I don’t believe John Calipari will leave Kentucky to go coach the Sacramento Kings, no matter how much money and power and former Kentucky stars Kings owner Vivek Ranadive can throw at him.
I don’t believe it. Not for a second.
In fact, I don’t believe Calipari will ever leave Lexington.
Not for the Kings, historically one of the NBA’s worst franchises. And not for one of those cornerstone NBA franchises like the Los Angeles Lakers or Boston Celtics or New York Knicks, teams whose stature might have tickled Calipari’s ego just a few years ago.
How can I be so sure? Well, I’d like to point to something Calipari routinely asks of the five-star recruits he lures to Lexington: “What is your why?”
When a coach leaves a secure, well-paid college job for the NBA, sure, it’s because he wants to coach the best basketball players on earth and seek the glitz and glamour of the NBA. But it’s just as often because he has come to despise the year-round grind of recruiting high school kids. If there’s a reason coaches like Billy Donovan and Fred Hoiberg can’t get to the NBA soon enough, it’s because of the Julys and the Septembers wasted in constant pursuit of the next great set of players. I’ve never heard a coach tell me he loves the recruiting process.
Except Calipari.
This is what he told me when I was in Lexington last month for an interview for FS1:
“Here's what I love,” Calipari said. “Meeting families. Hearing their stories. ‘Tell me your story.’ Sometimes people are crying. I asked a young player (recently), ‘What's your why?’ He says his why is in front of him: his mother. ‘That’s my why, that woman right there.’ She bawls. I'm crying. We're all crying. It's getting their story.”
I asked him if the NBA still holds an allure for him.
“My thing right now – where (else) could I do (this) and feel the way I’m feeling, the great joy?”
Look: I know John Calipari is a master salesman. He could sell ice to an Eskimo. If the possibility of going to the NBA still tickles his ego, he’s not going to give voice to that. He knows that’s the last thing the next group of Kentucky recruits wants to hear.
But I believe him when he talks about how the college games gives him something the NBA never could.
Here’s Cal again:
“If I talked to an NBA owner and I say to him, ‘What’s your why? You want me to come here to help you win a championship – what’s your why? Why do you want to do this? … Is (hiring me) just ego? I don’t need to feed your ego or your pride. That doesn’t do anything for me. I’m not here saying, boy, he’s really prideful now. That’s not why I would do it.”
The only reason Calipari would go to the Kings is if Ranadive could offer him something that is a complete game-changer. Maybe an absurd amount of money. (Although Calipari told me that his decision to go to the New Jersey Nets in the 1990s was a money-based decision, “but now that’s not what moves me.”) Maybe power could do it, like total control over personnel. Or maybe the outside-the-box-thinking Ranadive can lure Cal to Sacramento by offering him part ownership of the team, something that could change the paradigm.
But honestly? I don’t see it happening. I see Calipari retiring a decade from now as a Kentucky Wildcat, complete with his own statue on campus, a couple more national titles and a few dozen more players having gone on to the NBA. I don’t see why he’d leave a perfect situation in college for a dicey-at-best situation in the NBA.
Maybe you think Cal desires to go back to the NBA because the NBA is really the only place he encountered failure.
But I don’t believe that sort of career vengeance is something that drives him at this point in life. He’s reached a happy place. He has top-ranked Kentucky operating like a well-oiled machine. He’s not going to give that up.
“I go to the NBA, how do I get that same feeling?” Calipari asked me. “How many more games do I have to win for me to say you’ve done a pretty good job?”
“I mean, what do I have to prove?”
Nothing.
Follow Reid Forgrave on Twitter @reidforgrave or email him at ReidForgrave@gmail.com.
