In these comments, do not look for the usual huge amount of detail and proof that you see in the ordinary releases here at Nuggets 1. Some of this is more like everyday conversation than like top quality sports writing. On the other hand, some of the comments do include some detailed reasoning and proof that I pride myself on in the primary reports I release.
______________________________________
LATE APRIL 2008 FORUM COMMENTARY ON THE NUGGETS, ESPECIALLY ABOUT THEIR MISTAKES
In the economy there are banks that are "too big to fail". No matter how bankrupt a huge bank might secretly be, it has to be bailed out or the entire financial system/economy would be in some jeopardy.
Similarly, Karl may be too big to be fired. In other words, his resume is so long and his roots in the upper echelons of the basketball world are so deep, that he is among the coaches who are "too big to be fired." If so, the Nuggets are going to pay a monumental price for that stupid tradition.
What gets me is that had the Sonics not been such a deep and great team while Mr. Karl was coaching them, Karl never would have been hired by the Nuggets in the first place.
______________________________________________
The Nuggets were at least +4 games in the lucky win vs unlucky loss sweepstakes, so they were really a 46-36 team. Remember, for example, Kleiza's shot at the buzzer in Sacramento around Christmas? Remember the Wolves game where the Wolves outplayed the Nuggets by far but were cheated by bad calls late?
The Nuggets won the great majority of the games when they had a sane PG situation, which could either be AC playing well against a poor or at most a medium team, or else AI taking over the PG position despite being assigned to the other guard spot.
But when the Nuggets were playing against a good defense, and when AI decided he had to be a scorer first and a distributor second, this combo left the Nuggets with no point guards for all practical purposes, which resulted in virtually automatic losses.
_____________________________________________
They quit, so the question is why did they quit? How about the fact that GK has monthly win quotas, and is always quick with reasons why the Nuggets can not beat this or that team in this or that situation? Sorry, but no coach should ever be planting the seeds of doubt by being anything other than totally confident and believing that the team will win. If you are a coach and you think your team is going to lose, keep it to your damn self, because if you plant the seeds of doubt, they grow up to be the weeds of quitting.
______________________________________________
The rumors are that they will side with Karl, so if you thought this year was bad, wait til next season, when the Nuggets will probably be more disfunctional still and will not be able to make the playoffs.
I think there are two unwritten rules that usually apply in a situation like this:
1. The owner/front office will rarely if ever listen to any player other than whoever is considered to be the most important player.
2. The owner/front office may or may not choose to listen to whoever is considered to be the most important player on the team with respect to who coaches the team.
So the next question for this situation is, who is officially the most important player on the Nuggets right now? Allen Iverson is. One clever way you can tell who is considered the most important player on a team that is in the playoffs is by going to videos at nba.com and seeing whose press conferences are uploaded and whose are not. Iverson's press conference is there but Melo's is not, so someone really important in the Nuggets franchise decided that Iverson is more important than Anthony and that Anthony's press conference does not count for much.
Quite frankly, if it's not posted at nba.com, what someone says at a press conference doesn't mean much. What someone says in the locker room to a reporter means even less.
Furthermore, it is very easy to see who Karl thinks is the most important player. Karl has allowed Iverson to decide how to play without interference or direction, and specifically has allowed Iverson to decide in each game how to divide his efforts between scoring and distributing. On the other hand, he has continued, as in years prior, to try to change Anthony's root style of play, with mixed results:
1. Karl has insisted that Anthony take fewer shot attempts and score fewer points.
2. Karl has insisted that Anthony attempt more layups and fewer jump shots.
3. Karl has insisted that Anthony make more rebounds.
4. Karl has insisted that Anthony work harder on defense.
5. Karl has insisted that Anthony pass out of double teams and single but tough coverage down low situations more than his inclination to do that would be.
Melo being Melo, he has tried to follow all of these instructions. He failed at some of these adjustments, succeeded at others but, most importantly, both him and his team ended up with nothing to show for this "Remold Melo into a More Well Rounded Player" project. If the objective was to make the Nuggets competitive in the playoffs, the project was doomed to be a failure from the get go, because a basketball team is not a collection of independent personalities and basketball styles the way Karl conceives it to be, but it is a product on the court where the sum total is supposed to be greater than the sum of the parts. In other words, for example, how well the Spurs or the Lakers play is greater than the sum total of how "good" their players are, because they coordinate their players with various strategies and tactics.
So Melo followed instructions and the Nuggets came up empty, the opposite of what he was told would happen if he followed them.
As lame as the Melo situation is, the overall situation is even worse than that. Since Iverson and not Melo is considered the most important player on the Nuggets right now, he and he alone can try to persuade the Nuggets to get Karl to retire. But Iverson has been treated as if he was Jesus by Karl, and has been given total carte blanche to play any way he wants. Needless to say, AI never had as much respect with no strings attached and as much freedom to play as he wishes as he has received since coming to the Nuggets. So what are the odds that Iverson is going to try to persuade the Nuggets franchise to replace Karl, who is undoubtadly Iverson's favorite coach of all time? It obviously would be a huge surprise if that were to happen.
The final question to ask in this situation is what role, if any, did Karl play in bringing about this horrible situation? Karl, despite never achieving complete mastery over how basketball teams win games, has one of the longest pro and semi-pro coaching resumes in existence and as a result is considered to be one of the more prominent coaches from an overall stature perspective. If you had to bet, you would bet that Karl has been around the block so many times that he knew a long, long time ago that he could protect himself from being fired by (a)making sure that Iverson rather than Anthony was considered to be the most important player on the Nuggets, thereby reducing to the bare minimum any chance that he could be fired even if Melo went ballistic after Melo discovered that he had nothing to show for his "remolding," and (b)allowing Iverson to play any way he chose, thus reducing to about zero the chance that Iverson would ever call for a new coach in Denver.
Carmelo Anthony was too mellow to be aware of how Karl gave the Nuggets over to Iverson lock, stock, and barrel and how that would leave him out in the cold when it became time to debate whether new coaches should come in.
In other words, and in short, Carmelo Anthony has been jerked around and checkmated by George Karl, who has apparently become a master at avoiding being fired while failing at his job. Iverson may not know it, but he is also checkmated because obviously, he will never win a Championship in Denver while wasting away his final years there, whereas there must be at least 6 teams that would take him and where he would have a real chance of winning a Championship. The franchise is of course also checkmated, doomed to not only suffer as many more futile seasons as Karl has left in his contract, but also most likely doomed to become a losing team again in the very near future.
How soon the Nuggets will become a losing team, and how bad they will become, and how many seasons they will be a losing team, will be largely determined by whether or not they make a bad situation worse by over blaming key players for the mess and then trading them away on the cheap. The Nuggets like all teams need to make trades, but they don't need to make stupid trades that are motivated by blaming players for not being able to correct the coaching mistakes. It can be very tempting to make a bad situation worse by casting around the blame much farther than the blame really goes.
Carmelo Anthony, Allen Iverson, Marcus Camby, the rest of the players, and the Denver franchise are checkmated and trapped. In one word, they are:
L O S T
______________________________________________
Yeah, isn't it interesting how Carmelo Anthony in the off season while playing for different coaches is considered one of the best basketball players in the world, while during the NBA season he is considered a borderline all-star player and more or less a playoff failure? Something just isn't quite right about that, but most of us here know the cause of that little mystery.
______________________________________________
Why isn't there an award for being the most underachieving??? It's not easy to be the most underachieving. You have to have a team loaded with talent but way short on other stuff. I'm serious. Well, half serious, anyway.
_______________________________________________
If Karl returns and there are no new assistant coaches, it's time to expand your horizons if you are a basketball maniac and a Nuggets fan. For example, it may be time to become a fan of one of the Eastern teams while remaining a fan of the Nuggets for the future. How about the Hawks, who are a fantastic young team and are right now evening up their series with the Celtics 2 games a piece?
________________________________________________
EXTREMELY IMPORTANT COMMENT MADE BY ANOTHER FORUM PERSON:
But we have never assembled a team with players this good. Everyone involved in this organization willl regret these years someday. An oppurtunity this organization may not have for a very,very long time- bieng wasted. It's sad.
My comment was simply: "Agreed 100%."
________________________________________________
At least fire the old codger Doug Moe.
Seriously though, the front office is pathetic if they truly think GK knows how to win basketball games against the top 1/4 (8 teams) of the NBA.
________________________________________________
Almost everything in this post is wrong; see my previous posts for many detailed reasons.
The Nuggets have almost no system, very few strategies, very few tactics, and no set plays to speak of, so about all they have is selfish individual play. Wangju, you are arguing that the players should coach themselves and create a system for themselves that would be reasonable. That is asinine. Coaches may not be paid as much as players are, but they are played more than enough money to PREVENT what the Nuggets became.
I ask you Wangju, what are the coaches responsible for, if anything, in your world?
