Pros to pros

 You know how it used to be, back in the Before Time. Some NBA team threw a wad of cash at some big-deal college coach, and the big-deal college coach went off to wrangle the paid professionals, and, ah, geez, how did THAT work out?

Not well, usually.

Usually Rick Pitino would fail with the Knicks. Or John Calipari would fail with the Nets. Or a Billy Donovan or P.J. Carlesimo would do well enough to stick around, but would never be confused with, say, Phil Jackson or Pat Riley.

That's because coaching kids in college and pros in the NBA were two utterly different dynamics, requiring two different mind and skill sets. Authoritarianism worked in one world; it rarely did in the other.

Now?

Now comes the news that Dusty May is headed to the Dallas Mavericks from the University of Michigan, where in two seasons he took the Wolverines from 8-24 to 37-3 and a national title. Went 64-13 in those two seasons overall.

No wonder the Mavericks wanted him.

And no wonder, by the way, it's not nearly so much a leap of faith as it used to be.

This is because Dusty May has one huge advantage over those who followed this path before him:

He's not going from college to the pros. He's going from the pros to the pros.

That's because the virtually unregulated Name, Image and Likeness money and wide-open transfer portal has transformed the college game into the NBA without guardrails. Kids chase the money now as avidly as the grownups do, and with fewer restraints. So the dynamic between the college game and the pro game, in terms of how a coach manages both the Xs-and-Os and the human beings charged with executing them, isn't much different.

Oh, you can still be a my-way-or-the-highway hardass, in college buckets. But with few exceptions -- Matt Painter's Purdue springs to mind, and Tom Izzo's Michigan State -- your players more than likely will choose the highway.

Because the highway's wide open these days. Plus it pays more.

That's why, in more and more places, rosters turn over almost entirely every year now. Even May, after winning a national title, was going to be bringing in a whole raft of newbies he would have had to integrate with the holdovers. But with the Mavericks?

He'll still have Cooper Flagg, the NBA Rookie of the Year. He'll still have, barring any trades, Kyrie Irving and Khris Middleton and Klay Thompson. None of them will be entering the transfer portal.

In that sense, then, the NBA actually offers less chaos and more control now for a head coach.  That's the polar opposite of  the Before Time, which is why so many prominent college coaches (Paging Mike Krzyzewski ... Paging Bob Knight ...) chose to stay at Western Northeastern Tech State rather than take the NBA's money and run.

Or as a longtime friend and former sportswriting colleague texted me when the news came down: "Who could have guessed five years ago that in 2026 the NBA would provide coaches with a more predictable, stable and desirable work environment than college basketball?"

Indeed.