RIO DE JANEIRO — Mike Krzyzewski said, “I’m old, I’d rather win by a lot,” after the U.S. men’s basketball team battled a bruising Australian club, trailing for much of the game before winning 98-88.

Krzyzewski is 69, so the first part is true, and he’s a basketball coach, so the latter is also probably true.

He’s also a competitor, an old point guard at West Point (where he was coached by Bob Knight). He’s a coach who took over at Duke in 1980, at just 33 years old with a pedigree no one knew and a name no one could pronounce. “I can’t even pronounce my name right,” he joked.

At Duke, Krzyzewski was surrounded by Dean Smith’s North Carolina on one side, Jim Valvano’s North Carolina State on the other. In two of his first three seasons the losses outnumbered the wins. He survived, then thrived (five national titles) and became the winningest coach in college basketball.

Eleven years ago, he was given the keys to USA Basketball and instructed to return the program to its winning, efficient ways. Two gold medals later, here he was on Wednesday, seeking a third but finding a game, a real game. Team USA trailed at halftime. They were tied in the fourth. They didn’t control the game until the final half-minute.

It was stressful. It was a stress test.

Krzyzewski has never lost an Olympic game as the national team coach, and he wasn’t looking to start now. So, sure, maybe another blowout would have been easier on his heart, but a game, a hanging-in-the-balance game, was better for his soul.

“I thought it was a heck of a win,” Krzyzewski said. “This is a really good night for us.”

Krzyzewski was soon talking about how this is always a learning process. A team of All-Stars is thrown together and it’s a mad scramble to build chemistry and communication and game flow. The U.S. has always had talent. The rest it sometimes lacked.

[Related: Draymond Green on Kyrie Irving’s clutch shot against Australia: ‘Too familiar and wayyyy too soon’]

Not anymore, and certainly not Wednesday, when the defense stepped up in the second half and the offense ran through the hot hands of Carmelo Anthony and Kyrie Irving. This was exactly what he was looking to see.

“Think about you’re on a highway, going 55, you’re in the right lane,” Krzyzewski said. “This game was in the left lane with no speed limit. So you’re reacting, and [that’s] how you learn to drive in that.”

Much as has been written and discussed about what Krzyzewski has done for USA Basketball – through force of personality and effectiveness of organization. What sometimes is forgotten is what USA Basketball has done for Krzyzewski.

It’s made him a better coach, a quicker coach, a coach capable of getting thrown out of the often 55-mph speed limit of college hoops and right into the Autobahn of NBA/international basketball, with varying styles and grown men stars and refs that don’t always bother to care what you think.

He long ago admitted this was mutually beneficial. There’s the chance to spend time with NBA coaches – his staff includes Minnesota Timberwolves coach Tom Thibodeau, considered the best defensive mind in the game. It’s given him the front-row challenge of learning the international game, often an incubator of innovation.

It’s even provided him access to the best players in the world, who, in return, have taught him parts of the game. He used to marvel at the mind of Jason Kidd when he was his Team USA point guard. Kidd is currently head coach of the Milwaukee Bucks.

He’s even, he swears, learned from the refs, which has to be a stunner up and down Tobacco Road.

“[I know some] American writers [won’t believe this, but] I’m more patient,” Krzyzewski said. “I make sure I can talk to the officials differently so I can try to learn from them, ‘why,’ instead of you don’t just attack them.

“There are nuances about the game that I think I’ve learned a lot from that that I don’t think my players have experienced. So in a timeout you have to explain, this is what just happened [in an international game]. It may not have happened in a NBA game, but it happened now and it’s right, it’s not wrong.”

[Related: Gary Russell’s brother helped him learn a painful Olympic lesson at age 12]

It’s helped in recruiting – being the national team coach, let alone LeBron’s coach for two Olympics, never hurts. And it’s helped him in game management: Duke is one of the rare college teams that routinely pulls off two-for-one clock management at the end of the half.

Since taking over for USA Basketball, at an age when college careers often slow, Krzyzewski’s career is still going strong, two more national titles.

Some of that is because of some of this.

“We don’t have much time to prepare our team, so we try to do things in a simple way and let them be instinctive,” he said of dealing with the quick turnarounds of this brief tournament, but echoing a style that can’t hurt when dealing with teenagers, especially in the NCAAs. “I thought today in the first half, [Australia] executes so well that their offense was just ahead of our defense. You have to talk quicker, be more decisive.”

The U.S. was. There was never any panic, just calm adjustments. It’s what everyone around this program – NBA coach or player alike – has come to expect.

“It’s not even one particular thing where you say, ‘He’s a great coach because he does this,’ ” Thibodeau said. “It’s how he does everything. How he runs practice, how he runs a film session. How he runs a game. He prepares you to play a game when things aren’t going your way. We just have to stay with the plan. We just have to do it better, do it harder.”

On Wednesday, Team USA team dealt with a big, physical Australian team and won. Krzyzewski moved to 78-1 as national team coach and is unbeaten since the 2006 world championships.

He wants to finish without another loss, wants to hand the keys off to Gregg Popovich next year with a three-gold-medal run going. So, yes, that would be nice if every game was a 50-point victory.

That isn’t a reality as the other teams keep improving; they can throw five NBA players out there, too.

“This is the real world now,” Krzyzewski said.

So no, he said, this wasn’t more fun. It was that challenge, that learning opportunity, that competition that makes everyone, even the old Hall of Famer, better. No matter what he said, he couldn’t hide the emotion that comes from a hard-fought win.

“Satisfying,” Krzyzewski said, finally finding the word. “Yes, satisfying.”

For everyone involved.

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