The coach wanted to coach, needed to coach, couldn’t not coach, and no matter how witty he was on those ESPN shows, and no matter how sunny those Colorado days were, George Karl was still the worst the thing George Karl could ever be — an ex-coach.
And so, the former Nuggets coach took the gig with the Sacramento Kings, and there was the 63-year-old at with a fresh buzz cut and, presumably, a fresh purple tie.
“I’ve missed the gym and I love the game,” Karl told reporters. “I wanted one more shot to try to win a championship.”
That’s the rub. Clearly, Karl’s sterling resume is missing one thing — a ring. But how many years away are the Kings from even a playoff series win, let alone the first NBA Finals in franchise history, let alone a ring in the LeBron era?
For Karl, the ring would be surreal, but the reality is, he missed the process. He missed the life — and not the life, like the “NBA life” of multi-star hotels and meals — but the life of coaching, of growing a team, or blinking your eyes hard so you can stay awake to watch one more quarter of game film. Let’s be honest. George publicly lobbied for the Orlando Magic job. The Orlando Magic job. He needed to coach someone, anyone, yesterday.
I feel bad for Karl, whom I covered as a beat writer for six seasons, because he desperately wanted the Golden State Warriors job last summer. I’m sure his skin crawled every time he had to analyze a Warriors highlight on one of those ESPN shows.
Karl is clearly confident in his resume, but 2014 was the second consecutive summer he didn’t get hired (though the first summer, he was fired from Denver after some other jobs were filled). His first year as a head coach was 1984, the year Carmelo Anthony was born. He knows the business of basketball. He knew what another summer without getting a gig could mean, especially in a sport that now hires freshly retired players as head coaches, let alone longtime assistants or retread head coaches.
So Karl is in Sacramento, which in many ways is the perfect fit for him. Karl adores the culture of basketball, the connection to a city, the buzz of “the street,” as he would describe his relationship with fans. During those Nuggets seasons, especially that good one with Chauncey and Melo, he fed off the people in the street. Seattle, of course, was an ideal fit — a city that hadn’t won much in anything, Seattle fell hard for Karl’s hard-nosed Sonics teams in the 1990s. A week couldn’t go by in Denver that Karl didn’t make some reference to some glory day back then.
Sacramento, of course, is a one-team town. They love the Kings by default. And they love the Kings because the Kings are their thing, their guys, their representation. That old arena they play in has the feel of a college gym, and when it’s packed, man, that sucker gets loud. It’s a basketball town that is hungry for winning basketball. Shoot, they almost lost the Kings to Seattle, which in many basketball ways is a big brother basketball town. It makes them cherish them just that much more, knowing that feeling, albeit fleeting, of what it would be like if the Kings had left.
And last fall, Sacramento broke ground on a fancy new downtown home, a castle of arenas. You cannot win an NBA title without at least one top-six drafted all-star. Look it up. Well, the Kings have the fascinating, irascible, sassy, ascending DeMarcus Cousins, a top-six pick all-star they call Boogie. Of course, it’s natural to wonder if Karl will clash with this guy. Could this be young-Carmelo all over again? Or will it be like Gary Payton, the loud-mouth Seattle guard who fed off Karl and won the Western Conference in 1996?
The Kings have some enticing young pieces and an exciting (relatively) young executive in Pete D’Alessandro, a former Denver assistant GM and one of the smarter humans I know.
Will they win a championship? They’d be a bigger Sacramento legend than Arnold Schwarzenegger. It’s just too early to definitely say whether they can pull this off or not. But I will say this — sure, Karl is forever linked for numerous postseason flops. And dubiously remembered as the coach of the year who was fired. But this stat always astounds me — the he’s coached, his teams have NEVER been under .500. And only one of the 21 has been at .500, and that season was 2001-02.
Incredible.
As for being a lifer, a coach who must always coach, I was reminded of a few graphs I wrote three years ago on Karl. It looked at coaches, perpetually striving for perfection:
If Monet were a coach, he would have found a flaw in a Monet.
These coaches. Perpetually perturbed, everlastingly unsatisfied. Coaches live to coach, but they live their lives coaching, which means worrying, teaching, preaching, praying.
That brings us to George Karl, the lifer. The Nuggets’ coach, who got his first gig in 1984, begins another season with Denver on Wednesday at Philadelphia. He was asked Monday, “Are you where you want to be?”
“Coaches,” the coach said, “are never happy with where they are.”
Chew on this
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• Watch … and wait for it.
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• Happy birthday to the man who played Jimmy Chitwood, (“I’ll make it.”).
Benjamin Hochman: bhochman@denverpost.com or
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