You won't know better than that if you ask Mr. George Karl about this, laugh out loud. But why do I suspect that is exactly what is going to happen next... Umm, do people really know that Kenyon Martin and Anthony Carter are the best defenders on the Nuggets? DENVER NUGGETS DEFENDING SUB RATING All tracked and hidden defending 2008-09 REGULAR SEASON As of February 20 2009 Nene Hilario 0.493 Chris Andersen 0.431 Kenyon Martin 0.415 J.R. Smith 0.409 Renaldo Balkman 0.379 Carmelo Anthony 0.362 Anthony Carter 0.329 Chauncey Billups† 0.293 Linas Kleiza 0.201 Dahntay Jones 0.195 Well, Kenyon Martin is near to but not at the top of the list, so there you go again, Mr. Karl, being biased toward the more veteran player (in this case, Martin) over the younger, inexperienced player (Nene). Kenyon Martin is one your best defenders, but he is not the best. I don't usually publish the hidden defending component that is part of the overall defending I just reported above, but I certainly stand by the accuracy of it, as long as the statistics at NBA.com / Lenovo are correct... DENVER NUGGETS HIDDEN DEFENDING Based on Points Allowed Per Minute, this is a very close estimate of untracked defending 2008-09 REGULAR SEASN Through February 20 2009 Nene Hilario 0.174 J.R. Smith 0.157 Kenyon Martin 0.121 Renaldo Balkman 0.117 Anthony Carter 0.108 Carmelo Anthony 0.104 Chauncey Billups† 0.096 Chris Andersen 0.071 Dahntay Jones 0.069 Linas Kleiza 0.036 This is as close as anyone will ever get to rating man to man defending and defensive recognition, reaction, and rotation. (The three defensive r's.). But there are no style points here. Mr. Karl is, like many others, forgetting that "the best style" does not necessarily translate into the best results. You may agree with Mr. Karl that Kenyon Martin has the best defensive style on the Nuggets, but I don't care who has the best defensive style; all I care about is who has the best defensive results, and I just reported to you who does have the best defensive results. J.R. Smith's defending style may often appear to be kind of awkward, kind of reckless, kind of inconsistent, sometimes kind of pathetic. His style doesn't seem to generate a lot of confidence among many people who watch basketball games. But does it really matter "how much confidence his style generates"? No, it doesn't matter, and the results speak for themselves. As you can see looking at the two listings above, the Nuggets are slightly better defensively this year when J.R. Smith is out there than when Kenyon Martin is out there. As for Anthony Carter, he is not one of your best defenders at all. While he is above average in the hidden defending actions (the ones that generate the most style points) he is overall not a great defender, and is not as good this year as is Nene, Chris Andersen, Kenyon Martin, J.R. Smith, Renaldo Balkman, and even Carmelo Anthony. And isn't this the same Anthony Carter who you wouldn't start in the Lakers playoff series because, gasp, he isn't a great defender? Or did you forget? Wrong, Mr. Karl! That is not a fact. Kenyon Martin is not the best defender on the Nuggets, Nene is. If there was a vote on who has the best defensive style, I'm sure that Kenyon Martin would trounce Nene. But any vote on style would not change the fact that Nene is the best defender on the Nuggets, nor the fact that Marcus Camby was the best defender on the Nuggets in 2007-08: DENVER NUGGETS DEFENDING SUB RATING All tracked and hidden defending 2007-08 REGULAR SEASON Marcus Camby 0.583 Nene Hilario 0.508 Eduardo Najera 0.461 Yakhouba Diawara 0.374 Kenyon Martin 0.348 Allen Iverson 0.300 Linas Kleiza 0.274 J.R. Smith 0.263 Carmelo Anthony 0.259 Anthony Carter 0.203 Chucky Atkins 0.168 Last year Kenyon Martin was not the best defender on the Nuggets either, Mr. Karl, I hate to break it to you and your fooled fans. Kenyon Martin is a good or very good defender (your choice) but not a great defender, sorry to break it to you. Code: Martin, with fast hands and fast feet, giving him the ability to guard out on the perimeter, could have been placed on Spencer Hawes, rather than the reluctant-to-leave-the-paint Nene, who was late out to the Kings center time and again, allowing Hawes to have target practice from the 3-point line. Mr. Karl, why is it that you and some of your fooled fans insist on blaming every perimeter problem you have on whoever is playing center? Why can't anyone else bear any blame when your perimeter defense goes to hell? Carmelo Anthony and Chauncey Billups deserve some of the blame if blame is going to be thrown around in public. More broadly, why do you not play zone defense more than you do? Is it because you don't like the styles that emerge when zone defense is used? The thing you don't understand about three-point shooting, Mr. Karl is that you can not lock down defend against the three no matter what you do and no matter who you have doing it. That is the whole point of why good franchises like the Spurs always without fail have a "crew" of good three point shooters. In the playoffs especially, the Spurs roll out their three point game in order to overcome any defense that is overweighted on the inside and is attempting to shut down the paint. Even if you do partly shut down the paint, a good three-point team can still beat you, Mr. Karl. Just as a good 2-point jump shooter needs to be able to and can make some mid-range jumpers even if they are constested, a good 3-point shooter can make threes whether they are contested or not. (Whereas, by the way, not good 3-point shooters can not make many threes whether they are contested or not.) If you had what you are dreaming of in the Sacramento game, Mr. Karl, maybe the Kings are 12/29 instead of 14/29 on threes. 12/29 would be about normal for a good three-point team on a good night. You still lose the game, Mr. Karl, because you lost by 8, and since your team, by your own admission, was bad offensively. At least you are honest and not wrong about that. In the Sac-Town game, you, Mr. Karl, were afraid to play the very young Johan Petro, which left you too small inside. You are playing Sacremento, Mr. Karl, one of the worst teams in the League! Why were you afraid to play Johan Petro? Also, either Chris Andersen, Renaldo Balkman, or both had to get more playing time if you were going to win the game. It's your fault, Mr. Karl, that J.R. Smith is more inconsistent than ever, so that it is hopeless that he will help you in too many games. It is you who told him that he isn't good enough to start, and that there is something wrong with how he thinks, and with his personality. So it's your fault that Smith believed some or all of what you said and that his natural reaction has been to press too much. And everyone knows that all basketball players become more inconsistent than they were before when they press too much. On the one hand, J.R. Smith is rebounding to beat the band for a 2-guard, and is defending and fouling with the best of this year's Nuggets. But on the other hand, his 3-point shooting has arguably never been less reliable than it is right now. So what have you gained with all your tinkering with J.R. Smith, Mr. Karl? Have you really made any net gains? I don't believe so. Oh, here we go again. Yes, we know Mr. Karl. Anthony Carter, Kenyon Martin, and so on and so forth have better personalities than J.R. Smith, mostly or totally because J.R. Smith is less mature, which is not his fault, and has little to do with basketball. And Nene is, well, he's a... a foreigner! His native language is Portuguese! He talks funny, so how can he have a good personality and be mentally tough? How could he have a personality which meets the full approval of Mr. Karl? He couldn't, on account of the language thing and his other funny, foreign mannerisms. Laugh out loud, Mr. Karl! You know, it's not just me and so many of the "common people" who don't like you anymore. It's also that the referees don't like the defending that you put out on the court much anymore, and this is one of your biggest problems right now. The refs have more and more concluded that your defending is too heavy on aggressiveness and fouling and too light on skills, and they are starting to throw the rule book at you. Your team is being buried in personal fouls, Mr. Karl! And oh, it's getting kind of pathetic again. On the one hand there are all these people on Nuggets blogs and forums starting to post things like "Karl is the problem," and "Karl must go," and "Karl will definitely go if the Nuggets don't win a playoff series this year" and so on and so forth. Meanwhile, other, more "credentialed" people, such as reporters, are still trying to find out why the Nuggets are losing now from who? You guessed it, George Karl. It seems that when it comes to the Nuggets, it doesn't matter how many common people think he is a lousy coach. The royalty is faithful to him and looks for answers from him no matter what. By the way, I hate to break it to those of you who realize that Mr. Karl needs to go, but George Karl, unless he voluntarily retires, which is extremely unlikely, because the Nuggets will have won too many regular season games for that, and because there is one final year left on his contract, will almost certainly be back again next year, no matter how badly the Nuggets tank the rest of this season, and no matter how bad they are in the playoffs. If the Nuggets franchise really and truly cared about winning in the playoffs, George Karl would not be around right now. Can you see it coming in the distance yet, Mr. Karl? That train coming down the tracks, which comes every year? You and your lame philosophies are going to lose in the playoffs again. But oh, that's right, you don't really care much about the playoffs, and you have a lock on making your regular season quota this year already, which was 45 wins at a minimum, so you are all set and all comfy for the year regardless of how many people want you to be fired this year, and regardless of what happens the rest of the way.
Yes, apparently so, and that leads to my larger point about how on the one hand many, many ordinary people want Karl to go, but on the other hand, most "official people": reporters, assistant coaches, managers, and the like, not only agree with Mr. Karl on just about everything just about all of the time, but also are often expanding out and playing out his views in articles, practices, and so forth. So the uncanny thing about the article is that since the reporter is 100% in agreement with Mr. Karl, although it was the reporter speaking in part and Mr. Karl speaking in part, you really can not tell the one from the other, so it might as well have been all Mr. Karl talking. It seems to me that, logically, there is something rotten in the state of Denmark when hardly no one ever disagrees with the Coach on anything. True, I am still relatively new at comparing franchises, but I would expect that if I was covering the Knicks, the Bulls, the Heat, or other big market teams, there would be reporters and so forth commonly disagreeing with the Coach. And I know for a fact that Detroit reporters have been all over Michael Curry, Coach of the Pistons. The fact that hardly anyone in Denver ever disagrees with Mr. Karl in my view is a sympton that Denver is not a full scale NBA franchise, one that can not possibly be moved to another city the way Seattle was. Quite to the contrary, were there to be a 10-year economic depression, and were the NBA to shrink to about 20 teams, I have no doubt that Denver would be one of the cities to lose its team, whereas Detroit would keep their team. Either consciously or unconsciously, Nuggets franchise officials and Denver Post reporters seem to understand that the existence of the Denver Nuggets is not written in stone. There seems to be a mentality in Denver that the Nuggets franchise is delicate like fine china, so there can be no open disagreements between the owner, the managers, the coaches, and the players. It seems like they think that if they were to disagree and argue among themselves, they would be risking things such as becoming a 20 win team again, losing what little free agent drawing power Denver has, or even, as already mentioned, losing the franchise completely. Whereas by contrast, in places like New York and Detroit, official franchise people are arguing in public all of the time. The Denver view seems to be: "We, and that means all of us officially associated with the team, must not argue about basketball or raise doubts about George Karl in public, or God only knows what will happen to our little old franchise." Laugh out loud. With regard to Detroit Coach Curry, I have been only minimally critical for several good reasons. He is a new Coach, he is very generous to reserves, and he is smart enough to know that he doesn't know everything; that if you are a new coach and you have a relatively complicated team, the best thing you can do is to do a lot of experimenting with starting lineups and rotations. Curry has been like a mad scientist in this regard, experimenting more than even most of those who like experimenting, like me, feel comfortable with. But so be it, because if you can motivate your team late in the season and in the playoffs, so that you can win a playoff series or two, it matters little that you lost some regular season games due to a lot of experimenting. Everyone should just keep taking deep breaths in Detroit. It's all going to be alright, everyone. Especially since a group of know-it-all fans have already declared in internet postings that this season is meaningless and that Iverson will definitely be leaving for another team this off season. And in off-season 2009 and 2010, the Pistons will have massive cap space to get players such as Boozer or Bosh, or even Boozer and Bosh for that matter. Or something like that. The know-it-alls appear to own crystal balls, whereas I can't find them on Ebay. But the know-it-alls, now that I think of it, were saying all of this before it became common knowledge that the NBA, like everything else, is subject to economic damage due to either a near depression or a depression. A depression? Oh damn, I'm starting to lose confidence in the know-it-alls again, especially since if we are in a depression, any pre-depression free agent acquisition with cap space plan will be mangled beyond recognition. For one thing, the salary cap itself will become smaller. For another thing, there might be a little problem with all the players refusing to play, or the owners refusing to let them, due to irreconcilable financial differences. (Alright, that might not be such a little problem.) But even though I have little faith in the know-it alls, I am not going to hit the Pistons panic button now or probably ever, because at least I know that there will always be a team in Detroit, and that everyone will always be arguing about basketball things there. Arguing is the derogatory term for "pointed discussion". Pointed discussions are what you want and need if you hope that your team will eventually get things as correct as possible when the playoffs come around. If you don't discuss problems, they don't get fixed. But for now I'll let others argue about Coach Mad Scientist. I'm not going to make any sweeping judgments about Mr. Curry until I see what happens in the playoffs, and very possibly not even then. Some of the best scientists in history were regarded as mad, so who am I to judge?
