'That’s crazy, man': Coach K raves about Cats' unselfishness in SiriusXM interview with Tommy Lloyd

LAS VEGAS — Tommy Lloyd and Mike Krzyzewski have polar opposite careers as head coaches.

Lloyd is in his first season at Arizona after spending two decades as Mark Few’s right-hand man at Gonzaga. A Duke legend, “Coach K” is preparing for retirement following 42 seasons at the helm.

Along the way, Krzyzewski won five national championships, took the Blue Devils to 12 Final Four appearances, became the winningest coach in college basketball history with a record of 1,196-366 and coached the most first-round NBA draft picks in the history of the sport. He also led Team USA to three gold medals and was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 2001, the same year Duke won a national championship over Arizona.

Krzyzewski hosts “Basketball and Beyond” on SiriusXM Radio. He interviewed Lloyd on Monday, the day before Arizona’s leader was named Pac-12 Coach of the Year. Krzyzewski did the show from his Duke office, while Lloyd sat in his backyard to show off sunny Tucson in March.

“It was an honor,” Lloyd said Thursday, after top-seeded Arizona’s win over Stanford in the Pac-12 Tournament. “The first thing I asked him was, ‘How far down the line did your producer have to go to land on me the Monday after your last game (at Cameron Indoor Arena)?’”

Krzyzewski said he’s been impressed with the way the Wildcats distribute the ball. The UA has 643 assists this season compared to their opponents’ 371.

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“On your team, one of the stats is incredible and those are the assists,” Krzyzewski said to Lloyd. “You average nearly 20 assists per game, but you have nearly 300 more assists than your opponents. That’s crazy, man. Offensively, you’re sharing the ball well, but you’re doing something on defense where the team doesn’t share the ball as well.”

Lloyd’s response to Krzyzewski: “Assists at both ends of the floor — offensively, you create easier shots for each other and that’s the goal on offense. To be honest, Coach, we never talk about assists. I think it’s a byproduct of playing and moving and getting guys to understand what shots are good for them, what shots are good for their teammates and stuff like that. We play a pretty aggressive-attacking style, therefore we get a lot of assists.

“Defensively, I want to take away the most obvious and easiest plays. Obviously guarding the 3-point line is huge in this day and age. ‘Can we eliminate a couple kick-out 3s every game? Or even eliminate the attempts? On the inside, how much of our defense can we do without creating rotations? Can we get you to play two-on-two going downhill and try to score on a 7-footer with a guard on the ballhandler’s back or the guard veering off and blocking out the big on the roll?’ Sometimes it’s high risk, but I think it forces guys to create their own shot and score contested twos, which is ultimately pretty hard to do.”

Lloyd said the compliments were humbling. Consider: Krzyzewski has been competing at the highest level of college basketball since 1980, when Lloyd was a 5-year-old living in Kelso, Washington.

“It was an honor to be on there and obviously he has a program that I have a ton of respect for and he’s a coach that has really built college basketball to what it is today,” Lloyd said.

“I look forward to continuing to build what he started.”