The Nuggets are just a jumble of disappointment and sadness
“Never have the Nuggets entered the first round more heavily favored over an opponent. Never have they won so many regular season games. Never have they seemed as talented or as deep. Never have the odds been better of the Nuggets advancing to at least the second round. Never have our expectations been so far from being met”
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I don’t envy beat writers and newspaper columnists. They work on a deadline. After a dizzying playoff series elimination like the one we witnessed last night, the pros must rapidly organize their thoughts, craft them into decipherable sentences and forward the results along to their editors in time for publication – be it in the print edition or on the web. I have been trying to sort out my feelings since game six ended and I am still having difficulty finding the words to adequately summarize my views after the most crushing series loss in Nuggets post-season history.
Never have the Nuggets entered the first round more heavily favored over an opponent. Never have they won so many regular season games. Never have they seemed as talented or as deep. Never have the odds been better of the Nuggets advancing to at least the second round. Never have our expectations been so far from being met.
They could not have been beaten in a worse way last night in Oakland. Every possible factor contributed in making the results of game six stunning. It featured lapses on defense, failures to convert on offense, questionable lineup decisions, poorly crafted plays, laziness and terrible officiating all in one jumble of disappointment. The “what-ifs” are too many to imagine. The game could have pivoted differently in a thousand different ways. The series could have, too. Ultimately, though, a win is a win and a loss is a loss and the pointing of fingers is an exercise is futility.
There’s a new era in the Western Conference and, despite having spun on the precipice of inclusion for a decade, the Nuggets remain on the outside looking in. The Lakers have a lot of questions and the Spurs are growing old. But, instead of the young Nuggets being heirs, the conference has been inherited by the Thunder and the Clippers, the Grizzlies and the Warriors. Teams have come from nowhere to push the Nuggets aside in the race to relevance.
A superstar was born in the first round of this year’s playoffs. His name is Stephan Curry and against the Nuggets he demonstrated the value of having a true “hit man”. Curry was a sniper the likes of which the Nuggets have always lacked and the fact that the Warriors had him and the Nuggets didn’t was the real difference in the series, whether anybody wants to admit it or not. Perhaps there’s not room for a player who can dominate a series single-handedly in George Karl’s theory of “teamness”, but it’s more evident than ever that, in the NBA, you’ve got to have one. That being the case, it can only stand to reason that Karl’s way doesn’t work.
How much more evidence can the Nuggets possibly need to see?
George Karl cannot survive this loss. He’s old, he’s tired. His message is completely lost and, worse, he’s wrong. Karl abides by theories that simply do not work and we have seen evidence of it time and time again. By Monday he should be relieved of his duties as the head coach of the Denver Nuggets. Hopefully there’s a way that the team can keep him around in advisory role similar to the one Doug Moe played early in Karl’s tenure. But, if he insists on continuing to coach, Karl should be asked to do so somewhere else. There’s no more room for the argument that the Nuggets can’t find a coach with his experience. We have reached the point where chance for the sake of change is a better option than stagnation for the sake of stagnation.
The Nuggets might need to fall off, even miss the playoffs for a few years, before they can recover from removing Karl. But returning the playoffs again next year … and the year after that .. and the year after that and experiencing the same results doesn’t seem like an option anymore. At some point the team must make the painful decision to move forward – even if it means taking a big risk. Under Karl they have been a factor for a decade but they’ve never gotten over the hump. There’s no reason to think that they ever will. They consistently risk nothing and are rewarded with the same.
To a large extent it’s the NBA that’s flawed. In a perfect league a team like the Denver Nuggets would always have a chance at winning it all. But, the reality is that only a handful of teams have ever won the NBA title. The rest are also-rans. The league is designed to give credence to the greatest players, not the most complete teams, the deepest teams, the teams with the most “teamness”. It’s designed in such a way that George Karl and his mental processes are irrelevant. Second year coach Mark Jackson can’t hold a candle to George Karl when it comes to basketball smarts, but he can hold over him the fact that he just kicked his ass up one side and down the other.
The Nuggets don’t need to be blown up. They need to be held accountable by someone new. The Nuggets need a younger, more active head coach who will refuse to allow what Karl has allowed over the past decade: mediocrity.
