Coach George Karl can be forgiven for getting a little disturbed about some of J.R. Smith's "crazy" shots, but hey, without him burying threes the Nuggets are going nowhere. Although Karl can get a little upset with J.R. sometimes, he keeps the bigger picture in mind and does not criticize faults that will work themselves out over time. Karl realizes that Smith's contributions greatly exceed his occasional questionable shot. With people in general and with young basketball players in particular, you have to take the bad with the good. This is a lesson that Hornets Coach Byron Scott, who could not live with J.R. Smith at all, should have learned. Oh well, the Hornets loss is the Nuggets gain and, despite all the 4th quarter collapses, the Nuggets are still ahead of the Hornets. <div class="quote_poster">Quote:</div><div class="quote_post"> By Travis Heath Last season the Nuggets had trouble finding anyone not named Melo who felt comfortable shooting the basketball night in and night out. If you have watched the Nuggets play at all this season, you know this is no longer an issue In fact, young J.R. Smith loves to shoot the rock . . . okay, so the dude shoots it almost every time he touches it. Is that such a bad thing? Well, the short answer is there are upsides and downsides to it. The upside is Denver finally has a legitimate outside shooting threat. The downside is he sometimes takes what head coach George Karl has started calling "goofy" shots. This often leaves Karl in a double bind when Smith gets hot. On one hand, Smith can get rolling and start scoring points in bunches as he did on Monday with an electrifying 6 three-points shots en-route to 28 total points. On the other hand, everyone is just waiting for him to chuck up a questionable shot. "He was fantastic . . . until he took the goofy shot," Karl said of Smith's game Monday. "Everybody knew he was going to do it. We had a bet on the bench that he would do it and everybody knew he was going to. So he's very predictable." "That's him," Melo added with a smile. "He's going to do that. As long as he doesn't try to take too many crazy shots, we can live with a couple of them. As long as we pick it up on the defensive end to make up for that crazy shot, he can take whatever crazy shot he wants to out there." Karl begs to differ with his superstar player on that particular point as he would love nothing more than for Smith to learn the difference between a good shot and a bad shot. "I don't know what it is," a baffled Karl said on Monday. "It's a weird thing for me. When I enjoyed playing is when you play and dominate a team there's a juice to the game that the team is so together and so enjoyable to be a part of. I don't know if that happens anymore in the NBA. It's like, 'Okay it's my turn to get my numbers or my shots.' And it's stupid. It takes away from everything that you do well at that point. We should just keep playing basketball." So what's a coach to do with a player as talented as Smith who is struggling to understand the concept of shot selection? "I have no idea how to change it other than taking him out of the game and sitting him down," Karl asserted. Believe it or not, Karl is actually one of the more liberal coaches in the league when it comes to shot selection and he's not asking Smith to stop shooting. That said, unless Smith can learn to decipher a good shot from a bad one, he might want to prepare for a decrease in minutes after the All Star break when Allen Iverson returns from injury. </div> Source
