Mike Krzyzewski is one of the greatest college basketball coaches of all-time yet never made the jump to be an NBA coach. However, that was almost different as Coach K supplied us with the latest Los Angeles Lakers news.
Coach K appeared on WIP sports radio in Philadelphia and spoke on a myriad of things — when the NCAA may return, the greatest ACC player he has ever seen and most notably, the NBA teams that he almost coached for (h/t Sports Illustrated).
The Los Angeles Lakers were one of the teams that Coach K almost coached. He mentioned two times in particular that he was interested in making the leap to the NBA — in 1990 with the Boston Celtics and in 2005 with the Lakers.
Lakers News: Coach K almost coached the Lakers instead of Phil Jackson
Krzyzewski said that the Lakers offered him the head coaching position and that he rejected it, so we can say for certain that he would have coached the Lakers in the late 2000s instead of who actually did, Phil Jackson.
Jackson came back to the Lakers in 2005 after a year away from the team in which the Lakers only won 34 games. It certainly was an interesting situation at first, as Jackson had released a book titled The Last Season, which outlined his last season in LA and received controversy for being critical of Kobe Bryant.
Jackson later said that he could feel Kobe’s hatred towards him during his first coaching stint with the Lakers.
So how would Coach K have changed Lakers’ history? Quite frankly, I do not think that we can say that much would have been different. Of course, there is a butterfly effect for every move, but we do not have much to go off of if we even try to play the ‘what if’ game.
What we do know is that Jackson is one of the greatest NBA coaches of all-time, so it is not like the Lakers got a slouch. We also know that Coach K never coached in the NBA, so while he is immensely successful in college, it is not a guarantee that he would have been successful in LA.
However, with a prime Kobe Bryant and assuming the team still went and made the same moves and got Pau Gasol, it is hard to see the Lakers not winning two championships. Maybe you could make the case that Coach K could have done better than Jackson did at grooming the young players earlier on in his stint, but again, that is nothing we can say for certain.
It is interesting, though, to think of Coach K as the head coach of the Los Angeles Lakers. He likely would have joined Larry Brown as the only coach to win both a National Championship and NBA Championship.