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Dan Hurley, right, opted to stay at UConn to try for a third straight tile rather than jump to the NBA top coach LeBron James and the Los Angeles Lakers. (Mitchell Layton/Getty Images)
The massive headline across the top of the Los Angeles Times sports section read “Lakers Shift Their Focus.”
The Lakers had just swung for the fences and whiffed in their bid to pry away college basketball’s most accomplished coach.
That was July 2004, when Mike Krzyzewski turned down the chance to replace the resigning Phil Jackson, explaining “you have to follow your heart and lead with it and Duke has always taken up my whole heart.” He went on to win two more national titles with the Blue Devils while satisfying his curiosity whether he could coach NBA players by leading USA Basketball to three straight Olympic golds.
Two decades later, UConn’s Dan Hurley is poised to follow the same path that Krzyzewski once took. Hurley will be the fiery, wisecracking face of college basketball for the foreseeable future after rejecting a lucrative offer from the Lakers on Monday that reportedly would have paid him $70 million over six years.
Though Hurley has yet to publicly explain his decision, he previously has described UConn as a “perfect fit” for him and acknowledged that he’s reluctant to mess with happy. In April, the New Jersey native laughed off the pie-in-the-sky idea of him considering the Kentucky job when it was open, alluding to the fact that his wife Andrea was not about to leave the Northeast.
Then there’s the little matter of the challenge he’d be abandoning if he left UConn this summer. UConn is a fixture in way-too-early preseason top fives and a real contender to become the first program to three-peat since the heyday of John Wooden’s UCLA dynasty in the 1970s.
Hurley’s return is a triumph for UConn, which under his leadership just completed the greatest two-year run in modern men’s college basketball history. In 2023, UConn trounced its six NCAA tournament…
Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/dan-hurley-follows-in-coach-ks-footsteps-210225462.html
Author : Yahoo Sports
Publish date : 2024-06-10 21:02:25
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