John Calipari is more than a great salesman -- he's a great coach
There’s a simple and lazy narrative that is often applied to Kentucky’s John Calipari: that he’s the villain, the one-and-done guy, the college coach who most exemplifies everything that’s wrong with college basketball.
This season, though, as Calipari heads to his fourth Final Four in five years with a shot to become the first 40-0 coach in college basketball history, a deeper look at how his team has gotten this far flips that tired narrative on its head.
This year’s Kentucky team is an example of one of the greatest coaching jobs of all time. Not just that, but this team filled with future NBA first-round picks is doing things the right way.
The Calipari haters, who are legion, will look at this new narrative and either scoff or retch. To them, Calipari will always be the cheater who had two Final Fours vacated, one at UMass and another at Memphis. He’s the used car salesman who convinces the best players to play for him, then just rolls the ball out and tells them to play. He’s a smooth operator, sure, but he’s not a real coach.
It’s through this facile way of thinking that members of the U.S. Basketball Writers Association – my contemporaries – somehow decided to award their coach of the year award to Virginia’s Tony Bennett instead of Calipari. No offense to Bennett; what he’s done in reestablishing Virginia basketball has been nothing short of remarkable, and his team this year often played as tightly knit basketball as any team in the country.
But how can anyone in his or her right mind choose Bennett over the coach who is aiming for history?
The truth is, a media and a public that value the cliché of “doing things the right way” will never give Calipari the credit he is due. His reputation is so ingrained in people’s heads that they have a difficult time judging him on his merits.
And so, when we look at this year’s Kentucky team as it tries to make history, let’s reframe how we look at Cal: He’s surely one of the best leaders in coaching. He’s somehow convinced a bunch of absurdly talented basketball players from the me-first AAU basketball culture to value playing defense over playing offense. He’s not just the one-and-done guy; he’s the coach-psychologist who has coached a group of talented teenagers to set their egos aside and value team over individual.
Seriously: For old-school basketball minds, can you think of a better example of “doing things the right way” than that?
While those who adopt the Cal-as-villain narrative point to his NIT team from two years ago as the reason his philosophy of exploiting the NBA’s one-and-done rule is fatally flawed, those of us willing to reexamine Calipari’s legacy should look at this year’s team as, quite simply, one of the best examples of coaching brilliance.
And it so happens that, for the complicated Calipari, the NIT team that was his biggest failure also helped shift his own coaching philosophy into the one that’s made this year’s team so great.
The chapter in Calipari’s recent book on that NIT team was titled “Humbled.” Those who think of Calipari as a walking, talking ego may laugh at the idea of humility even entering his mind. But that’s exactly what that season did to him. A year after Anthony Davis and Co. dominated the college game, the best recruiting class in the nation ended its season at a tiny gym a few miles from where Calipari grew up outside of Pittsburgh, losing to Robert Morris in the first round of the NIT.
That season, I would argue, laid the groundwork for this season, both for Calipari and for his players. The next group of top-ranked recruits realized five stars and the words McDonald’s All-American next to their name don’t mean much if they are disjointed and selfish. And Calipari himself – an introspective man who attends mass every morning and prays for each of his players – was mortified. That season was more than a basketball lesson; it was a life lesson in humility.
I went to Lexington before the season to interview Calipari for FOX Sports 1. It was a revealing, introspective interview that lasted nearly an hour (shown here and above). Yes, I asked him about this team’s chance at going 40-0, which I thought was a distinct possibility heading into the season; he didn’t fully answer the question, instead saying something about he always wants to be the guy who does things people say can’t be done.
“You start winning and you – (because of) pride and ego, which are sins – you start believing that because you’re coaching, your team’s going to win,” Calipari said. “Your point guard is going to be good because you’re coaching them. Really? So now all of a sudden you hit that season and you find out it isn’t true. I have a job; the players have to be in the same mentality that you’re in and connect. If you don’t get them to connect, it's not their fault. It's my fault. So if I wasn’t able to get them to connect, if they weren’t quite up to snuff, if you don’t get every player to listen to every word you’re saying, you know that and you better try to figure out different ways of getting through to them …
“We don’t have a building to play in, and we got to go on the road, we got to go to Robert Morris,” Calipari continued. “My grandmother worked at the cafeteria at Robert Morris. I used to work out at Robert Morris at the gym. We go in and they should have beat us by 20. I walked away saying, ‘Let me go back and do some soul-searching, because it's not going to be like this.’ And I got to do a better job with my players to connect, better job making sure I’m getting through.”
That’s ultimately the story of this year: a coach who cares deeply about his players, and who is as connected with the minds of those players as any coach in the country.
The story of this Kentucky team isn’t just a story of the most talented team in college basketball. It’s a story of a coach who has gotten his absurdly talented players to play as a team, which any college coach can tell you is one of the greatest challenges in the profession.
People are complicated; people change. And so the public narrative about a person should be just as nuanced as the person himself, and ought to be able to change, too.
Email Reid Forgrave at reidforgrave@gmail.com, or follow him on Twitter @reidforgrave.
