milestone just further proves that Krzyzewski is the greatest basketball coach we have seen college or professional.
Coach K started his career at Army with middling success before taking over as the head coach of Duke, and even in his first three years with the Blue Devils things didn’t go well. His record after three seasons was 38-47, and it is crazy to think that if he would have started like that in this day and age he may never have had the opportunity to continue coaching at Duke. In his fourth season though, he turned things around by going 24-10 and never looked back.
Before Coach K came along, Duke was not even on the map as a basketball program. But in his 35 seasons as coach, he has not only put the program on the map, he has turned it into a powerhouse. Duke is now considered one of, if not the best program in college basketball. They regularly are one of the best teams in the nation, they are always getting top recruits and perhaps the best way to know how good the program is is by seeing how much fans of college basketball hate them. You know you’re at the top of the game when fans root for your team to lose, and Duke is at that level kind of like the
New York Yankees are.
Coach K is a great guy and there is nothing to hate about him, but he has created such a powerhouse in Durham, N.C. that people can’t help but hate the Blue Devils.
Coach K isn’t just great because of his work at Duke though. He has been the head coach of the USA basketball team since 2006, and in that time he has won two Olympic gold medals and two gold medals in the FIBA World Cup. Some might say that any coach would have won with the players he has been coaching, but that is certainly not true. As the
Cleveland Cavaliers have shown, it is not easy to get star players to come together and play as a team, but Coach K has been able to do that.
The accolades that Coach K has received in his career are well known, with four NCAA Championships and two Olympic gold medals among other things. But his ability to coach both young college players and grown men from the
NBA is something that shouldn’t go unnoticed and may be his greatest accomplishment.
Krzyzewski could have easily gone to the NBA and given that a shot, but he has always been loyal to Duke since he got there in 1980 and in doing so has built an extraordinary program. 1,000 wins is nothing more than a number, but it just further cements the fact that Coach K is one of a kind. Even though he is nowhere close to retiring, he will go down as the greatest basketball coach of all time when he does call it quits.