Pick any sport at the Division I level and you’ll find very few degrees of separation between most of its head coaches.
Sometimes, the path-crossing spans entire hemispheres.
That’s certainly the case with the last two Arkansas basketball coaches. When most fans think of Eric Musselman and John Calipari, they reminisce on their annual battles on the hardcourt leading the Razorbacks and Wildcats, respectively. Or, of course, how Calipari succeeded Musselman in Fayetteville after the latter headed to USC for a list of reasons that’s still unspooling to this day.
But that wasn’t the first time Calipari succeeded Musselman as the head coach of a high-level basketball team.
Fourteen years ago, Musselman was still working his way back into the coaching ranks after getting sacked in Sacramento when he came across a couple coaching gigs involving foreign national teams.
First, it was Team China at the 2009 Adidas Nations camp/tournament. Not long afterward, he ran across an opportunity to helm the Dominican Republic national team thanks to a couple of long-time friends.
Scott Roth, his teammate in high school, had coached that team 2007-08. A few years before that, so had Keith Smart, his former assistant in Golden State who’d later follow him to Fayetteville.
Musselman ended up leading the Dominicans in 2010-2011 and assumed he’d stay on for longer. But a phone call out of the blue from John Calipari, then near at the height of a coaching stint at Kentucky that included the below ejection against Arkansas, put an end to that presumption.
The Dominican Republic Comes Calling
“He said, ‘Hey, can you send me all your notes on the Dominican national team?’”
When Musselman asked him to elaborate, Calipari informed him he was coaching the squad now. “Well, I got a contract. I helped guide us to the pre Olympics,” a thoroughly flummoxed Musselman recalled saying on a recent released Burning Sage podcast.
Musselman has told the nuts and bolts of this story before but in this interview he let loose with a previously unreported nugget: in that phone conversation in 2011, he recalls Calipari responding: “Well, my buddy bought the national team for the summer. And I’m like, ‘I have never heard of this’ whole buying-a-national-team-thing. (Nor have we, Muss.)
In the end, it all worked out. Nobody’s feelings got too hurt as, just a week later, Musselman nabbed a higher-paying gig coaching the Venezuelan national team. Calipari, in turn, ultimately got what he wanted too.
Karl-Anthony Towns, a nearly 6-foot-10 man-child out of New Jersey, joined his Dominican national squad the next summer at the tender age of 15. In the following years, Towns would go on to star for Calipari at Kentucky as an eventual No. 1 NBA Draft pick.
On top of all that, Musselman and Calipari got to hang out in the same hotel during the 2012 Olympics qualifiers. “We kind of gravitated to eat together at certain meals,” Musselman said in 2024. “I don’t know about Cal’s Spanish, mine’s probably a little better than his.”
He added: “I look at him as a friend and mentor, somebody that you seek advice from when you need it.”
So, Seriously: Cal’s Friend “Bought” a National Team?
It’s unknown exactly what Musselman meant by someone “buying” the national team, but it’s worth noting a large company made a significant investment into the Dominican Republic national team in 2011.
A blog post from that era, which was written in Spanish, quoted then-national team director Hector Baez mentioning the “Najri Group.” That is likely referring to Empresas Najri, a diversified conglomerate based in the country. Their COO was Eduardo Najri, who was later quoted as the national team’s general manager in announcements about Calipari’s hire.
Details beyond that are fuzzy, but it isn’t inconceivable that a business person opted to throw a lot of money at the team in a push to make the 2012 Olympics — especially considering the Dominicans had four NBA players on their team at the time, not to mention a young Karl-Anthony Towns. It helped that Calipari had also likely gotten wind of Karl-Anthony Towns from his long-time assistant Orlando Antigua, a Dominican trailblazer with the Harlem Globetrotters whose brother had coached the young phenom in New York City.
It’s unclear if Najri had a prior relationship with Calipari, but if he was looking for the best coach possible, the Kentucky coach would have been at or near the top of such a list. Calipari was at the peak of his powers then, coming off a Final Four run in his second year with the Wildcats in 2011. In the three years prior to that, he reached the Elite Eight in Year 1 at Kentucky, plus the Sweet 16 and national championship game in his last two years at Memphis.
There would have been very little debate at the time about Calipari’s status in the basketball world. And if Cal did make a decision to coach a brand-new team thanks to a very successful businessman/friend, that would be far from the last time.
Despite all the high hopes for the Dominican Republic squad, the team wasn’t good enough to overcome the likes of Canada and make the 2012 Olympics in London. Although the British were given an outside shot of finishing in the top 6 of that Olympics based on a list of uk online casinos, they actually finished 9th. But the British even qualifying for a normal Olympics was as unlikely as the Dominicans making it.
As it was with Great Britain, it may take a most unlikely Olympic Games to one day be held in San Domingo for this island nation ever to make the Big Dance on the international scene.
Andrew Hutchinson contributed to the above.
Musselman gets more into what Calipari had in store for him on the DR team here:
CurryHicksSage’s full interview with Eric Musselman is available here for a one-time fee of $3. Hear Muss talk more about his time at Arkansas, including the infamous Muss Bus Twitter controversy with Hunter Yurachek.
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