Coach K turned down a huge pay raise to stay at Duke.
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Mike Krzyzewski is set to retire after 47 years as the winningest coach in men's Division I college basketball and with five national championships.
But his college career almost ended much earlier.
It is well-documented that Duke stuck by Coach K early in his career. His teams were just 38-47 in his first three seasons, a record that would get most coaches fired.
Krzyzewski repaid that loyalty in 2004, when the Los Angeles Lakers nearly enticed him to leave Durham for the NBA with a huge raise and a chance to coach Kobe Bryant.
In a 2020 episode of "The Old Man & the Three," a podcast hosted by former Duke player JJ Redick, Krzyzewski explained how close he came to leaving college basketball before winning his fourth and fifth national championships.
"Closer than any other offer I ever had," Krzyzewski told Redick.
Coach K noted that he briefly flirted with the Boston Celtics in 1990, just before winning his second and third championships at Duke. But he said the offer from the Lakers was nearly one he couldn't refuse.
"With the Lakers, you know, I was 57, and I said, 'Is there something more? I love what I'm doing. I love Duke, but is there something more? And I'm not going to be doing this forever,'" he said. "They were at my house. They offered a lot of money. We were building the Emily Krzyzewski Center at the time, and they offered to do the rest of the building of that. So when they left the house, this is like generational wealth. You gotta consider it."
According to ESPN at the time, the Lakers offered Coach K a five-year, $40 million contract, in addition to paying for the rest of the building on the Duke campus. He was making less than a quarter of that at Duke — "about" $2 million per year, according to the Chicago Tribune at the time.
According to Redick, Krzyzewski was so close to leaving Duke that he called Redick over the summer and told him he was thinking about taking the job. Redick even started contacting friends about transferring to another school.
But in the end, Coach K couldn't leave Duke and even mentioned how loyal the school and his former athletic director had been to him early in his career.
Coach K's career might have looked a lot different, but he told Redick he was "really, really pleased" that he never left Duke.
