Of this article...mentions Pop and the Spurs..not sure if it has been posted..
http://sports.yahoo.com/nba/news;_yl...yhoo&type=lgns
NEW YORK – They forever worship at the altar of Dean Smith, the lost souls of the Carolina Family talking about basketball's honor, about a right way, as though they're these pristine disciples descending to cleanse the unwashed. These phonies spread a gospel about an NBA of selfish players. Some sermon they love to spread, some load of pompous garbage.
Together, George Karl and Larry Brown had going one of the biggest cons in the game, and on Monday it finally came crashing down on Karl, the Denver Nuggets' coach. His silly sandbox desire for revenge on behalf of Brown, the exiled New York Knicks coach, cost the Nuggets a basketball season.
When Karl was declaring on Monday that Knicks coach Isiah Thomas was an "[ass]" and "full of [crap]," that he was guilty of Saturday night's premeditated and evil act, Karl should've been apologizing to his own team for creating a cir stance that let that night, this season, spiral out of control.
Karl should've been begging his owner for forgiveness and for his job.
Instead, there goes Carmelo Anthony for 15 games and J.R. Smith for 10.
And there goes the Nuggets' season.
"I'll swear on my children's life that I never thought about running up the score," Karl said.
Just like Isiah Thomas swears that if the Continental Basketball Association had given his business plan a little more time, it would've made the cover of Fortune together.
If you're being honest here, you'll see that Karl has managed the most improbable feat of the season: He's turned the Machiavellian Knicks president and coach into a sympathetic figure. It takes some sort of mangled plot to make that possible, and Karl delivered. He refused to take into consideration the fragile psyches and volatile dispositions of his players when he was busy doing his end-zone dance on the Madison Square Garden floor up nearly 20 points in the final minutes.
So, Anthony flipped out and started swinging.
And Smith broke out of an official's bear hug and tumbled into the stands with the Knicks' Nate Robinson.
Karl knew the dispositions of those players and still was willing to risk all breaking loose.
"He put his players in a tough position," Thomas said Monday morning. "He put his players in a very bad position."
Nobody likes Thomas, true, but that doesn't make him the instigator of Saturday night's melee. He alone wasn't responsible because people believe he ruined the CBA, made a mess of the Knicks and maybe sexually harassed a female Knicks executive. Feel free to pile on Thomas, judge this Bob Knight protégé with those holy Dean Smith values, but try telling yourself that there isn't a self-respecting coach in the NBA who wouldn't have told his team the same thing.
No more layups, fellas. No more dunks.
Had former Knicks coach Pat Riley ever been probed about telling his team that he wouldn't stand for one more dunk, one more uncontested layup, he wouldn't have flinched. Riles would've gone Colonel Jessup and the basketball world would've applauded him.
, yes, Isiah called for the Code Red.
Welcome to the NBA.
Three weeks ago, Kobe Bryant scored 52 points on the Jazz at Staples Center. After the game, Utah coach Jerry Sloan wished his Jazz had stopped letting Bryant leap and shoot over them, wished they had been more physical. He suggested his team hadn't showed a lot of toughness and concluded that it would've been much harder for Kobe to make shots lying on his back.
Everyone laughed, and no one blinked. Sloan wasn't advocating that the Jazz hurt Bryant, that they do something dirty. If Bryant had been clobbered, the story would've been played this way: That's good, old-fashioned, hard-hitting Midwestern basketball. That's Jerry Sloan being Jerry Sloan.
Thomas does it and he's bringing the street into the NBA.
Listen, do I believe Thomas when he says that he was just pleading with Anthony to stop embarrassing his players instead of warning him of a hard foul, that he told him, "You shouldn't be rubbing it in"? Of course not.
Still, there's a fine line between calling for a "hit" on a player and delivering the familiar get-a-body-on-someone message. And Thomas is culpable when that duty falls on rookie second-round pick Mardy Collins, who probably felt torn between his better judgment and an understandable survivalist instinct to please his coach, who, as team president, also happens to hold immense influence over his future.
"It's very difficult to judge," NBA commissioner David Stern said. "If I had thought someone had given a specific order to injure another player, I would've reacted very differently."
So Stern did the right thing: He called a jump ball on New York and Denver, fining each franchise $500,000 for breaking the spirit of the law.
This isn't to suggest that Thomas didn't play a part in escalating the fight, but Karl takes most of the blame.
It isn't illegal run up the score and leave four starters on the floor with 1:15 left in a 123-100 victory. It's just unprofessional, a reckless judgment with hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of players on the floor.
If this had been Spurs coach Gregg Popovich, another Brown ally, running up the score, he wouldn't be so inclined to worry about his mature, polished stars flipping out in a fight. Of course, Popovich has won three championships. Yes, he is indebted to Larry Brown for giving him his start in the NBA, but he would never have endangered his chance for a fourth le by exposing Tim Duncan and Tony Parker to a two-bit bid for vengeance.
But George Karl did.
And he blew up his basketball season.
So much for Coach Smith's Carolina Way.
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I don't know if I agree with this being all on George Karl...I also highly doubt that anyone is sympathising with Isiah Thomas..at least I know I'm not.
Dean Smith's "The Right Way" = milk a lead by stopping play and running the 4 corners with 12 minutes left forcing college basketball to incorporate the shot clock...
(nothing against that, he did what he needed to in order to win, i just chuckle when i hear about how carolina did things the right way...)
1. I wonder if he wrote this before or after the Nuggets' win tonight.
2. An article from NY...wow, wonder if that's going to be at all biased towards, let's see, NEW YORK?!?!?!
3. If it was the Spurs, you're damn right there would be no need to worry because Pop would have taken out his seasoned starters who know how to close games.
which leads me to point four:
4. Karl made his point about having a young team that has blown so many leads in the fourth, and not a team of season vets. They nearly let the game get away from them again tonight.
from SI.com:
Karl claimed he wasn't doing that by leaving his starters in the game.
"Where were we running the score up?" he said. "He had the same team in the game that pressed us and trapped us and cut a 25-point lead to 10 in about two minutes. Same team. Same pressure. Same 3-point shooters. Exact same. He didn't throw in no towel. He didn't take his best team off the court and say, 'Hey, the game's over.' He never gave one (darn) signal to it. It's absurd."
Karl said he's seen big leads by the Nuggets evaporate before and wanted to guard against it. After losing three of the first four on the road trip, Karl wanted to make sure the Nuggets put the win away.
"My team has blown 10-point leads, 11-point leads with two minutes to go," Karl said. "I watched Utah blow a 12-point lead to Sacramento two nights before that with four minutes to go in the game and you're telling me that I'm running the score up?"
5. Isaiah has been sanction by the NBA before, as a coach. He received a two-game suspension as a Pacers coach for escalating an on-court altercation...and he head the nerve to about it. He also had the idiocy to talk about Ron Artest's suspensions as if they were too harsh when Artest got suspended for antics such as flipping fans off.
6. I am going to research all the double digit leads that the Nuggets have had this season to see how many starters were in the games with less than three minutes to go (yes, I'm that bored). I just looked up the Nuggets/Hawks game on Dec. which was 96-81 with less than three minutes to go in Atlanta. Apparently, Melo, Camby and J.R. Smith were all playing with less than a minute to go and a 13 point lead.
Last edited by ponky; 12-19-2006 at 03:35 AM.
OMG a meer mortal criticized the ICON.
It was a mistake keeping them in, but it's too early to say if something is done as a season or not. 15 games is not that long when talking the whole season...
i refuse to acknowledge any former jayhawk as an icon...
OMG a meer mortal criticized the ICON.
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