Whether Right or Wrong, the Nuggets Don't LIke Public Discussions and Disagreements, and that Makes Winning a Championship Harder for Denver
Editorial notes: This was written five months ago, in March 2009. See the additional editorial notes at the end for more details about late postings and how they are not going to be a problem any longer.
The following will be a little confusing out of context. The following relates to this Denver Post article, and is an extension of this response to it.
Over the past several years in Denver, many, many ordinary people have wanted Karl to retire or move to another team, but on the other hand, most "official people": reporters, assistant coaches, managers, and the like, in public at least, 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 and bloggers have been all over Michael Curry, Coach of the Pistons.
Open discussion will often lead to improvements in the management of the team. Such improvements could be the difference, for example, between winning two playoff series or three.
Its interesting to note that in pro football, every single franchise has disputes and controversies about the management of the team that are on open display in the media and on the Internet. Whereas in pro basketball, some franchises, such as the Nuggets, seem to be afraid of any public disputes and controversies.
With the Nuggets and certain other smaller NBA franchises like it, you can disagree, and you can deliver the evidence, and you can either be obviously correct from the get go, or at least proved to be correct a little later, but Nuggets management and coaching will most likely never see or consider your input.
Whereas were you to do the very same thing for the Knicks, for example, your arguments might possibly resolve a tight contest between two opposing views within the management and/or the coaches of the Knicks. With large and winning-obsessed franchises such as the Knicks and the Celtics, everything is considered by team officials, including sportswriter articles, Internet forum polls, and Internet comments. I mean, there are, for example Knicks sportswriters and bloggers who the management of the Knicks will actively check out for stuff they might use, whereas that does not appear to be the case with respect to the Nuggets.
The fact that hardly anyone in Denver ever disagrees with Mr. Karl in my view is a symptom that Denver is not a full scale NBA franchise. Such a franchise, for one thing, is 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 often arguing in public.
Note that with a franchise like Denver (and there are others, including many of the franchises in markets even smaller than Denver) fans and anything they discuss on the Internet are completely irrelevant. By contrast, with franchises not afraid of (or stuck with whether they like it or not) open controversies and public discussions, the official participants can and sometimes do check Internet comments, blogs, Internet polls, and so forth to see how popular and/or how correct their position is among the fans and among people who know basketball well.
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 the Coach of the team in public, or God only knows what will happen to our little old franchise." Laugh out loud.
COACH MICHAEL CURRY IS LIKE A MAD SCIENTIST
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 that accurately predict the future, 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?
========== Editorial Notes ==========
--The above was written in mid March, 2009. For a much more on the subject of the Pistons in 2009 and going forward, see this Report.
--As promised, we are finally posting material written and posted on forums in the spring. Obviously, if you have your own site, you should be posting at least simultaneously on your own site when you for whatever reason post elsewhere. But there has been a bad habit of not doing so, a bad habit that is being beaten down due to new content sharing regulations that have teeth.
