National Basketball Association

Krzyzewski, like Calipari, is making the most of one-and-dones

Published Apr. 3, 2015 5:41 p.m. ET

Stewart Mandel

INDIANAPOLIS — At a news conference here Friday on the eve of the Final Four, Kentucky coach John Calipari found himself for the umpteenth time defending and explaining his infamous reliance on one-and-done freshmen. He remains in many critics’ eyes the face of everything wrong with college athletics, a naked opportunist who pays no regard to academics.

“(It’s) because I’ve got a big nose,” he joked of his lightning-rod status.

But if Calipari is the one-and-done devil, why doesn’t Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski — the sport’s universally recognized paragon of virtue — endure any of the same flak? His team might not be 38-0 like Calipari’s, but he would not be here without a trio of soon-to-be-out-the-door freshmen.

In fact, his team this year is actually more dependent on freshmen than Kentucky’s.

Does that mean Coach K has turned to the dark side? Nope. He’s just adapted to the current climate of his sport, albeit a little more slowly and less flamboyantly than Calipari.

Krzyzewski has had a smattering of one-and-dones before, most recently Kyrie Irving in 2011, Austin Rivers in 2012 and Jabari Parker last season. But this, as Krzyzewski keeps saying, is the youngest team of his 35-year tenure. Freshmen and projected first-rounders Jahlil Okafor (17.5 points per game), Justise Winslow (12.5) and Tyus Jones (11.6) are three of the top four scorers. Throw in reserve Grayson Allen, and freshmen account for 56 percent of the Blue Devils’ scoring, 38 percent of their rebounding and 62 percent of their assists.

For comparison’s sake, Kentucky’s freshmen account for 47 percent of its team's scoring, 40 percent of rebounds and 35 percent of assists. The Wildcats are a certifiable veteran team compared with the Blue Devils, whose attrition-depleted roster consists of four scholarship freshmen and four scholarship sophomores-through-seniors.

“Look, it’s there,” Krzyzewski said Friday of the NBA’s age minimum. “What, are you going to discriminate against one-and-dones? Where are these kids going to go? How well can they be taken care of?

“When we recruit a kid, we don't say, 'You're a one-and-done,' but we recognize he could be.”

But the coach who previously won titles with four-year standouts like Christian Laettner and Shane Battier also admits he’s more open today than he might have been previously to building a roster around guys with little chance of staying through graduation day.

Prior to the NBA’s one-and-done rule, which began in 2006, “There were maybe eight-to-12 kids that we didn't recruit each year because we felt they would go right to the NBA,” said Krzyzewski. “. . . Then when one-and-done became in effect, we still didn't recruit those kids, and then we started to recruit (them) because we said, ‘Maybe some of them or one of them could fit the profile for Duke.’ . . . There's a certain profile we look for, for whether he's one-and-done or four years or whatever.

“So if we can find kids that fit our profile, we'll deal with the consequences of whether they're there for one, two, three or four years. I think to get the right kid is the most important. We need to respond accordingly if we lose them earlier.”

Obviously, any coach would love to land recruits the caliber of Okafor, Winslow and Jones. Even Michigan State’s Tom Izzo, whose own Final Four roster is older and less heralded, said Friday: “If you (have) got a son that wants to come and be one-and-done, and he's good enough, I'll take him.”

But future lottery picks do not necessarily guarantee Final Fours. Note that neither Rivers nor Parker won even a single NCAA tourney game during their short stays in Durham.

Krzyzewski, like Calipari, had to figure out how to mesh a heralded freshmen class with a core of returning veterans. He and his staff had to acclimate the freshmen to the rigors of a college schedule. And, of course, he had to coach them up.

Two factors greatly helped this team. One, its lone senior, Quinn Cook, happily ceded the point guard role to Jones while still commanding the necessary respect to lead the team.

“I could tell the closeness of our team during preseason workouts,” Allen said. “Every day, Quinn was able to lead us to where we came in like we were working for a national championship. And this was in the summer. How everyone responded to him, and we had no egos on the team, it’s easy for all the personalities just to come together.”

Meanwhile, Duke’s vaunted freshmen were hardly strangers when they got to campus. On the contrary, Okafor, from Chicago, and Jones, from Apple Valley, Minn., first meet at an AAU tournament in third grade and became so close they chose their college together. Winslow, from Houston, teamed up with them on USA Basketball’s summer FIBA summer world championship teams.

“It’s tough when you’re a freshman and you’re expected right away to be one of the better players on any team,” Duke associate head coach Jeff Capel said, “but especially here, because the pressures playing at Duke are different. Only a few schools maybe have that. At times it can be really lonely for an 18- or 19-year old kid as you’re going through that. I think Austin felt that a little bit. Jabari, at times, maybe he felt lonely.”

With this year’s class, though, “It’s different,” Capel said. “Justise can understand Jah a little bit, Jah can understand Justice and Tyus, Tyus can understand both of them. They had each other to depend on if things got tough.”

Now, a trio of players who may stay less than a year on Duke’s campus stands two wins from delivering Krzyzewski his fifth national title. If they pull it off, they’ll leave a similarly impactful legacy to the ones Carmelo Anthony left at Syracuse (2003) and Anthony Davis and Michael Kidd Gilchrist left at Kentucky (2012).

Both Krzyzewski and Capel emphasized that just because a guy uses college as a springboard to the NBA doesn’t mean he solely entered school for that reason.

“You'd always like to have them stay for the entire time,” Krzyzewski said. “In a lot of respects, I think the kids would like to stay that long, too. Financially, it's very difficult to make that decision.”

With that in mind, Calipari continues to push for changes that might encourage players to stay longer, like letting parents take out a loan against their sons’ future earnings.

“What’s the problem?” he said Friday. “Their son is going to be worth $25 million.”

For his part, Krzyzewski remains hopeful that NBA commissioner Adam Silver will get his wish in the next collective bargaining agreement to raise the minimum by a year, or get rid of it entirely.

In the meantime, though, it’d be just plain foolish for a coach at a program with national championship aspirations to pass on an NBA-caliber player purely because he’s an early flight risk.

Calipari takes the heat for popularizing the movement, but Krzyzewski is also reaping the benefits.