USA - Krzyzewski out to keep United States on top

LAS VEGAS (2010 FIBA World Championship) - The rest of the world had better take note - the United States mean business going into the 2010 FIBA World Championship.

The Olympic champions Tuesday confirmed that coach Mike Krzyzewski is to stay on not only through the 2010 tournament in Turkey, but also the 2012 Olympic Games in London.

And he's not alone. Also back are assistant coaches Mike D'Antoni, Jim Boeheim, and Nate McMillan, but perhaps most importantly - so are the players.

USA Basketball president Jerry Colangelo confirmed during the announcement that he has spoken to several players from the Olympic squad, and they have given their word that they want to be involved in the FIBA World Championship campaign.

LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, Kobe Bryant, Dwight Howard, Chris Bosh, Chris Paul and Deron Williams are among those players to have re-committed.

"The players who were at the All-Star Game back in February, I spoke to the seven of them and they all indicated they are ready, they want to be part of it," Colangelo said.

The message is clear. The United States is back, and determined once again to establish itself as the dominant force in international basketball.

The players are already echoing that as several put out statements in support of Krzyzewski's return.

"Coach K and the assistant coaches were a perfect fit for the USA Senior National Team in 2006-2008 and I'm confident they'll again be a great fit for 2010-2012," said James.

"We worked together for three summers and we all developed a great respect and chemistry that was very important in the success we achieved."

Williams was even more blunt in his assessment.

"This is the best possible news for USA Basketball," he said. "I am sure those outside of the United States are disappointed. Coach K is King."

The spirit of family that Krzyzewski has sought to instill in the players will be the key going forward over the next three years.

"We all felt (as coaches) that the work we started with Jerry Colangelo and the players is not finished and we wanted to continue with the program we're establishing," Krzyzewski said.

"The players have said the same thing. We're only going to be as good as the players we have. You can't pass on an opportunity like this."

Another key to the philosophy of Colangelo and Krzyzewski is respect - respect for the program, and respect for international basketball.

Whereas once the United States assumed the international game was its playground, there is now a realisation in the camp that they cannot have it all their own way.

A run of painful defeats in the FIBA World Championships in recent years, as well as the 2004 Olympics, taught them that.

If anything, it is a world the United States created, albeit one it cannot control.

The moment everything changed, Krzyzewski believes, is when the legendary "Dream Team" swept all before them at the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona.

"I think when you look at international basketball and the explosion that has occurred, that was the atomic bomb," Krzyzewski said of 1992.

"I always think about a kid that was watching in Barcelona, and looked at this game and thought, 'I could do this'. He becomes Pau Gasol.

"Or there's a kid in Argentina watching and thinking, 'I would like to do that'. That's Manu Ginobili.

"The world was getting ready to do this with the split in the former Yugoslavia and the break up of the USSR, the emergence of countries like Lithuania.

"Where international basketball is now, it's tremendous. Worldwide basketball is terrific and we know to win this competition we have to have the best players and the best preparation just to have a chance to win."

In some ways, it would have been easy for Krzyzewski to walk away from the USA Basketball program following the success in Beijing.

Having won back the title of champions, the 62-year-old may have wanted to return his focus to his day job at Duke University.

After all, the Hall of Famer is facing a considerable challenge to catch up with arch-rivals and national champions North Carolina in the Atlantic Coast Conference.

But Krzyzewski - a member now of 12 different USA Basketball coaching teams - has been around long enough to know that international basketball can only make him better as a coach, and that benefits Duke too.

"If I wasn't coaching in the summer, would I ever be able to spend weeks away with Mike D'Antoni, Jim Boeheim, and Nate McMillan, talking basketball? There's no way," he said.

"Would I have have been able to find out what LeBron James, Deron Williams and Kobe Bryant are thinking when you're facing a particular defense? There's no way.

"If you don't learn something from that, if it doesn't make you better you have a bad attitude, there's something wrong with you.

"We're still learning, because the game is always evolving."

For all the challenges that comes with managing one of the most prestigious college basketball programs in America, coaching on the international level gives Krzyzewski a whole new set of problems to solve.

"I really respect international basketball," he said. "I've studied it for the last three years, and you see the scope of the techniques teams use. To look at what teams do offensively throughout the world is very interesting and very difficult to defend against.

"We as a group, that's one of the things we talked about as an Olympic thing, how much we respect the international thing. We would bring in international officials to teach us about different things, and try to set up our practice teams to run international offenses so we could learn.

"There's a deep respect."

FIBA