Coach K On Court Storming

He’s got the right idea here

Court storming became a huge issue this past season after Wake Forest upset Duke in Winston-Salem and Kyle Filipowski took a hit from a fan as he tried to leave the court.

It would have been a much bigger deal if he hadn’t returned quickly after the incident. Think of what would have happened if he had suffered an injury that seriously harmed his draft stock: not good.

Law suits would have followed. The NCAA would have been forced to react, possibly with Draconian legislation.

Former Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski has some thoughts on the matter. Appearing on the Dan Patrick Show, Coach K said this:

“From 1996 till I retired we lost 70 road games, we won about two thirds of our road games. In those 70 games, we had 58 court stormings. And we asked the ACC to do something about it, they said, ‘Well, it doesn’t happen.’ I said, ‘No, it happens to us,’ and they’ve never done anything.

“For Duke, our policy has been, just with me and the students when I still coached, don’t storm the court unless it’s a championship. In other words, don’t let the opponent think that they’re more important than our pursuit of a championship…We don’t want that. We don’t want to give our opponent that level of respect. The only respect we should have is for winning a league, the ACC championship, or the NCAA championship.”

That seems about right. The situation with Filipowski was obviously dangerous, but there’s something to be said about teams court-storming when you lose: the whole respect thing K talks about here is reversed. They’re celebrating beating you in the regular season. Which means, in a very really sense, that they won the battle and still lost the war which puts you at a great advantage.