Big Shoes

Mike Krzyzewski

Jon Scheyer replaced Mike Krzyzewski as Duke basketball's head coach in 2022 with no prior head coaching experience. Three years later, he's the fastest coach in ACC history to 100 wins and has taken Duke to the Final Four. In the series finale of Big Shoes, we break down how Duke pulled off one of the cleanest coaching transitions in college basketball history, and how the same strategy played out very differently at North Carolina. ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.

Pat Summitt

Pat Summitt took over as Tennessee's head coach at 22 with no budget, no staff, and no scholarships to offer. By the time she was done, she had eight national championships, 1,098 wins, and had basically built women's college basketball into what it is today. This episode is about what she built, how she built it, and--maybe more importantly--what happens to a program when the person it was built around is gone. Featuring sportswriter Maria Cornelius, who has covered Tennessee women's basketball since 1998. ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.

Barry Bonds

Barry Bonds is one of the most feared hitters in baseball history — 688 intentional walks, a single-season home run record that still stands, and a statistical page on Baseball Reference that's roughly half bold letters. He spent 15 years as the face of a franchise that was, in a lot of ways, his family's team before it was even his. And when he left, the Giants didn't try to replace him. They couldn't. And that turned out to be exactly the right approach. Featuring sportswriter and Hall of Fame voter John Shea of the San Francisco Standard. ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.

Harry Kane

Harry Kane is one of the greatest strikers of his generation--a boyhood Spurs fan who joined the club at ten, was almost never given a chance, and then somehow became the most prolific scorer in their history. So how did Tottenham manage to waste nearly a decade of him at his peak? In this episode, I talk with Jack Pitt-Brooke of The Athletic about what made Kane so special, why Spurs couldn't capitalize on it, and what the club still hasn't learned. ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.

Steve Nash & Mike D'Antoni

In the mid-2000s, the Phoenix Suns were doing something nobody had ever seen before. They ran a high-tempo, small-ball offense so good that teams literally didn't know how to prepare for it. Steve Nash and Mike D'Antoni. Three division titles in a row. And yet, for all of that, they never won a ring. This is the story of how a franchise that had everything--a generational system, a Hall of Fame coach, a two-time MVP point guard--managed to talk themselves out of believing in it. From a trade that made everybody go "wait, what?" to a coach getting fired while Shaq was busy dancing with the Jabbawockeez, this is the Phoenix Suns: a team that caught lightning in a bottle and then couldn't stop poking holes in it. ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.