Mike Krzyzewski's influence built to last as retirement looms

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com.

Mike Krzyzewski's unparalleled coaching career is down to a few basketball games, with no more than a month left before the retiring Duke Hall of Famer walks off the sideline for the last time.

His influence on the sport will remain long past that final farewell. The fingerprints of the man known simply as "Coach K" are all over the highest levels of the game as he winds down his nearly five-decade head-coaching career.

CLICK HERE FOR MORE SPORTS COVERAGE ON FOXNEWS.COM

Nearly two dozen of his former players currently are on NBA rosters. Another dozen or so are coaching or working for NBA teams. There are others who lead their own Division I college programs. And some of the NBA’s biggest stars of the past two decades have won Olympic gold medals under his direction.

"He’s got a small army of people that are working in basketball that believe in his values and things that he felt were important," said Arizona State coach Bobby Hurley, the point guard on Krzyzewski’s first two NCAA championship teams in 1991 and 1992. "That’s regardless of whether you coached with him or if you were a player, because they’ll have such incredible experiences and memories of things that he did that you still use in your own situations.

"His legacy is going to continue to grow through others that he’s had an impact on in their lives, and I’m definitely one of those people."

The 75-year-old Krzyzewski coaches his final home game at Cameron Indoor Stadium on Saturday, fittingly against rival North Carolina. At most, he has 10 games left in a career that began with five seasons at Army followed by 42 at Duke, assuming the Blue Devils reach both next week’s Atlantic