Karl's In Charge

When word came down that Carmelo Anthony had been suspended for a game for a “transgression” against the team, it didn’t surprise me. After all George Karl is the coach. Reportedly, Anthony refused to come out of the game when Karl said to. Really? Nobody seems to be asking the real question. What kind of relationship do you have with a player when he can look you in the face and refuse to come out of a game? Even worse, if you have to stoop to suspending your best player to try to prove some kind of point, how much control do you really have? How much do your players really respect you? Obviously very little.
Somehow this man always seems to escape media scrutiny when his teams underachieve and fall flat on their faces. It’s always the players fault huh? I’ve seen this before. I was still living in my home state of Wisconsin during part of Karl’s tenure with the Milwaukee Bucks. Remember the Big Three? No, not the Celtics Big Three. I mean Glenn “Big Dog” Robinson, Sam Cassell, and Ray Allen. It was a beautiful combination. Robinson and Allen both average above 20 points and Cassell was just under 20. They fell a missed Robinson mid-range jumper (he never ever used to miss those) from playing the Lakers in the 2001 finals instead of Allen Iverson and the 76ers. They figured this team couldn’t win a championship together so what did they do? Traded Big Dog, followed by Ray Allen and finally Cassell, before they finally fired George Karl. If only they would have realized that maybe he was the problem in the first place.
Fast forward to the Denver Nuggets of 2007-2008. The team won 50 games—and I mean 50 games on the dot. They were swept out of the playoffs and the best reason people could come up with was Allen Iverson and Carmelo Anthony don’t play well together. Word? They were they third and fourth leading scorers in the league averaging 26.4 and 25.7 respectively. Who in the hell ever has two scorers in the top four in the same year? That’s bananas. Oh, and there was the other reason—they just don’t play any defense. Word? You have Marcus Camby and Kenyon Martin as your center and power forward but your team just mysteriously doesn’t play any defense? Oh, ok. It couldn’t have anything to do with the coach could it? I believe that if Allen Iverson, Carmelo Anthony, Kenyon Martin, and Marcus Camby are four of your starting five and you get swept in the first round of the playoffs, then Coach, something is wrong with you.
I admit, I drank the kool-aid early on, too. The man had a very nice run with the Gary Payton and Sean Kemp-led Seattle Supersonics of the nineties. In retrospect though, maybe Gary Payton did a lot more coaching on the floor than we can imagine. Consider: since he was ousted from Seattle in 1998, he has only led two teams to at least 50 wins. That’s two out of ten!
Now, the Denver Nuggets are in transition again. Chauncey Billups is still “Mr. Big Shot” and they seem to have potential. The problem is, nobody seems to notice that their coach can’t get along with his players. None of them. Ever. At some point, you’d think someone would realize that maybe it’s him. Eventually Denver will fire him, and they’ll probably win after that. The funny thing is, someone else will probably hire him and immediately see their team make zero progress and ultimately regress. I’ll sit back and shake my head and laugh because I know… no NBA team will ever win when Karl’s in Charge.

Bohannon Deshannon