It has been a long six years, but John Calipari’s critics were undone this season by the most unlikely of men: Duke coach and media hero Mike Krzyzewski.
With recent news that Justise Winslow, Jahlil Okafor, and Tyus Jones will enter the 2015 NBA Draft, we have hopefully come to the end of a sad and hypocritical era of media criticism of John Calipari. It is truly pathetic that all it took for this to happen was for Mike Krzyzewski to put his imprimatur of consent to the idea that college coaches should try to recruit the best players regardless of their NBA intentions. As self-evident as this concept seems, it has been drawing censure for six consecutive years from sports journalists around the country, 100% of it aimed at Kentucky coach John Calipari.
Glenn Logan from SB Nation wrote about the media hypocrites and Coach K’s adoption of Calipari’s style today for MSN Sports. Logan reminds us that Bob Knight, Coach K’s mentor, once called the one-and-done system “a disgrace” to college basketball. Now that K is doing it, what will Knight and the other haters have to say?
[tab name=”Tab”] What will they say, indeed? Well, that question has now been largely answered, but the mendacity has merely changed its focus from scorn directed at Calipari to lauding Krzyzewski for “adapting” and “changing focus.”[/tab]
This is hypocrisy in another form. Many of the writers lauding Krzyzewski are doing so at the expense of their own arguments, their own expressed opinion that when Calipari is winning this way, it is somehow evil. They don’t write that Krzezewski has embraced Calipari’s evil, but rather that his touch turns “evil” in to necessary, even good.
Anyone remember this?
Coach Calipari – MSU Postgame 1 month ago at Kentucky Wildcats TV
