NEW ORLEANS — After decades of success as Duke’s basketball coach, Mike Krzyzewski’s career ended Saturday night with a loss that figures to resonate decades into the future.
Duke’s 81-77 NCAA Tournament loss to rival North Carolina completed Krzyzewski’s 47-year, Hall of Fame coaching career with a record 1,202 wins, but two wins shy of the one, final national championship he wanted to claim before stepping aside.
That UNC not only beat Duke in Krzyzewski’s final home game on March 5 at Cameron Indoor Stadium, but also defeated the Blue Devils to end their season — and his career — at the Final Four certainly stings the Duke fan base.
Having announced his retirement plans last June, the 75-year-old Krzyzewski’s hope was to lead the Blue Devils to the sixth NCAA championship in his 42 years as their coach.
The team won the ACC regular season outright for the first time since 2006 and produced the 16th 30-win season in his Duke tenure. Duke’s 85-76 second-round win over Michigan State on March 20 was the team’s 30th win and brought Krzyzewski’s win total to 1,200.
But playing in the Final Four for the 13th time in Krzyzewski’s 42 seasons at Duke, the Blue Devils saw their season, and thus Krzyzewski’s coaching run, end in the national semifinals at the Superdome.
Krzyzewski turns the Duke program over to associate head coach Jon Scheyer, as announced last June, having won five NCAA championships (1991, 1992, 2001, 2010 and 2015), trailing only the 10 won by UCLA’s John Wooden. Krzyzewski finished with on Final Four appearance more than Wooden’s 12. Former North Carolina coach Dean Smith is next on the list with 11.
“We’ve done more than we haven’t done,” Krzyzewski told the News & Observer last summer. “We’ve done some really unbelievable things. We’re not the only ones, but we’re in the room.”
A point guard at Army for coach Bob Knight during his college playing days from 1966-69, Krzyzewski began his college coaching career as a graduate assistant for Knight at Indiana in 1974.
The following year, at age 28, Krzyzewski became Army’s head coach. In five years there, Krzyzewski posted a 73-59 record. Though the Cadets went 9-17 in the 1979-80 season, Duke athletics director Tom Butters hired Krzyzewski as Duke’s coach on March 19, 1980.
It proved to be one of the best decisions ever made by a college administrator.
After compiling a middling 38-47 record in his first three seasons, Krzyzewski built Duke into an ACC and national power. But not before enduring what he called one of the two lowest points of his coaching career, a 109-66 loss to Virginia in the 1983 ACC tournament at Atlanta amid calls from Iron Dukes boosters for his ouster.
“To me, reference points are not as much the victories as they are setbacks,” Krzyzewski told the News & Observer last summer. “That was one of the two lowest points of my 42 years. Walking off the court, in Atlanta, with a lot of the Iron Dukes wanting me fired.”
Butters, of course, stuck with him.
Krzyzewski’s final overall record is 1,202-368, a .766 winning percentage. At Duke, he compiled a 1,129-309 mark, a .785 winning percentage.
Over the years, he led Duke to 15 ACC championships, collecting a combined 535 ACC regular-season (466) and tournament (69) wins. That’s more than any other coach.
The Blue Devils made the first of their 36 NCAA Tournament appearances during his tenure in 1984, claimed Krzyzewski’s first of a record 100 NCAA Tournament wins in 1985 and made the Final Four in 1986.
Duke made seven Final Four appearances over a nine-season period from 1986-94, including the program’s first NCAA championship in 1991 followed by another title in 1992. That made Duke the sport’s first back-to-back champion since the waning days of Wooden’s UCLA dynasty two decades earlier.
From 1990-94, Duke played in four of the five NCAA Tournament finals.
His career and the program faced a serious challenge during the 1994-95 season when Krzyzewski had back surgery, forcing him to step away from coaching due to physical and what he now acknowledges are mental health challenges.
Duke went 13-18 overall and 2-14 in the ACC with assistant coach Pete Gaudet taking over when Krzyzewski stepped away after the season’s first 12 games.
The following season, with Krzyzewski back on the sideline coaching, Duke went 18-13 and, as a No. 8 seed, lost to Eastern Michigan, 75-60, in the NCAA Tournament’s first round.
That, Krzyzewski said, was the second of the two low points of his Duke tenure along with that 1983 ACC tournament loss to Virginia.
“A lot of people beat up on us during that time,” Krzyzewski said during an exclusive interview with the N&O last summer. “Before that, we had gone to seven Final Fours in nine years to where, over a two-year period, we were 31-31.”
From there, the rapid climb back to the top of college basketball continued. Duke won a game in the 1997 NCAA Tournament, reached a regional final in 1998, returned to the Final Four by 1999 and won the program’s third NCAA championship in 2001.
“I think once I got it back,” Krzyzewski said last summer, “I came back with similar passion, whether you call it vengeance, whatever the hell word. But I wanted us to get back.”
After leading Duke to a Final Four appearance in 2004, Krzyzewski entertained a serious offer to coach the NBA’s Los Angeles Lakers two months later. After much deliberation, he declined and declared his plan to stay at Duke for the rest of his career.
Not long after that, though, he accepted the head coaching role with USA Basketball, which needed a boost after losing three times in a disappointing bronze-medal finish at the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens, Greece.
Krzyzewski led the U.S. to gold medals in the 2008, 2012 and 2016 Olympic games. No coach, in men’s or women’s basketball, has led a country to three consecutive gold medals. His U.S. teams went 88-1 in international competition.
Back at Duke, he returned the Blue Devils to the top of college basketball with the 2010 NCAA championship, a team built around older players who had suffered adversity and emerged as champions, including Scheyer, his eventual successor.
The following season, Krzyzewski steered Duke into previously uncharted waters with a heavy reliance on one-and-done players who only planned to spend the mandatory one season in college before heading to the NBA.
The 2010-11 team, which won the ACC tournament but suffered a lopsided loss in the regional semifinals, included freshman guard Kyrie Irving, who became the No. 1 overall pick in the 2011 NBA Draft despite only playing 11 college games due to injury.
Over Krzyzewski’s final decade as a college coach, his Blue Devils saw mixed returns from the one-and-done strategy. Duke suffered NCAA Tournament first-round losses in 2012 (to Lehigh) and 2014 (to Mercer) despite having freshmen stars and first-round picks Austin Rivers (2012) and Jabari Parker (2014) on those teams.
The highlight of the era was 2014-15, when Krzyzewski led Duke to a 35-4 record and his final NCAA championship. Three freshmen starters from that team, Jahlil Okafor, Tyus Jones and Justise Winslow, were first-round picks in the following summer’s NBA draft.
Duke fell one win short of the Final Four with Elite Eight losses in 2018 and 2019 before finally breaking through one final time this season.
The Blue Devils did win the 2017 ACC championship, during current Boston Celtics star Jayson Tatum’s lone season at Duke, and the 2019 ACC championship when freshmen Zion Williamson, R.J. Barrett and Cam Reddish led the team before becoming NBA draft lottery picks three months later.
A total of 42 Duke players became NBA first-round draft picks during Krzyzewski’s tenure. That number will surely grow this summer with freshmen Paolo Banchero and A.J. Griffin projected as lottery picks.
Last June, Krzyzewski announced his plans to retire following this season and Duke selected Scheyer as his successor.
Krzyzewski will stay on at Duke, working for school president Vincent Price, as a special ambassador. He said one of his projects will be to ensure Cameron Indoor Stadium, Duke’s basketball home since 1940, remains a viable college basketball venue while retaining it’s unique character.
But his coaching career, with records that may never be matched, will still be defined by an insatiable drive to succeed.
“For me,” Krzyzewski said. “I’ve always been trying to prove myself.”
