Coach K says he feels for his players, ‘pressure put on them’ amid his final season
The reality that this is Mike Krzyzewski’s final March has become the dominant storyline of the NCAA tournament in a way that few others ever have. Perhaps not since 2015, and Kentucky’s ultimately unsuccessful pursuit of a perfect season, has the tournament come to be defined by a singular topic as much as it is now, with Krzyzewski’s final game looming.
There is a reason why Jim Nantz and the rest of CBS’ lead broadcasting team was in Greenville, S.C., with Duke last week and why they’re here now in San Francisco, where Duke will play against Texas Tech on Thursday night in a West Regional semifinal. There’s a reason why Krzyzewski has noticed more people staring or pointing their phones in his direction when he’s out and about these days.
“It wears on you a little bit because everywhere you walk, everyone is taking a picture of you and they’re watching everything,” Krzyzewski said Wednesday inside the Chase Center, where his team was minutes away from the start of a practice. “Look, that gets old. You know, that gets old.”
Krzyzewski announced his retirement on June 2, in front of an audience of family and supporters inside Duke’s Cameron Indoor Stadium. As he walked out that day for a press conference and approached a makeshift stage, Cascada’s “Every Time We Touch” began to blare from over the speakers, an homage to the song’s presence at Duke basketball games.
In the 10 months since his retirement announcement, Krzyzewski has lived in a world defined by lasts — his last trip to Chapel Hill, for instance, or his last home game, or his last ACC tournament and, now, his final NCAA tournament. The sudden-death nature of the event has only served to increase the drama, given that every time Krzyzewski now walks to the bench before a game it could be the last such walk of his 47-year coaching career.
It has made for immense theater but also great pressure, if not for Krzyzewski then certainly for his players, several of whom are still teenagers. And yet here on Wednesday, Krzyzewski dismissed his role in creating that pressure, as if to suggest that his public decision to retire and remain for one last season hadn’t placed his team in college basketball’s largest fishbowl in the first place.
“I feel for my guys,” Krzyzewski said. “They’ve had pressure put on them that we’re not putting on them. I tell them all the time, we’re playing for us, for you ... but it just happens that way.”
Krzyzewski attempted to argue that “we’re through with all that” — the “that” presumably meaning the pressure to win for him in his final season. There is little evidence to support the notion that those expectations are gone, though, given that his players faced multiple questions here on Wednesday about what this all had been like, and how they attempt to block out the circus that has become a built-in feature of Krzyzewski’s farewell.
“The main thing we do (is) we really just stick together,” said Wendell Moore, Jr., who, as a junior, is the most senior member of Duke’s starting lineup. “Through all the ups and downs, the crazy media posts, the shame and the praise. I mean, we all just kind of do it together.
“You know that we’re not going to be able to do any of it without each other. That includes Coach. So the 14 guys on our team, the five coaches on our staff ... we don’t get too high on things or get too low on things. I think we do a good job using each other to help us stay in that balance.”
Krzyzewski received a similar inquiry Wednesday, one that asked him to explain how he has attempted to function amid a finale that has only grown more intense as the weeks have passed. His final home game at Cameron Indoor Stadium turned into a made-for-TV event, one replete with pregame and postgame ceremonies and almost 100 of his former players in attendance.
That the Blue Devils suffered a humbling defeat against bitter rival North Carolina made things all the more awkward afterward, when Krzyzewski had to sit through several minutes of people saying nice things about him while it looked like he’d have rather been anywhere else. He knew then, though, what his players also knew: there were more days left to play. The season wasn’t over.
It’s different now, though, and the specter of a Duke loss, and the final game of Krzyzewski’s career, has grown more and more real. The Blue Devils, the No. 2 seed in the West, were expected to win easily against Cal State Fullerton in the tournament’s first round, and did. Duke was expected, too, to beat Michigan State, and prevailed late after facing a five-point deficit with five minutes to play.
But now Duke is a slight underdog against Texas Tech, and on Wednesday some of the Red Raiders faced the same question that their counterparts from Cal State Fullerton and Michigan State faced last week: What would it be like to send Krzyzewski into retirement?
“It would be great,” said Marcus Santos-Silva, a senior forward. “ ... I know there’s a lot of press and media about this game, but we’re just not letting that get to us. We know what’s the outcome if we come out with this win, and we would be lying if we didn’t know, yeah, if we win this, we send Coach K home.”
For his part, Krzyzewski intimated that this sort of pressure is nothing new to him, that he is unfazed by it in part because, “I’ve been fortunate to be on a very public stage for a long, long time,” he said Wednesday, before referencing his education at the United States Military Academy.
He had “great training” then, he said, “to focus on the job at hand.”
“That’s your orders,” he said. “That’s your mission. It’s not about the battle you won. It’s about the battle you are going to fight. Then when it’s over, there’s going to be another battle.”
There wouldn’t be for Krzyzewski, at least on a basketball court or in a capacity as a head coach, if Duke were to lose Thursday night. The prospective finality of it all has come to define this tournament more than anything else, and it’s the reason why all eyes — from those belonging to Jim Nantz to the bellmen at Duke’s hotel and all in between — are on Krzyzewski.
It’s also why his players have carried a particularly heavy burden into March, one that has only grown weightier as the weeks have passed. When Krzyzewski said that the pressure surrounding his players made him “feel for my guys,” his commentary spread quickly online, where it became a focal point of mockery.
On Twitter, users responded to Krzyzewski’s quote — that his players have “had pressure put on them that we’re not putting on them” — with an abundance of replies containing the Hot Dog Guy meme. The meme references a comedic sketch that begins after a car has just crashed through a storefront, leaving a smoky landscape of disarray. The camera pans, revealing that the vehicle that crashed through the store is adorned with a large hot dog emerging out of the hood.
Suddenly a woman shrieks: “Someone drove a hot dog shaped car through the window!”
Soon enough a man wearing a full-body hot dog costume appears and claims he has nothing to do with the hot-dog shaped vehicle that has just caused all the chaos. Nobody seems to believe him, but the man insists he’s in the clear and that, “We’re all trying to find the guy who did this.”
To the memeing public on Wednesday, Krzyzewski became a version of the Hot Dog Guy — walking into the pressure cooker in which his players have lived for months and saying, “I feel for my guys,” as if what they’ve experienced materialized organically. Duke found a way against Michigan State on Sunday, and survived just when it seemed like it might not. Now the stage is brighter, the stakes even higher, out West.
This story was originally published March 23, 2022 at 8:37 PM.
