It's not often that a head coach owes a player his job, as more often that not, a contentious player is the reason a coach is fired from an organization. In the case of Mike Krzyzewski, he just might owe his long tenure as coach of Team USA to Los Angeles Lakers star Kobe Bryant, as The Black Mamba's playmaking allowed him to continue at the helm of USA Basketball.
Krzyzewski flashed back to an intense moment in the 2008 Olympics, as Rudy Fernandez had hit a 3-pointer to bring Spain back within two points in the fourth quarter of the gold-medal game. As the 71-year-old college legend tells it, the actual winning plays are a blur, but the timeout is as vivid as it gets.
“That was the most pressure I’ve ever felt in international competition, and in that timeout, Kobe and the rest of these guys — but especially Kobe — said, ‘We got it,’” Krzyzewski told Ben Rohrbach of Yahoo Sports. “We didn’t even run a play. We got accustomed to just believing in one another. [Kobe] made a couple plays … and all of a sudden we won.
“I would not have been the coach in Istanbul in 2010 if Kobe Bryant didn’t step up there,” Krzyzewski added. “But thank goodness that we had that type of team dynamic where he felt good and the guys felt good about him stepping up. And he did.”
Bryant was coming off a sour loss in the NBA Finals to the Boston Celtics but was able to wipe off the bitterness as the veteran leader of Team USA, which was in a mission to redeem itself from a bronze medal in 2004.
Kobe would go on to two Shaq-less NBA championships after capturing gold that summer, establishing himself as the most dominant player in the league and riding the wave of international success into his reign in the NBA.
Krzyzewski would go on to two other Olympic medals in London 2012 and most recently in Rio de Janeiro 2016. He has since stepped down as coach of Team USA to continue his work with the Duke Blue Devils.
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