K the "modern day John Wooden" per Rick Pitino

[duke74]

From today's NY Post Steve Serby interview with Rick Pitino:

Q: Coach K?

A: [Mike Krzyzewski] the modern-day John Wooden. I said this 15 years ago about Mike, that he was a modern-day Coach Wooden. He is a West Point graduate. ... He is extremely disciplined. ... He’s learned all the great things from Coach Knight, and maybe just stayed away from some of the ones — Hubie Brown always told me when I left him, he said, “Take all the great things that you think you’ve learned from me, and make sure you make them better. Take all the things that you should leave behind that you’ve witnessed from me, and make sure you don’t repeat them.” And it was a very profound statement at the time, it was right before I took the Providence job. And I think that’s what Mike has done with Coach Knight. He has a quality that very few people have after you lose — he has grace under fire. The only thing missing in a lot of great young coaches today is grace under fire when you lose. There’s no better winner, and there’s no more gracious loser than him.

..Some nice thoughts...complimentary...

Here's the link. Pitino discusses a number of coaches...

http://www.nypost.com/p/sports/colle...nRElxGbHrLgJ/1

[rocketeli]

I think there are some similarities in the position they occupy, but in one way they differ. Wooden ran a very dirty program, which IMHO diminishes his legacy, and I don't believe Coach K does.

[WakeDevil]

Wooden prepared his teams so that he didn't have to run up and down the sidelines all game like he hadn't conducted a practice that season.

What is the evidence that Wooden was in cahoots with the rogue booster? To say he ran a dirty program is not the same as asserting he didn't exert enough pressure to get that man away from the players.

[Jim3k]

I think there are some similarities in the position they occupy, but in one way they differ. Wooden ran a very dirty program, which IMHO diminishes his legacy, and I don't believe Coach K does.

I'm certainly not going to defend Sam Gilbert, but what he did didn't clearly violate NCAA rules as they existed then. In those days, college basketball really did not have the big money issues it does today. The shoe companies hadn't yet become a corruptive influence and the gamblers had been run out of the game (at least for a while). So Gilbert's supplementing the income of some of the Bruin players was far down on the corruption list. Wooden was pretty naive and generally clueless about Gilbert's conduct. Had he known, he would have shooed Gilbert away; if that didn't work, shooing was likely to be the extent of his involvement. Yeah, Wooden's era is tainted by Gilbert, but it's fair to say that Wooden wasn't really a part of it. (Institutional control was not yet part of the lexicon.)

[Olympic Fan]

Just two po8ints about Sam Gilbert, the dirty booster (and a money launderer for a drug cartel).

(1) He only started funneling money to UCLA players with the arrival of Lew Alcindor ... so Wooden's first two titles were untainted.

(2) Wooden knew about Gilbert and occasionally told his players to keep their distance ... but never took any effective action to cut Gilbert off from the program. Bill Walton talked about how big an influence Gilbert was and how the players let recruits know that they would be taken care of if they came to Westwood. The Gilbert influence was a huge part of Wooden's "legacy".