Former Kentucky Player on Twitter: Cal to Be Lakers' Next Coach

Published on 7-Apr-2014 by Stacey Mickles

Basketball - NCAA Mens    NCAA Basketball Daily Update

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Former Kentucky Player on Twitter: Cal to Be Lakers' Next Coach

Every big event can use an intruiging undercurrent of buzz, and tonight's NCAA hoops championship just got it.

Former Kentucky point guard Rex Chapman has put it out on Twitter tonight that, win or lose, John Calipari is going to be the next coach of the Los Angeles Lakers.

Chapman may have gotten his degree from Kentucky, but somehow, he evaded the spelling and grammar classes. Nevertheless, his message was understood well enough:

Chapman tweet

And it didn't take long for him to get a bit of blowback, so he responded in his own semi-intelligible way:

Chapman tweet 2

Well, he's right. I don't know him. But I know something else he said was that there was "no way" Calipari was leaving Lexington. And that was on the Dan Patrick show this morning. But Patrick had an inkling:

The former Wildcat star is part of Kentucky's broadcast team, so he certainly has direct access to the coach. Having said that, he's a partisan analyst who's been in this sort of spotlight before. Surely, he knows it could be a distraction, even to Wildcat players who themselves are no doubt leaving en masse to the NBA.

So why would he drop the dime at this particular moment? He's definitely lacking the journalism chops to want a scoop that badly.

Anyway, if true, this would be Calipari's second go-round in the pros. He hardly distinguished himself at the helm of the then-New Jersey Nets. That team's strong point was mailing it in, so maybe he's still got an itch that wasn't scratched, thinking he could still make a difference in the NBA.

Maybe he can. He'd make a fitting figurehead to de facto head coach Kobe Bryant.

But, as a fan pointed out, what would Cal have to gain now? He has a national championship -- possibly two after tonight -- and he has nothing to prove.

Who knows? Maybe Dan Patrick is right and the next batch of one-&-dones isn't as one-&-done-ish as Calipari thought it should be. Maybe he's tired of the fans' expectations and the criticism. Or maybe the Buss siblings flipped a coin and whichever of them wanted to appease Kobe with a coaching change won.

Whatever. The rubber will meet the road in a couple of hours.

They just need to get that game out of the way.