With apologies to Delonte West, the most compelling LeBron James story of the past week has been the possibility of John Calipari leaving Kentucky and joining the King at his next NBA location. The college game’s most notorious coach teaming up with the world’s best player to create a supposed dream team — such ideas usually exist only in our imagination.

And there they should stay: it doesn’t make sense.

Let’s first acknowledge, in honor of Pete Carroll, that Calipari’s first attempt at coaching in the NBA did not go swimmingly. He went from Massachusetts to the New Jersey Nets, where he was fired in less than two and a half years. His overall NBA coaching record? 72-112.

But more important are Calipari’s coaching philosophy and ability.

Calipari’s attack is essentially the dribble-drive motion offense, which focuses on the talent of individual playmakers rather than the mechanisms of the team as a whole. This works well in college and high school, where there are large gaps in athleticism, but in the NBA, those disparities are lessened. As a result, it’s rare that you’ll see an NBA team use the dribble-drive motion offense as its predominant offensive strategy; rather, it’s an alternative to normal sets.

As for his acumen on the sideline: Calipari is no slouch, but he’s not a genius, either. His best talent has always been for recruiting, not for actual in-game coaching prowess, and the latter would have to be his focus in the NBA. Let’s not forget that our own Johnny Dawkins, in just his second year as a head coach and managing a severely talent-deficient roster, entirely undressed Calipari in Cancun last year.

Fundamentally, too, Calipari’s teams are known far more for their athletic ability than for their mechanics. With both his Memphis and Kentucky teams, there was a perpetual, ominous feeling that the wheels would come off. There’s only so much you can rely on natural talent before a sound squad exposes your flaws. In the 2008 National Championship game, Memphis missed four of five free throws down the stretch and lost in overtime; in the 2010 Elite Eight, Kentucky hit just 55 percent of its free throws and 12.5 percent of its three-point attempts in a close loss.

So let’s reexamine the LeBron issue. For five years, he has been playing for Mike Brown, a coach whose philosophy can best be described as “have four players stand around and let LeBron do what he wants.” The results have been fine for LeBron’s stat line, but it hasn’t brought Cleveland a championship. The problem is that one of the core aspects of the dribble-drive motion offense is to allow the ball-handler — often, LeBron — to create for himself while the other players do what they can to get open in case he needs to dish the rock. It’s an oversimplification, but doesn’t that sound strikingly like what he was doing before? Combine that with, again, Calipari’s less-than-amazing in-game coaching, and you have a situation that doesn’t appear entirely different from what has transpired in Cleveland over the past few seasons.

I’d imagine that the man behind this yet-to-be-realized partnership, NBA power broker William Wesley, believes that Calipari’s talent as a collegiate recruiter can be translated to the professional ranks, where he’ll be able to attract big-name free agents to join him and LeBron in whatever locale they choose. Remember, a large part of the problem in Cleveland was not just that the coaching was mediocre, but that the front office never built an adequate — much less above-average — supporting cast for LeBron.

But there are significant disparities between college and the NBA, many of which are entirely obvious on the surface. There is a limited amount of money that can be spent on free agents, and not everyone is available. Particularly with guaranteed contracts, the strategy for signing players is dramatically different than that of inking a high schooler to a letter of intent. Decisions made in the present can have drastic ramifications a decade down the road.

The point is this: strip away the name, and what do you have? A coach who failed in his first stint in the NBA, and who has a talent and a style far better suited for the collegiate game than the professional one.

The appeal escapes me.

Wyndam Makowsky just managed to squeeze a Pete Carroll dig into a basketball column. Congratulate him at makowsky “at” stanford.edu.