It’s Summer Time So People Are Speculating On Coach K’s (Eventual) Retirement Plans

Like everyone else, we wonder about Mike Krzyzewski and his retirement schedule but since it does no good to speculate we generally avoid talking much about it.

This week though it’s everywhere. One former assistant, Mike Brey, said he thought that former Duke star Bobby Hurley would be a great fit (more intriguingly, he mentioned several other guys and said they were all basically happy where they are, which naturally led to more speculation about how long Hurley will stay in Tempe. Brey’s partly right though: Hurley is temperamentally suited to what will be a tough job and he’s lived in a fishbowl his whole life as son of Bob Hurley and brother of increasingly prominent Danny and he nearly died in his 1992 accident. Not much is going to phase him after all of that).

That led to a bit of a boomlet but there’s no sign of a change so what does it matter?

Now Dick Vitale has weighed in and says that he thinks Krzyzewski has plenty of gas in the tank and is good to go for a long time yet.

And we’ll point out what we realized when people were sure he’d take this job or that job in the NBA and why that wasn’t about to happen: he’s incorporated his entire family into Duke basketball. Wife Mickie is a key hoops partner. All three daughters are involved to some extent. A grandson is going to walk on this fall and the Emily K Center is as big a part of his life as is Duke basketball.

Anyone who thought he was going to leave all of that for the chance to rent and get fired in a few years by the Lakers or Celtics or Trailblazers does not have the measure of the man in the slightest.

As far as Duke goes, clearly he’s on his own time table and we hope he stays just as long as he wants (although perhaps not quite as long as daughter Debbie, who once said she sort of hoped he’d coach until he dropped. We probably are not quite remembering that line correctly, but her hope was that he’d basically be like the Energizer Bunny. Still going...still going...still going...so far so good).

Duke fans probably don’t think about it very much but we’re the luckiest fans in the country. And ACC fans probably don't think about it much either, anymore than we did with Dean Smith, but he’s an enormous asset to the ACC in general.