Nugget's Strategy is a Loser; Spurs Win 96-89

The Spurs did the same things they did in game 3 and so did the Nuggets, so the result was the same, a Spurs win that was bigger than the score makes it look, 96-89. The Spurs now have a 3-1 stranglehold on the best of 7 series and will likely close out the Nuggets on Wednesday night in San Antonio. For alot of detail on how the Spurs win games, read my game reports for games 2 and 3, especially the report on game 3. For alot of detail on why the Nuggets were basically blown out in this series despite being a more athletic and talented team, read on here.

In sports, as in life, if you think you are going to lose, you will lose, and you will almost always lose in sports if you are playing an experienced opponent who knows exactly how to win. Let's look at five of the self defeating assumptions that the Denver Coach and possibly others in the Nugget's organization came up with. First, George Karl, at the least, and maybe others in the front office, thought the Nuggets were doomed in the playoffs many months ago. In their book, the Nuggets were simply not disciplined and experienced enough to be able to win in the playoffs this year. Second, they assumed that there was not enough time to integrate Iverson onto the team. Third, they assumed that the team lacks "mental toughness," and I am not completely sure what they have been talking about, but I will make an educated guess later in this report. Fourth, they assumed that Melo's obsession with scoring has to be eliminated at all costs. So Karl criticised the League scoring leader in public, in the newspapers, only to have to later backtrack in public when he realized what a mistake going public was. Fifth, Karl and maybe some others assumed that all of the acrobatics that the Nugget's Coach went through with the lineup and the rotations were worthless, and that the Nuggets had about the worst bench in basketball. They also assumed the Spurs were probably the most unbeatable team in the League, so that the only way to keep the series respectable would be to abandon the bench and go with Melo and A.I. for well over 40 minutes a game, while at the same time having no plan and no desire to have either one of them dominate and attempt to take over games.

Every one of these assumptions was clearly a blunder. First of all, as the Warriors are now proving against the Mavericks, it is stupid to assume in advance that you can most likely not win a best of 7 game series against a great team. Nothing is written in stone in sports, and if you can unleash the talent on your team, and you have the will to win, you can defeat with athleticism and energy a very experienced and knowledgeable team. The fact that the Warriors are beating the Mavericks just makes being stuck with Karl even more miserable than it already is, because the Warriors are playing more or less like the Nuggets were playing in the first half of the season, until George "Scrooge" Karl, focusing on the negatives only and forgetting about the positives of that style, lowered the boom and banned that style of play.

Second, the assumption that Iverson could not be fully integrated on the team was not based on any logic that I know, but it turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophesy. Iverson was fully integrated on the team only during an eight game stretch in late February and early March, when he was the point guard. Give Iverson something to do and he will do it. In this game, Iverson ended up confused as to exactly what he was to do, which is logical since the Nuggets did not really have set offensive plays to speak of, particulary ones started by someone other than Blake.

Following game 4, sports writers such as Hollinger at ESPN were left to give their opinions as to what Iverson should have done, such as getting the ball to Melo more, especially in the 4th quarter. But how quickly Hollinger and others forget that Melo was no longer supposed to be the go-to guy under Karl's ruinous plans. In fact, Iverson was doing exactly what Karl wanted, which was to try to score in isolation as much as possible. In the end, Karl didn't trust anyone on his team to score, except for Iverson and Melo, and I guess he figured: why bother to develop a good set of offensive plays when no one except A.I. and Melo can score?

Neither the Nuggets nor Iverson magically played better immediately when Iverson was starting at the point at the end of the winter, but since this was just one of George Karl's many little experiments and was not allowed to continue long enough to produce real results, we will never know whether it would have produced big results or not, unless it is tried again next season. Steve Blake is a George Karl kind of player, to say the least. He's as steady and dependable as they come, he works hard in practice, understands the basics of the game well, does exactly what he is instructed to do by the coaches, and is as unselfish as you can get. He is the kind of player that makes life easy on a coach. Unfortunately, he is about the last kind of player you want facing the mighty San Antonio Spurs in the playoffs. The Spurs made mincemeat of Blake in game 4, stealing the ball from him 4 times and pressuring him to miss every one of his 6 shots except for one. Blake who had 2 points, 4 assists and the 4 turnovers in 35 minutes, was utterly demolished by the Spurs. George Karl can talk about mental toughness, a professional team, and not quitting all he wants, but there is, in the end, no excuse for having Blake as a 35 minute starter against the Spurs, when there was the obvious alternative of having A.I. play the point and J.R. and Kleiza share the shooting guard spot.

With regard to the third mistake, to me, that mental toughness thing sounds like more of a coaching thing than a player thing, but I will try my best here. The term brings to mind whether you can make quick decisions based on knowledge, and make those decisions in tough situations. So with players, the mental toughness thing would be whether they can execute in high pressure situations or not. If they know what to do and do it, then they are mentally tough. However, if they don't know what to do, but are ready to do what they think is the right thing to do, then they still would be "mentally tough," but not ready to play the Spurs, because they don't know what to do to beat them. In other words, mental toughness sounds like it is, at best, half of what is needed. So why does George Karl use the term "mental toughness" over and over again? I don't know, because it's only a small part of what is needed, and harping on that without talking about and adding in the knowledge, strategy, and tactics that should go with that seems very lame. The strategies and tactics are the cake and the mental toughness is the icing.

Fourth, in response to his Coach's worry that he was too obsessed with scoring and was not doing enough of the other things, Melo did everything he was instructed to do and look where it got him. Nowhere. He's in the same boat as the other years, a very quick first round exit. But if Denver's objective was to make Melo seem mature and ready to contribute and fit in well on another team, they could not have done a better job.

Melo ramped down his shooting and often looked to pass the ball to someone who looked open, at least at the moment he passed it anyway. He rebounded more, played some defense, went after some steals and loose balls, and brought on his 3-point shot very late in the season to replace some of the 3-point shooting that J.R. was making earlier in the season.

As I warned several weeks ago, Melo was not going to be available at crunch time under the George Karl approach and, sure enough, he was not available to dominate in the 4th quarter in this game. In the 4th, Melo made a jumper, missed a jumper and a three, made an alley-oop dunk, and was blocked by Bowen. In accordance with instructions, Melo was sharing the wealth with A.I., Blake and the bench rusty J.R. Smith, but without the kinds of set plays and rhythm that might have made sense out of that approach. Karl removed Melo as the dominant option on offense, but did not fully construct an offense to utilize the combination of players he wanted to use, which was A.I., Melo, Nene, Camby, and Blake at point guard.

Melo, unlike Iverson, doesn't understand that some coaches don't really know what they are doing in some respects. Yet.

I have described the fifth big mistake, deciding that the bench is worthless in advance, many times in prior game reports, so I am not going to repeat myself here. I just want to remind folks that the flip side of not playing your bench much is that your starters have to play with very few breathers, which will usually leave them more tired than the other team's stars in crunch time. Sure enough, many who saw the game were in agreement that A.I. and Melo looked pretty weary when the game was on the line in the 4th quarter, compared with Parker and Duncan.

Why would you play anyone over 40 minutes but not want them to try to dominate a game? It's either one or the other, isn't it? If you don't want a player to try to dominate a game, you don't play him for 40 or 45 minutes!

Meanwhile, Don Nelson, Coach of the Warriors, told Baron Davis to dominate and, by golly, Baron Davis is dominating. Nelson is playing Davis, Stephen Jackson, and Jason Richardson for more than 40 minutes a game, but he makes room for 4 players in the 20's for minutes and Al Harrington's minutes are in the teens. So he has 8 players in the active rotation, whereas the Nuggets have had basically 7 players in the active rotation. And the Nugget's 7th man keeps changing, which is a killer. Just as or more importantly, Nelson has not tried to limit or contain how his players like to play, let alone tried to get them to play like the team that is supposedly so much better than they are. As a result, the Warriors are in fact playing the way they want to, which is most of the time the best way to play. The Warriors could not care less about trying to copy how the Mavericks play, whereas Karl has the Nuggets engaged in a ridiculous effort to play more like the Spurs and less like the Nuggets played during the very successful early days of this season.

I was just listening to Denver sports radio, and they warned their listeners that they would look down on anyone who called in and tried to blame the Nuggets flame-out on the Coach. The sportscaster claimed that anyone who thinks that way is being too simplistic. Well, if you can explain the mistakes that the coach has made in detail, and you don't see other coaches doing those things, then I would hardly call it too simplistic to blame the Coach. The real reason they don't want callers to blame the Coach on the radio is that they know that George Karl is untouchable, and will be coaching the Nuggets next year come hell or high water. And their station is owned by "The Lincoln Financial Group," which sounds like the kind of company that would be closely associated with the real estate and sports companies run by the very rich owner of the Nuggets.

The owner of the Nuggets, Stanley Kroenke, is a successful business person, and he is not known for second guessing his decisions. His decision was to give a multi-year contract to George Karl, and Kroenke is not a basketball expert per se. So we are most likely stuck with Karl for at least another season, and likely for several more seasons, until Karl himself puts himself and the Nuggets out of their misery and retires. The Denver front office, which takes it's cues from the owner, would probably not be able to persuade Kroenke to fire Karl unless the Nuggets were to become a major losing team. When the Nuggets were 35-36 after they were blown out in Phoenix with the starters playing almost all of the minutes, I was half expecting that they would miss the playoffs and finish with a losing record and that, with some luck, Karl might be fired, leading to a fresh opportunity for a huge season for 2007-08. But then the talented Nuggets caught a bunch of teams with injuries, and/or slumping, and/or with a poor coach or two, and won 10 of their last 11 games, which destroyed any chance for Karl to be fired this year. I am afraid we are stuck with him, just as much as Mr. Karl will forever be stuck with a goose egg next to his name in the number of titles won chart.

There is a a pro football coach who, like Karl, wins often in the regular season, only to inevitably lose in the playoffs because his team is playing too conservatively or, in other words, playing not to lose instead of playing to win. His name is Marty Schottenheimer. He is now a former pro football coach, because the feisty owner of the San Diego Chargers, who is probably even more rich than the owner of the Denver Nuggets, bought out Schottenheimer's contract after Schottenheimer's Chargers bowed out in this past season's NFL playoffs in the first round, even though they were one of the 2 or 3 most athletic and talented teams in football and were projected to go to and probably win the Super Bowl. Getting rid of Schottenheimer cost the Charger's owner 4 million dollars, but winning or at least getting to the Super Bowl is so important to that guy that he was willing to pay that price to bring in a new coach who is not so timid and dogmatic. (The Chargers have Norv Turner as their head coach now, who is about as different from Schottenheimer as you can get.)

The Nuggets might win game 5, because they are loaded with talent, but I no longer see how they can win this series unless there is a miracle. So, most likely, all that is left this season for fans of the real Denver Nuggets style is to root for the Golden State Warriors, or the Phoenix Suns if you want to be a snob about it.

Najera played 15 minutes and was 3/5 and 0/1 on 3's for 6 points, and he had 3 rebounds and 1 steal.

Kleiza played 17 minutes and was 0/2 and 0/1 on 3's for 0 points, and he had 3 rebounds and 1 assist. Although Kleiza won about 4 games for the Nuggets this year, he has been largely a non-factor in the series due to limited minutes, due to not having the green light to take alot of 3-pointers, and due to the lack of set offensive plays that involve him.

Blake played 35 minutes and was 1/6 and 0/2 on 3's for 2 points, and he had 4 assists and 3 rebounds.

J.R. Smith played 14 minutes and was 1/5 and 0/4 on 3's for 2 points, and he had 2 assists, 2 steals, and 2 rebounds. The stranglehold that was put on Smith's minutes since the all-star break led to a huge waste of his talent and abilites in this series. Smith's post all-star break playing time was starved just enough to render him unable to resurrect, in brief minutes in this series, the big scoring punch he provided in November and December. The Nuggets were 2 of 16 from beyond the arc in this game, with only Melo connecting from there, while the Spurs were 8 of 25.

Nene played 40 minutes and was 7/9 and 4/5 from the line for 18 points, and he had 7 rebounds, 3 assists, and 1 steal.

Camby played 35 minutes and was 5/8 for 10 points, and he had 17 rebounds, 4 blocks, and 3 assists.

A.I. played 45 minutes, virtually the whole game, and was 9/15, 0/3 on 3's, and 4/5 from the line for 22 points, and he had 7 assists and 1 steal.

Carmelo Anthony played 38 minutes and was 11/18, 2/5 on 3's, and 5/6 from the line for 29 points, and he had 6 rebounds and 3 assists.

The next game, which will be game 5 of the series, will be in San Antonio Wednesday, May 2 at 6 pm Mountain Daylight Time.