The most common way to reference the accomplishments of Duke's Mike Krzyzewski, whom every reasonable observer recognizes as one of the greatest coaches in college basketball history, is to recite the numbers.

Three NCAA titles, 10 Final Fours, nine ACC championships, 735 career victories, 12 national coach of the year awards (from eight different seasons), five ACC coach of the year honors, etc.

As with other elite coaches and players, though, Coach K's greatness can't possibly be capsulized simply by running off a long list of perfectly quantifiable accomplishments.

Perhaps you have your own top-five list of what makes Krzyzewski great. (Of course, depending on your colors, perhaps you want to puke at the thought of such a thing.) Two items on my personal list are (1) the consistency of effort, passion and aggression among his Duke teams at home AND on the road, and (2) the unmistakable pattern (with some exceptions) of his best players getting better -- and often a LOT better -- during the course of their careers in Durham.

Senior guard J.J. Redick is the most recent Duke player to illustrate the latter point. Even last year, when he was the ACC player of the year and a consensus first-team All-American, Redick was discounted by many fans as "just a shooter." (I have about 1,000 e-mails from last March along those lines.) That was a bad argument then. It's an embarrassing, indefensible argument now.

Category -- J.J. 2004-05 -- J.J. 2005-06

Points per game -- 21.8 -- 25.8

FG percentage -- 40.8 -- 50.0

3-pt. percentage -- 40.3 -- 43.8

2-pt. percentage -- 41.5 -- 56.5

These are enormous, dramatic, incredible improvements in very important statistical categories. The change in shooting percentages, especially, is something you don't see often, even among players with a lot more room for improvement.

These things simply don't happen by chance. They happen because Redick is a very self-motivated individual who worked extremely hard over the summer to improve his ability to drive past aggressive defenders for high-percentage shots. They happen, too, because Duke's coaching staff has a pretty good batting average when it comes to recruiting high-achieving personalities, then pushing those players very hard via an impressive combination of basketball expertise and motivational methods.

Every ACC basketball fan has seen plenty of examples of talented players who looked similar as freshmen and as seniors.

It's a credit to Duke, and to Redick, that he's exponentially better as a senior than he was as a freshman, and he's even made large leaps from a year in which he was a unanimous, first-team All-American.