Former Nuggets coach George Karl ( Karl Gehring/The Denver Post)
These days, George Karl is paid to give his opinion on ESPN.
And yes he has opinions on the Nuggets. This is part of what he said about his former team in an interview with The Post, for my weekly Nuggets/NBA column, which will be available on Sunday.
On the difficulty of mixing and matching players with minute-restrictions: “I always liked that stuff. I liked ‘Okay, he can’t play tonight or he can only play 20 minutes.’ Because anytime you limited me, it opened up the opportunity for something else. And I’ve always enjoyed that, because in the CBA you had a lot of that.”
On playing 12 players: “One thing I think (Nuggets coach) Brian (Shaw) is kind of caught up a lot in a little bit is he’s playing too many players. I don’t think he can play three centers, I don’t think he can play that many big guys on the court when your team plays well when itap fast and small. I’m not saying you play 48 minutes at fast and small, but you’ve got to delegate some portion of fast and small. He has six big guys, and in the game of basketball right now you don’t need six big guys.
On the Nuggets attempting to be able to play slow and fast: “You’ve got to be able to play both ways. In that last year, I think our record against teams that held us in the 90s or under 90 points… we won 75 percent of our games. You want to play a game that motivates and energizes the strengths of your basketball team. At that time, for me, I thought the strengths of our team were mostly our perimeter guys. And (Kenneth) Faried, of course, surprised by playing very well. But the strengths of our team were our perimeter players. So I ran a system that was magnifying those strengths. Brian’s got to evaluate what he thinks – they have a lot of big guys. Is that the strength of their team? Or is the perimeter the strength of their team? I don’t know what the team is, other than I’ve always felt that Ty is their engine.”
Follow Chris Dempsey on Twitter @dempseypost or email him at cdempsey@denverpost.com
