Another one bites the dust

I've often used this space to opine that Mike Krzyzewski is NOT a great Xs and Os coach.  He certainly in an excellent recruiter and motivator.  But Duke usually succeeds due to effort and attitude, not necessarily skills and sets.  In fact, their offensive stats are pretty simple.  

Krzyzewski gets his players to play extremely hard and extremely smart, especially on defense. 

But his players often struggle once they leave Durham.  Without Krzyzewski in their ears and in their heads they don't have the skills to fall back on to succeed in the NBA.  The  most successful Duke professional of the K era, Carlos Boozer, had to reinvent himself in the League.  At Duke, he was a back to the basket center; in the NBA he is a face-up smallish forward who has turned into an all star.

The lack of success of the players is also true with ex-assistant coaches.  With the firing of Fayetteville native Jeff Capel, the Coach K coaching tree looks bad.  First Tommy Amaker crashed and burned at two schools in big-time conferences (Seton Hall and Michigan) before finding moderate success at a non-big time conference at Harvard. Quinn Snyder lost AND was embroiled in a recruiting controversy at Missouri.  And now Capel, who only won when Blake Griffin was on campus. 

Johnny Dawkins, losing his way through the Pac 17 at Stanford, is just killing time waiting to join the unemployment line outside of Krzyzewski's office.

All these guys were hired by ADs who assumed they could transfer Duke's style to their campuses.  But you can't duplicate K's motivational skills or emotional work.  And with not many X and O tricks to fall back on, coaches like Amaker, Snyder, Capel and Dawkins fail.  

The 'Carlos Boozer of coaches' is Notre Dame's Mike Bray, who unlike the other Duke coaching alums did NOT play at Duke.  Maybe there is some there there on the sidelines, but ex-players fail to notice it among the shouting, cursing and motivating coming from Coach K.