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A reporter on that ACC conference call Monday -- OK, me -- noted Coach K's tough personal stance on dirty play and asked how many games he had suspended Christian Laettner for stomping Kentucky's Aminu Timberlake at the 1992 NCAA Tournament.
"First of all," Coach K said to me, "would you call that a stomp?"
Absolutely, I said. I'd seen the replay many times.
"Well then," he said. "My judgment and yours would differ."
So there you have it. Laettner didn't stomp Timberlake, and Henderson didn't mean to hurt Hansbrough.
--Gregg Doyel
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| posted on Friday December 18, 2009 | |
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The latest player to transfer from Dook is Olek Czyz!
This article should put an asterisk next to Eliot Williams, but still has some nice insight:
Krzyzewski's resume speaks for itself, but is there trouble brewing in Durham?
Duke continually recruits the nation's best high school players and, usually, lands the cream of the crop. Only recently, however, some of those players have opted to leave Coach K and the Duke program with more frequency.
The University announced Friday that sophomore forward Olek Czyz will leave the program and is expected to transfer to another Division I school to continue his college career as a student/athlete. While every athletic program, and university for that matter, is going to have a player (or student) leave for one reason or another, Coach K's program has been losing players at an alarming rate recently.
Czyz became the fifth scholarship player to leave the Blue Devil's program since 2006. While Czyz isn't exactly a household name and hasn't been a major contributor to the team during his short time at Duke, he is just the latest to make the jump from Duke to another school. And he certainly isn't the biggest name to defect.
Elliot Williams (now at Memphis), Eric Boateng (Arizona State), and Taylor King (Villanova) all left the Duke basketball program within one year of their arrival on campus and, more shockingly, all were McDonald's All-America honorees as high school seniors.
Coach K shouldn't exactly hit the panic button, as his program remains one of the best in the country and is currently ranked in the Top-10 of both the AP and ESPN/USA Today polls, but it appears, as the old saying goes, that 'something is rotten in Denmark.'
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Permalink!
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Coach Ks back injury in 1995 -
Coach K's 1995 Duke team lost their ACC opener to a medicore Clemson team. Soon afterwards, K left the team because of 'exhaustion' and problems with back surgery.
Assistant coach Pete Gaudet took over the team and proceeded to go 2-14 in the ACC. Gaudet 'left' the team at the end of the season.
The games that Coach K didn't coach are not on his record.
This quote is awfully interesting:
...he had Vince Carter over for a January visit, nine days after he advised his players of his need to sign off for health reasons. The punch line later came from Carter himself. Shortly after that visit, Carter was quoted in an SI article on Duke, (published well before Carter chose UNC over Duke by the way). 'He was up and about,' said Carter, 'He didn't seem like a guy who has had all these back problems.'
Some speculate that K left the team for reasons beyond exhaustion or his back.
Faced the same 'problems', would he had left the excellent '91-92 team that was favored to, and eventually repeated as National Champions? Ask Pete Gaudet if you ever see him.
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