Chris Collins: Trying to Turn Northwestern into the new Duke
Jon Rothstein of CBS Sports conducted an interview with Northwestern coach Chris Collins, but it became obvious to whomever was reading the article that all they really wanted to talk about was Coach Mike Krzyzewski at Duke, where Collins spent many years as an assistant.
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Collins credited Coach K with teaching him to be flexible, as he took his first Northwestern team into a more slow ball path than he had wanted to. He said his desire is still to get back to the more up tempo style of Duke, and that having a young team would allow him to develop things in that direction. In many ways, Northwestern shares a lot of aspects with Duke. It is a private school in a league of bigger schools with a great academic reputation. Perhaps Collins sees himself as the Coach K of the North.
Rothstein also suggested that Collins had found his Johnny Dawkins of the North. That would be incoming freshman Vic Law.
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Collins also talked about how hard it is to sustain success at Duke, and how hard you have to work.
The subject of the Olympics never came up, despite Collins being the coach of the USA Select Team for the FIBA World Championships. That would have been another opportunity for Collins to demonstrate how much he had learned from Coach Krzyzewski.
Right now Collins is part of a Coach K coaching tree that really does not have a signature member. Mike Brey at Notre Dame is probably the most successful of the group. Johnny Dawkins is at Stanford, and Quinn Snyder is now in the NBA. It is still too early to say how Collins and new Marquette coach Steve Wojciechowski will fare at their spots. Jeff Capel, now a Duke assistant, had some success with the Griffin brothers at Oklahoma before losing his job out there.