Answering Hollinger: Do the Nuggets Have Any Space Cadets?

First of all, I want to say that Hollinger is a good analyst. You would hope that a highly paid full-time ESPN would be, so there is no surprise there. He has identified most of the major factors that will determine the fate of the Nuggets this year. But being human, and being limited in how much time he could put into following the Nuggets, he missed a few factors and his analysis is a little off here and there. I am going to concentrate here on Hollinger's biggest mistake.

Hollinger committed a big contradiction with regard to J.R. Smith. He says that the Nuggets getting him from the Bulls for a second round pick was "a steal," and he says that Smith is a deep shooter, and that his (along with Melo's) loss during the suspensions left the Nuggets "devoid of offensive punch". Later, Hollinger says Smith "has the offensive talent to be the knock-down shooter who spaces the floor for the big guns, and the quickness to be a capable defender who slows up the Ginobilis and McGradys of the West long enough for Camby to ride to the rescue."

But at the same time, Hollinger says, or at least implies, that Smith losing his minutes was automatic due to the arrival of Iverson, that Smith can be a "space cadet," and that when he is one of those, his skills are no longer available, so he should not be playing. I guess Smith should check himself out anytime he feels that space cadet thing coming on.

For the record, it is obvious that Smith losing half or more of his minutes with Iverson's arrival was not at all automatic.

Let's get one thing straight right here and now. If, as in Hollinger's world, there are players in the NBA who have some kind of mental defect where they become "space cadets" and lose most or all of their playing ability, they should be waived immediately. And whoever signed them should be fired for making such an obvious mistake. They should never have made a pro team to begin with. Fortunately, the vast majority, if not all, humans do not have space cadet episodes, whatever they are, so there are more than enough good basketball players to fill out all the leagues everywhere, without having to have a space cadet on any team anywhere.

All of the critics of Smith want to have it both ways. They sing his praises regarding his obvious skills, but then they say "but it doesn't matter, because he can be a space cadet". Or, "but it doesn't matter, because he can make a goofy shooting decision at a critical moment." The former is Hollinger and the latter is George Karl, and I am sure each would agree with the other's complaint about Smith.

To call any professional athlete a space cadet is a slur. If you think Smith is mentally ill, or that he has a physical brain defect, come out and say so and demand that he be evaluated professionally. Give him a leave of absence and help him get the care and treatment he needs. Someone who has a brain illness should not be working in a high stress occupation. Don't do a hit and run with the vague phrase "space cadet".

Unless Smith has some mental disease like epilepsy, or unless he is on drugs while he is playing, he has the same mental faculties at all times. If he makes a mistake, it's part of his normal personality and brain functioning, not some sudden illness. He has the same brain function and personality when he is hitting half a dozen straight threes as when he goes 1 for 11 on threes during a game. Instruct him to stop shooting threes in the fourth quarter if he's having one of those games, don't say he's mentally ill.

So Hollinger has made a slur on Smith, or else he has made a slur on the Nuggets organization. If Smith is in fact ill, then the Nuggets messed up giving up the second rounder to get him, or perhaps the Nuggets team doctors are negligent because they have not discovered some brain disease that Smith has. Or perhaps the Nuggets have one or more players on their team with a drug problem, and they don't detect it or root it out.

I do not at all agree. I say that both Hollinger and George Karl have cast slurs on J.R. Smith, because they refuse to accept the mistakes that come with his youth, personality, and skill set, along with the benefits. They want the good without the bad. In sports, as in life, you have to take the bad with the good, and to get the really good you must sometimes put up with the really bad. Your concern as a Coach or a fan is whether and by how much the good exceeds the bad.

We see this in nature as well as sports. In the spring and summer, trees bloom green and provide good shade (and good oxygen). In the fall in the far North, in places like Vermont and Michigan, the trees become so colorful that folks take tours to check them out. A few weeks later, the colors and the leaves are gone, and the trees look ugly on a cold and rainy winter day. And in an ice storm, branches might come down, creating a huge mess. Or the whole tree might fall on and damage your house or your car.

Now, you could say, "those trees are really nice in the Spring, Summer, and Fall, but they are ugly in the Winter, and they might possibly come down on my house, so they should be cut down. That would be Hollinger's or Karl's view of the trees. So with either of them in charge, the yard ends up without the benefit of the trees. Or, you or I could say "Yeah, the trees are ugly and slightly risky in the winter, but I can tolerate that because they are nice the rest of the year. They are nice and beneficial for 9 months and not so nice and sometimes bad for 3 months." That's the reasonable and logical way of looking at the trees, as well as the reasonable and logical way of looking at a player like J.R. Smith. He is in the top 10% of all pro basketball shooting guards on his numerous good nights, but you have to put up with a bad game now and then, and a really stupid decision now and then. If the good outweighs the bad, and the trees, and Smith, overall contribute alot more good then bad, then why would you cut them down? Why would you refuse to play Smith?

Because you, if you are George Karl, are an unrealistic perfectionist who refuses to deal with what you have labelled a defective personality. And you think that you might be able to change a defective personality for the better, by using various carrot and stick methods. You don't want to deal with the personalities you have been dealt on your team, you only want to deal with personalities that meet your criteria. Unfortunately, personalities can not be changed much, if at all, by a series of awards and punishments. Your actions are never going to change anyone's personality to any measurable extent.

What you are supposed to do as a Coach is to make the best use of the personalities and skills you have on your team. With respect to each player, you are supposed to train that player on the skills that he is most lacking, as well as to encourage him to keep practicing his best skills, so as to keep them at the high level. In the case of J.R. Smith, for example, you try to improve his distribution skill by having him play pass only in practice squad games over and over, every practice. You try to improve his defensive skill by putting him in defensive drills over and over.

Getting back to Hollinger, you can see what Hollinger has done with his Nuggets analysis. He has cast a slur on J.R. Smith and, in fact, on the Nuggets as a whole. In effect, he is accusing the entire Nuggets organization of being in over their heads with respect to building a Championship caliber team. In Hollinger's mind, the Nuggets can not win a Championship because they have a "space cadet" on their team, and because they can not mentally figure out stuff like how to integrate Allen Iverson's game with Melo's game and with the team as a whole.

So what Hollinger is really implying is that, along with Smith, there is a space cadet or two or three in the Nugget's front office. Now why did Hollinger cast these aspersions? Because the highest paid sports analysts rarely if ever directly criticize the strategies and tactics of coaches. In my view, Mr. Karl committed many errors, and so Hollinger had to cast aspersions far and wide to avoid going after Karl, the real problem. Specifically, to avoid criticizing Karl, Hollinger had to decimate Smith, trash Iverson, and suggest that the Nugget's organization is mentally unfit to win a Championship. But if all this was actually true, then how did the Nuggets win 47 out of 82 games and dominate the Spurs in game one of the series? Something isn't right there. If all of Hollinger's claims were true, the Nuggets would not have made the playoffs last season.

Though wrong about Smith, Iverson, and the Nugget's front office, a man such as Hollinger can not completely strike out without getting at least a piece of the ball, and Hollinger in fact did get a foul tip while at bat here.

While there are no space cadets anywhere in the Nugget's organization, there is someone who holds some beliefs and attitudes that a crude person might think could only be held by a "space cadet." There is one George Karl who lives, to some extent, in a fantasy world, where personalities can be changed, and changed fairly easily too, with rewards and punishments. These theories were investigated and proven to be wrong by psychologists in the 1800's. For Coach Karl, playing minutes are the reward when a player changes their personality for the better, and bench time is the punishment when a player fails to change their personality. The trouble is, as psychologists have shown, there is no known way for someone to change their personality short of, ironically, taking psychoactive drugs. I say ironically because, if you had a player who took a drug to change his personality, you would then have a real space cadet on your hands.