WRAL piece: K "exhilarated, not relieved"

[roywhite]

http://www.wral.com/sports/story/3444728/

Very positive mindset carrying over from Olympic experience to coaching Duke. Sounds great.

[heyman25]

I hope he is looking for speed and athleticsm in our future recruiting. That should be something he took away from Beijing and the 3 year Team USA experience.

[Karl Beem]

I'm sure that he's decided that recruiting more players like Kobe, Wade and Lebron would be a good thing.

[Carlos]

I hope he is looking for speed and athleticsm in our future recruiting. That should be something he took away from Beijing and the 3 year Team USA experience.

We just signed a 3-man class and 2 of those guys (Williams and Czyz) are as athletic as any player you'll likely see. The other guy (Miles Plumlee) is considered athletic for his position.

We're after guys like Kenny Boynton, Brandon Knight, Derrick Favors, Harrison Barnes, and Josh Hairston just to name a few guys who are very athletic.

It's not that K hasn't been pursuing those kids of players, it's that Duke hasn't signed only those kind of players. With K's brand of pressure defense you don't absolutely have to have 5 athletes on the floor - but it sure helps. If you look at the Olympic team you could see a drop off in defense when Kidd was in the game.

[77devil]

I imagine Coach K is quite relieved even if he isn't saying so, in addition to being exhilarated, refreshed, energized, (insert your own adjectives). He's looked great in the interviews. I believe we are about to witness K take the program up another level, once again.

Go Devils.

[Devilsfan]

Read the K article on the front page. If he truely makes it fun the players will love it. Maybe the rotation stays deeper for the "entire" year, although Redd and Boozer saw most of the court from the bench. Hopefully McClure and Poicus (sp) will see more minutes this year. But I don't think you can take that competitive must win demeanor out of Coach K reguardless of the vocal wishes he expressed.

[Exiled_Devil]

I imagine Coach K is quite relieved even if he isn't saying so, in addition to being exhilarated, refreshed, energized, (insert your own adjectives). He's looked great in the interviews. I believe we are about to witness K take the program up another level, once again.

Go Devils.

I don't mean to be snarky, but Coach K is the kind of guy where if he said relief wasn't in the mix, it wasn't. What I take away from that is that he was enjoying the experience too much to worry about failure.

I also dig his response to the redeem team tag -

We always wanted to be called and still want to be called the United States Olympic Basketball Team. There are some key words in there: United States, Olympic, basketball, team. That's worth more than anything.

[BlueintheFace]

What will be most interesting is the changes he makes to the Duke team after this summer. Last season he overhauled the offense a good deal. This time around he has been elbow deep in personnel and tactics discussions regarding the US team. Might we see some more changes? I think we will... the question is what kind of changes might we be talking about..

[Dr. Rosenrosen]

I was excited by K's comments about "going for it"... I'm hoping this translates into an even more aggressive and fast-paced style (an area of the game where our size can be a huge advantage as it was for Team USA) aimed at closing out games instead of playing not to lose.

[roywhite]

http://www.newsobserver.com/sports/story/1197134.html

Article from N&O talking about likely positive effect on recruiting from Coach K's Olympic success and publicity.

Recruiting analyst Dave Telep talking about K; "for what he did for basketball in our country, he deserves a recruiting boost"..

[Scorp4me]

Funny I didn't get any of that from hearing him talk. Sounds to me like K is going to just coach and stop listening to you guys determine who he should recruit, who he should play, how much they should play, clock managament, defining a successful season unsuccessful simply because they didn't win it all in a one and done format, and on and on. Now I realize that no longer using a message board to guide his thinking may cost us 3-4 wins a year and several more chances at a NC, but I think it's worth the risk.

[miramar]

I am delighted to see that Coach K was exhilarated rather than relieved after the victory, and that he is determined to continue to enjoy the moment in the future. I remember a story about Larry Farmer as a sophomore at UCLA when they won the 1971 NCAA championship. He ran into the locker room afterwards delighted after the win, and was surprised to see that seniors Curtis Rowe and Sidney Wicks were just sitting by their lockers relieved that it was all over and that the pressure was finally off. That would be the last thing we need.

[moonpie23]

what's the latest on derek favors? does the gold medal help at all with him?

he looks pretty spectacular...