John Calipari says you can forget about him ever coaching in the NBA again.
Calipari, 57, will be at Kentucky for the rest of his coaching days.
“My plan is to coach here for the rest of my career,” he wrote Monday on his Website. “I want this to be my final coaching position.”
Calipari in recent years has been linked to numerous NBA franchises, including the Knicks, Nets, Lakers and Pelicans.
Many in the industry believe he wants to eventually return to the NBA to prove he can be a success there. Calipari went 72-112 in 2-plus seasons with the Nets in the late 1990s.
But now he says his new goal is for Kentucky, which has eight NCAA championships, to surpass UCLA’s record of 11.
“I hope you understand that it’s going to be very difficult,” he wrote. “We’ve won eight titles since 1948, and now we’re going to try to win four more. This could take more than a decade, but so what? Let’s chase it. Can we do it? Sure, but it’s going to be really tough. The tournament isn’t a best-of-seven series and the best team doesn’t always win the title. The trick is to always be one of those teams at the end of the season that’s right there. That’s the first step.”
Calipari also reiterated his goal of having half the players in the NBA All-Star Game be Kentucky products.
“I want to one day go to the NBA All-Star game and have half the players in the game be from Kentucky,” he wrote. “If we continue on the pace we’re on we can do this. John Wall, DeMarcus Cousins and Anthony Davis are becoming perennial all-stars. Eric Bledsoe, Brandon Knight, Karl-Anthony Towns, Devin Booker, Willie Cauley-Stein, Trey Lyles, Julius Randle and Enes Kanter are on the cusp. There’s also Nerlens Noel, Terrence Jones, Patrick Patterson and I probably left off one or two. We could have three guys taken in the lottery this year and they’ll each have a shot at the All-Star game down the road.”
Calipari finished by following up with another salvo in his perceived week-long shot at Duke, and other programs that recruit by promising what their University can do for a player throughout his life, as opposed to Kentucky’s pitch of helping players get to the NBA.
“There will be some who will attack me, attack the program, attack the approach, and some will even say, ‘He only talks about the NBA,'” he wrote. “But I can only tell our fans it’s similar to what Frank Sinatra once said: Our best response … is massive success.”
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