Following a ten-year stint, Larry Krystkowiak has been released by Utah Basketball. A large presence, Krystkowiak was born in Montana and starred for the Grizzlies at power forward, leading him towards a decade-long NBA career. His coaching career has taken him all over the board. He briefly served as the head coach of the Milwaukee Bucks and has been an NBA assistant for multiple teams. As head coach at Montana, his alma mater, he took the Grizzlies to an opening-round upset in the 2006 NCAA Tournament.
Krystkowiak took over at Utah in 2011 just as the program transitioned to the Pac-12. Things started very rough for the Utes, but Krystkowiak made them into a pretty solid program during his tenure. He engineered a stretch of five straight seasons finishing in the top 4 of the conference, including 2015’s run to the Sweet Sixteen. These last two seasons weren’t as successful, with a pair of eighth-place finishes, and their overall performance just wasn’t satisfactory.
Utah made just a pair of NCAA Tournaments during Krystkowiak’s decade at the helm, and the expectation for the next head coach will be a bit more consistent. It’s not easy to win in the Pac-12, especially with how down the conference has been in recent years, but it’s still a power conference job. The next head coach in Salt Lake City isn’t going to have unrealistic expectations, but will certainly be landing in a place where winning is possible. Krystkowiak certainly showed that during that Sweet Sixteen.
We’re going to run through a few potential candidates for the Utes as they begin their coaching hunt. In the current power structure of the Pac-12, not many people think of Utah as a basketball school, and this is clearly not the same program that Rick Majerus constructed some decades ago. It’s going to take an incredible bit of coaching to make the Utes competitive on a regular basis in this league, but it’s not an impossible feat.
Let’s start running through a few of the names that could pop up in connection to the Utah job.