John Calipari won't fail again in NBA

— -- Jayson Williams is actively rooting for John Calipari to lose, and yes, this one is personal. As a New Jersey Nets power forward in a different life, Williams did not accept the coach's relentlessly abrasive approach. As a man who later faced charges connected to the accidental shooting death of his limo driver, Williams did not appreciate Calipari's choice to break from a largely supportive circle of past and present colleagues by publicly questioning his character.

So all these years later, with a 26-month prison stay behind him, the former Nets All-Star rooted for  Hampton in Kentucky's first NCAA tournament game and for  Cincinnati in the second. Williams will root for  West Virginia on Thursday night, and for any other opponent that might stop Calipari from completing the first 40-0 season in college basketball history.

"Cal kicked me when I was down," Williams said.

So when he ran into  Shabazz Napier, the former Connecticut guard who last April in the NCAA tournament denied Calipari his second national title at Kentucky, Williams hugged him and thanked him. Over the phone the other day, Williams wondered if NCAA detectives would ever chase Calipari back to the NBA and delete the same kind of records and memories they'd erased at  Memphis and Massachusetts.

It wasn't an unfair thought, not when you consider what then-Kentucky president Lee Todd revealed about Calipari's 2009 job interview while he stood on the floor of the Prudential Center in Newark, New Jersey, after the Wildcats advanced to the 2011 Final Four: "It was a three-hour conversation," Todd said, "and then he convinced me that this banner won't come down."

This morning, there's no evidence that John Calipari runs anything but a clean, mean fighting machine at Kentucky, and one serving as a worthy model for all. Basketball people love to point out that a team is a reflection of its coach, and even Calipari's most ardent detractors can't deny him the obvious or, as he'd say, steal his joy on this front. The Wildcats play hard, play unselfishly and even honor some virtues John Wooden forgot to include in his pyramid of success. That's got to say something encouraging about this 56-year-old version of Coach Cal, right?

If some familiar faces on his enemies list (it's a long one) don't quite see it that way, count Williams among them. He hated how Calipari berated Nets players and staffers over the coach's two-plus seasons in New Jersey from 1996 to '99 and how he'd mocked the player in his book, "Bounce Back," by saying he should've "done everything in my power to trade Jayson Williams. Heck, I would have traded him for a mascot."

So Williams doesn't want Kentucky to lose; he just wants Kentucky's coach to lose, even if the oddsmakers say he won't get his wish. And whether or not Calipari does go down in this tournament, he'll surely be part of the same post-dance dance he engaged in last year, when he negotiated with the  Cleveland Cavaliers before signing a $52 million extension to stay in Lexington, Kentucky, he wouldn't have signed had he known  LeBron James was taking his talents out of South Beach.

Calipari could stand among the most coveted NBA free agents this spring, and chances are owners will throw offers of obscene money and unlimited power at his desire to right his Jersey wrongs.

"Can you believe I got fired there?" Calipari still asks associates.

He failed with the Nets, failed miserably, and people who have known him a long time say it bothers the you-know-what out of him, and that a shot at a redemptive comeback might inspire him to leave the perfect job he now holds.

Williams said if he crosses paths with Calipari between now and then, theirs won't be a pleasant conversation. But in the most unlikely event they shake hands and make peace, Williams said he would offer this advice to Calipari on how to manage a successful return to the NBA:

"Let it be about the players this time. The NBA game isn't like college. This game is about the players, and you have to learn how to communicate with them. You have to know there's a big difference between talking to an 18-year-old and a 26-year-old."

Can Calipari figure out that difference? Has he already figured out that difference? Of course, it won't matter if Calipari remains at Kentucky and refuses to follow the lead of Rick Pitino, who left Lexington for a $50 million score with the  Boston Celtics he would come to regret.

But if Calipari does follow his outbound Wildcats to the NBA, the facts as we now know them suggest he'd be wildly successful when measured against his Nets standards, if not his Kentucky standards. Truth is, the odds of Calipari joining his mentor, Larry Brown, as coaches who won titles in college and in the pros would be exponentially better than the odds of Calipari again starting a season 3-17 and getting humiliated like he was after a blowout loss at Miami in 1999, when the Nets owner about to fire him, Lew Katz, marched him to the waiting Cadillac that would whisk him away while reporters watched.

If Calipari is as smart as this 36-0 Kentucky team has made him look, he won't commit the not-so-venial basketball sins he committed on his first go-round in the NBA. Some of his mistakes were staggering, none more so than the first one he made on draft night in 1996.