A Look Back At The Coach K-Gilbert Arenas Conflict

Pretty clearly, Arenas didn’t understand his situation well.

Most of us lack the perspective to offer meaningful critiques of basketball players, strategies or coaches and that goes to roster decisions too. We just don’t have enough information.

So when former Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski was coaching Team USA, one of the early controversies about his first team, the 2006 FIBA World Cup team, was over whether or not to take Gilbert Arenas. Arenas says he called Coach K to tell him that he’d do whatever he needed him to do to play on the team.

Krzyżewski is famously blunt with players and told Arenas that he was on the bubble, according to Arenas, and Arenas found this deeply offensive.

The U.S. team lost one game in FIBA play, to Greece 101-95, and finished with the bronze medal.

It was the last game Coach K lost internationally; he finished his run with Team USA with a record of 75-1.

Arenas has never forgiven Coach K for not putting him on the 2006 team, but looking back, it’s hard to argue.

First, the core of that 2006 team was Carmelo Anthony, Chris Bosh, LeBron James, Chris Paul and Dwyane Wade. Those players stayed with Team USA for some time and were parts of three Olympic championship teams. They laid the foundation for immense success and validated Krzyzewski’s roster decisions. You can reasonably look at the loss to Greece as a learning experience and one that probably altered the trajectory of Team USA through today.

And frankly, the way Arenas handled his rejection did two things: first, it most likely meant he was never going to make a later team. He was a talented player so he might have been needed, and the way the system worked under Coach K and his USA Basketball boss Jerry Colangelo was that a core group of players was always ready to go. Despite what he said about sacrificing for the team, he wasn’t willing to wait his turn and to help in a secondary role - i.e., in camp and in practice.

And second, it sort of established him as a loudmouth and a jerk, a bit of a loose cannon. That was pretty much confirmed in 2010, when he and former Georgia Tech star Javaris Crittenton pulled guns on each other in the Washington Wizards’ locker room over a gambling debt. It was an unbelievably stupid thing to do, but from a distance, fairly or not, it also helped make sense out of Coach K’s decision to drop Arenas from the team.

It’s not always about talent or skill. Sometimes it’s just about what kind of person you are, a point that UConn coach Danny Hurley underscored recently when he said this:

“We’ve got a real old-school culture here of accountability. I’m an old-school coach in terms of the tone that I take with my players in practice. The expectations I take with effort, the focus on winning and ‘we’ over ‘me’...They tell on themselves. They drop hints. [If] you’ve got the wrong type of people around the inner circle of your players, they’ll sink your program.”

Given what we saw of Arenas near the end of his NBA career, it’s not unreasonable to think that may have had something to do with why he was on the bubble - and also why something very special was built.