Cancer is uglier than the devil after a bad night’s sleep. But how the dreaded disease changed George Karl as a basketball coach was a gift from angels.
How Karl saved the Nuggets’ season and became the best coach in the NBA at age 59 was by coaching less.
In the art of X’s and O’s, less of Karl is more. It’s beautiful.
All season long, Karl endured the tune-in-tomorrow soap opera of Carmelo Anthony. From the chaos of a trade with the New York Knicks, as Denver general manager Masai Ujuri claimed the Nuggets “got killed” in the deal, Karl patched together a 50-game winner. It has been like watching a man build Pikes Peak from pebbles.
You drop in on a Denver practice these days, and the loudest noise is a basketball bouncing on hardwood rather than the dominating personality of Karl, whose listen-to-me arrogance had been known to make skin crawl on superstars from Ray Allen to Anthony for more than 25 years.
“I don’t know how school works. But I remember a couple times the principal would come sit in your classroom and the teacher would still teach, but it seemed like there was more attentiveness going on. I think I’ve done that more this year,” Karl said Tuesday. “I’m a delegator now, there’s no question.”
In the ultimate players’ league, a coach calls an occasional timeout and scribbles plays between taming egos. Think that’s easy? It’s not.
There are solid reasons to cast ballots as coach of the year for Gregg Popovich, who rescued aging Tim Duncan and the graying San Antonio Spurs from the wax museum, and Tom Thibodeau, who taught Da Bulls a joy of defense not seen in Chicago since Dennis Rodman’s nose ring rolled out of the Windy City.
“I’m biased, because he’s my coach,” Ujiri said. “But if I were voting for coach of the year, he has my vote. I know, because I was inside those meetings and saw what George Karl went through. I saw him managing his health. I saw him coaching a team he knew was going to change by a trade but didn’t know when the trade was going to happen. He did a stellar job.”
Karl has done the best work of a peripatetic NBA life that has seen him wander in locker rooms from Cleveland to Milwaukee, not to mention stops in Golden State and Seattle, without ever tasting a sip of champagne in a championship toast. He has done more than find a home in Denver. The coach appears comfortable in his own skin.
Oh, Furious George still lingers inside a coach who will forever burn with a white-hot competitive fire. Karl just doesn’t let Furious George off the leash to bark in public as much as in decades past.
Cancer never does anyone favors on purpose. Throat cancer robbed Karl of 40 pounds and temporarily muted his voice to a hoarse whisper. How could that possibly be a good thing?
Karl has always been the smartest guy in the gym.
It’s just less noticeable now. Karl’s presence is smaller, shrinking with the waist band of his slacks. He speaks less. The coaching points of a 1,000-game winner in the NBA have been given room to grow in the space of the blessed, newfound silence.
Don’t mistake the silence for a reduction in creativity. The ideas still hum inside Karl’s brain.
In fact, the coach is pondering a major tweak to Denver’s starting lineup when the playoffs begin. Would the Nuggets consider opening games with point guards Ty Lawson and Raymond Felton together in the backcourt?
“There are certain personalities you want on the court, both offensively and defensively, that might not want to wait. You might want to start with (them),” said Karl, acknowledging that he could use Felton and Lawson in tandem to up the tempo from the opening tip.
Years ago, as Allen slowly stretched the tension from his muscles while relaxing on a carpeted floor in Seattle, I asked a star who had felt the wrath of Karl about playing for a demanding coach before their acrimonious divorce in Milwaukee during 2003.
It was a bad mistake. Allen grew so irritated, I thought he might spontaneously combust. He believed Karl turned peace into a soap opera and marred brilliance with X’s and O’s through constant, nagging micromanagement.
Karl enjoys a pat on the back as much as the next guy. But being saluted as coach of the year isn’t the ultimate goal. Doug Moe told me no coach in the league has more fun swaggering than Karl. So, just once, wouldn’t it be a kick to see him strutting with the NBA championship trophy?
“I’ll sell my soul to the devil if you guarantee me a championship,” Karl said.
Cancer did not kill George Karl.
It made him a stronger basketball coach.
Mark Kiszla: 303-954-1053 or mkiszla@denverpost.com
