NBA Olympians Force Krzyzewski to Adapt His Duke Coaching Style

Mike Krzyzewski, the four-time NCAA championship winning basketball coach at Duke University, tells Diane Brady in the July 16 issue of Bloomberg Businessweek how he’s learned to manage professionals for the Olympics since he was an assistant for the so-called Dream Team in Barcelona 20 years ago:

“I was an assistant to Chuck Daly in 1992. At the first coaches’ meeting, Chuck looked at us and said, ‘You have to do one thing really well: Ignore. You’re not going to micromanage. These guys know their pace. Don’t mess it up.’ He was right. This was the best of the NBA. I learned not to over coach. In college, you have to talk more, but these guys got it right away. The Dream Team was going to win. In 2008, I’d been coaching the USA team for two years. We weren’t so good that it didn’t matter. I knew we had to bond as a group.