So, I was literally working on my latest Insights piece yesterday late morning when I got the alert: Mike Krzyzewski was planning on retiring as Duke’s mens basketball coach after the 2021-22 season. I knew right away that the piece I was working on at the time would be getting shelved and I would be back to writing about how basketball correlates to private companies.
For those of you who have lived or even spent any time in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area, you know that the Triangle has been the epicenter of college basketball for at least the past 40-50 years. There are 3 schools—North Carolina State University, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Duke University—all within 25 minutes of one another who each have rich college basketball traditions. A lot of it is down to the coaches… NC State with Everett Case, Norm Sloan and Jim Valvano; North Carolina with Frank McGuire, Dean Smith and Roy Williams; Duke with Vic Bubas, Bucky Waters