We’ve talked before about not riding on the Cooper Flagg hype train and now former Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski has weighed in on that subject, telling ESPN this, as relayed by Sportskeeda:
”He still has to do. I think he will. He has the potential to be one of the best. I don’t want to put that pressure on him. We shouldn’t be talking about Cooper, we should be talking about our team. If this was Cooper talking, Cooper would say that, because he’s a very humble young man.”
He’s basically correct, of course, but that’s what a coach would think. Fans are going to get wound up obviously and people in the media are trying to drum up business, so they’ll hype whatever they possibly can.
And of course the story is irresistible: a kid from Newport, Maine, population 3,133 is the next great phenom? Who can resists that?
Chris Carrawell didn’t exactly help the hype train the other day when he said that when Flagg was on the Select Team this summer, that for three minutes, he was the best player on the floor.
He’s 17!
That’s the kind of buzz he generates.
Still, Coach K is right. You can’t place one player above the team. Basketball is a game of movement, balance and deception. One player might be able to do stunning things, but no one, no matter how good he is, can play better individually than he can within a team. And that will be the measuring stick for Flagg, as it is for anyone else.
He goes on to talk about how he thinks Jon Scheyer is doing, and that’s a great question.
So far he’s 54-18. Obviously Duke is a very different place than it was when Mike Krzyzewski took the job in 1980.
You can’t really make a fair comparison because Coach K built Duke into a legendary program and didn’t have that to build on like Scheyer has. Even so, let’s look:
In his first two seasons, Krzyzewski finished 27-20. After he turned the program around, in his fourth and fifth seasons, K finished 47-18. And in 1985-86 and 86-87 – that is, his first Final Four trip and the following year – Duke finished 61-12.
So all things considered, Scheyer is doing very well, and we’re just talking about his record. That doesn’t include his recruiting or how he has adapted to the vast, sweeping changes in the game.
His job, in many ways, is different and more complex than what Krzyzewski knew.
