Washington Wizards fans, your savior is out there. Yes, there is a solution for the only thing in Washington more convoluted and depressing than the United States Congress. This coach has won has won at every level. He's close with the Wizards best player and is perhaps the most charismatic figure in college basketball. Your table is waiting at Old Ebbett's Grill, Mr. Calipari.
Calipari just coached the Kentucky Wildcats right now to a National Championship and landed the nation's No. 1 recruiting class. He'd be crazy to leave, right?
Calipari leads a charmed life in Lexington, but at some point he's going to challenge himself in the big leagues again. He's taken three separate college teams to the Final Four, yet struggled in a short stint coaching the New Jersey Nets. If Calipari could succeed in the NBA after the dominance he has exerted over the college game, he'd reach a different stratosphere. And unlike Coach K, who has famously rebuffed the pros, Calipari has shown no loyalty to a specific college.
An apt comparison from a different sport would be Pete Carroll. He bombed his first stint in the NFL, went to USC and dominated, winning a National Championship and finishing with a record of 69-12. Carroll's now back with the Seattle Seahawks and thriving.
If he came to Washington, Calipari would be reunited with John Wall, a player he's often called one of his favorites. With the Wizards chances of picking in the top three of the draft pretty high, he'd also likely be coaching with Anthony Davis or Michael Kidd-Gilchrist again, two of the phenomenal freshman who led Kentucky to the promised land this spring.
There are few basketball coaches at any level who handle their players as well as Calipari. He has the unique ability to take supremely talented, pampered players and make they buy into his team-first system. While the Wizards are currently short on the talent part, that skill of being able to handle the massive egos of modern athletes is nothing to sneeze at.
Though he just landed the nations No. 1 recruiting class, Calipari will have other NBA suitors besides the Wizards. The Sacramento Kings have two of his former players, the shot-indulgent Tyreke Evans and the mercurial DeMarcus Cousins, both of whom could desperately use Cal's therapeutic wizardry. The Knicks are perhaps a bigger threat for Calipari's services as they offer the world's biggest basketball stage and a deep and talented roster with major connections to the CAA agency, which is Calipari's agency as well.
Before the Wizards can upgrade their roster, they need something to sell. GM Ernie Grunfeld will probably be gone by May and besides Wall and a few role-playing big men, the cupboard is bare. Is there a better pitchman in basketball than Calipari?
As the losses pile up the Wizards are slipping into a comatose state of irrelevance. This offseason they need a spark. Something to wake up their dormant fan base and give free agents around the league a reason to consider them. That spark's name is John Calipari and based on his past, nothing is impossible if the price is right. So it's time for Wizard's owner Ted Leonsis to break the bank.
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Calipari keeps Kentucky pipeline open
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Calipari is a master recruiter and teacher /coach, and at the collegiate level, the players do buy in. At the pro level he would not be able to practice one of his strong points, which is the selection and recruiting of players. & would not have the automatic acceptance of "his system" (there are a lot of big egos in the NBA).
& FYI Calipari has never been implicated in the NCAA violations that led to the vacated tourney appearances. Get that? Never! Camby took $ from agents; Derek Rose on his SAT. Both findings took place after they had participated in the NCAA tourney, which automatically leads to the wins being vacated.
to give Calipari hell over his stint with the Nets ignores the facts, the Nets had only three winning seasons in the '90's. Chuck Daly had 2winning years, and Calipari had the 3rd.
As to his "loyalty" he was at UMass for 8 seasons, Memphis for 9, and really has just started at UK with only 3 under his belt. I would say that all of his moves have been timely and reasonable, leaving UMass for the NBA (and its higher paydays), leaving Memphis for the "center ring" of basketball at UK. IMHO
A Cat fan in Canada
Perhaps Calipari can be a good coach with the Wizards. Anything is possible, even Mike Brown took a team to the Finals. But probably no. Here's why:
1) Calipari isn't a good coach. He's a good recruiter and a good motivator given the tools but he doesn't make in game adjustments. You saw it versus Conn last year and again this year. This is especially cogent in the NBA, where series determine outcomes and adjustments game to game and in the 4th quarter mean everything. Calipari is particularly ill suited for this. He rides his rotation, makes very few adjustments or calls time outs. All this would mean disaster in the NBA
2) Calipari isn't going to have overwhelming superiority with the Wizards, a notoriously crappy and undisciplined team as he does at UK
3) Calipari's main motivational tool to keep his black 1 and done players in line is his Wizard of Oz illusion of his pipeline and weight in the NBA. This works on 18 year old players whose life purpose is to be in the league but doesn't really serve as motivational incentive once guys already have their contracts
4) Calipari has already failed in the NBA.
To say Pete Carroll is "thriving" with the Seahawks is a bit of an overstatement. He has back-to-back 7-9 seasons. Yes, one of those seasons resulted in a division title, but that says waaaaay more about the division than Carroll's skill at the NFL level. Let him actually have a winning season and then see how that college-to-pro transition worked.
Calipari might do well in Washington or with some NBA team, but something tells me his schtick will work way better on college kids than with pros.
There's a reason why there have been so few coaches who have been successful in college and the NBA or the NFL, and why there are so many who haven't handled it well: For every Larry Brown, who did well at both levels, there's a Rick Pitino, Mike Reilly, Dennis Ericson, Steve Spurrier and Lon Kruger.
I guess it's time for another round of the "Hire a big name college coach to save an NBA franchise" experiment, since it's been a few years, but anyone who has watched basketball at the NBA level for a while can rattle off a list of college coaches who could not do it at the next level, usually for all the same reasons: they are micromanagers used to having control over the players (in college, the coach can get your scholarship revoked, in the pros, the players can get the coach fired); their plays are amateurish ("Little Ricky" Pitino loved to run full court traps on defense--you could almost see the opposing point guard salivating as he waited for the double-team so he could get his man a layup); and they mistake themselves for the show, when NBA fans come for the players, not to see the coach work (another Pitino habit was to stand on the sidelines and shout helpful tidbits on defense like "keep your hands up!").