Is John Calipari worth $120 million? Wrong question to ask
Is John Calipari worth the ludicrous amount of $120 million? The bigger question: Is Nets owner Mikhail Prokhorov willing to pay it?
As we become ever more desensitized to the money thrown around in professional sports, the words "John Calipari" and the number "$120 million" scan by in our news feed, and we barely blink.
The instinct may be to ask yourself, "Is John Calipari worth $120 million?" But that would be the wrong question to ask.
A better one: Is Mikhail Prokhorov willing to pay it? And the answer to that question is an unequivocal "yes."
In part, because he's Prokhorov, one of the richest humans on Earth with an albeit declining net worth of about $9 billion. (In other words, Prokhorov could buy and sell John Calipari 75 times.) Also, if Prokhorov has been willing to pay that much in luxury-tax payments alone since taking over as the oligarch of the Brooklyn Nets, what's another $120 million among friends?
“Coach Cal is a great coach," Prokhorov told reporters Monday, in a news conference explaining what happens now that GM Billy King has been deposed and coach Lionel Hollins fired. "But we won’t be discussing, today, any names. We’ll put a lot of names on the list."
There's only one name that matters, though, and it's Calipari.
He was an utter failure in a three-year stint as GM and head coach of the then-New Jersey Nets in the 1990s, creating an environment of not only unfulfilled expectations but also paranoia. From dispatching basketball operations employees to search the office for bugs to organizing talk-radio propaganda campaigns, Calipari's hubris was legendary. And that was when the Nets toiled in the hinterlands. The job, and the franchise, have since become much bigger deals in Brooklyn.
No bigger deal, mind you, than Cal's current job as the head coach at Kentucky, where he's been to four Final Fours, won a championship and coached some of the NBA's brightest stars. That's part of Calipari's allure, other than the nearly unimpeachable success he's had at Kentucky: If he's recruited and coached the likes of John Wall and DeMarcus Cousins before, he can do it again.
However this works out, there's no way for Calipari to lose. He'll either wind up neck-and-neck with the Knicks' Phil Jackson as the highest-paid executives in the league at $12 million a year (Gregg Popovich and Doc Rivers are close behind), or he'll stay in Lexington and get more prized recruits, another raise, or both as the result of the Nets' very public love affair with him.
The situation in Brooklyn is dire. Under Prokhorov, the franchise has mortgaged its future in trades that didn't work and lost the popular Jason Kidd to Milwaukee, of all places, resulting in a product that is adrift with no redeeming value other than its zip code. If you're wondering why Calipari would leave his kingdom in Kentucky for such hopelessness, $120 million is all you need to know.
Just don't ask yourself whether he's worth it. In sports, you're always worth what one person is willing to pay.
