As many of you know by now, Duke head coach Mike Krzyzewski will be leading Team USA Men’s Basketball program in search of yet another gold medal in the Olympics in Rio this week.
You can find the full schedule of Olympic basketball that is going to be played right here.
Stuck at working and looking for how you can watch every event live, basketball or otherwise? That’s right here.
I’m bringing all this up for a reason: I stumbled upon a pretty incredible stat this week. Coach K, who has never coached a second of basketball at the NBA level, has coached more NBA players than 90 percent of NBA coaches in the history of the league. Perhaps more impressive is that there are just five active NBA coaches that have coached more NBA players than Coach K has: Doc Rivers, Gregg Popovich, Mike D’Antoni, Rick Carlisle and Alvin Gentry.
Some of that is because Coach K has helped to turn USA Basketball into a full-fledged basketball program and not just an amalgam of 15 players thrown together every other summer. And some of it is because he’s been churning out NBA players for more than three decades at Duke.
But whatever the reason, Coach K has more experience with NBA players than basically all of the NBA.
That’s pretty impressive for a career-long college coach.