George Karl Begins Screwing Up the 2012-13 Denver Nuggets

Here we go again. Another season is upon us, and a full month before the first game is played and even before the exhibition games season has begun, Denver Nuggets Coach George Karl is already openly and publicly screwing up the management of his team. He is already signaling that he will be cheating the best player that the Nuggets have at one of the positions out of the starting slot and out of some playing time as well.

By the way, if a player who should be starting does not start, it is virtually inevitable that the player is also going to be cheated out of some playing time. When Karl (in the quote you will see below) implies that a player who does not start will not generally be cheated out of playing time he is either lying or else at the least he is completely wrong about that. At rock bottom minimum, in the quote shown below Karl is trying to con the reporters and the fans; he does this all the time.

GEORGE KARL VERSUS THE YOUNG NUGGETS CENTER JEVALE MCGEE IN 2012-13
So here we are one month before the season starts and Karl has signaled that JeVale McGee will probably not start. But JeVale McGee is by a country mile the best center on the Nuggets. He is one of the best blockers in the NBA. He is one of the better paint defenders in the NBA due to the blocking, the aggressiveness, the quickness, and the sometimes good man to man defending. He could possibly be an all star when he gets older and a lot more experienced. The other two centers the Nuggets have, Kosta Koufos and Timofey Mozgof, are not in the same league as JeVale McGee (so to speak).

On the other hand, McGee is apparently not the smartest center in NBA history and he apparently has a personality that contains way too high an emotional content for Karl's tastes. Karl evaluates personalities and if your personality differs from what he thinks is a good or at least acceptable personality for pro basketball, you are subject to being cheated out of playing time even if you are actually the best player at a position, or the best player on the team for that matter. Karl detests emotional and impulsive personalities and also he despises players who have "minds of their own" and who have the potential of looking at things differently from the way he does. Essentially, George Karl wants players who are low in emotion and who more or less robotically agree with what he says and who more or less robotically do what he says to do even if what he says to do is not the right thing if the objective is to defeat the best teams.

More broadly and generally, looking at Karl over the years, you can see that he is definitely biased against young forwards and centers. For some strange and unknown reason he does not discriminate as much against young guards as he does against young forwards and centers. But he has been known to discriminate against guards. The most famous example was that Karl discriminated horrifically against J.R. Smith, who now is starting for the New York Knicks.

The other two centers the Nuggets have are Kosta Koufos and Timofey Mozgov. I really don't know for sure yet about how Karl evaluates Koufos' personality, but I will say that Karl is probably not sold on Koufos personality yet. But Mozgov definitely has a personality that Karl thinks is a good one and that is much closer to Karl's idea of the perfect personality.

JeVale McGee is 23 years old in November and this is way too young for forwards and centers for Karl's tastes. Kosta Koufos is only 23 years old, the same age as McGee and too young for Karl's comfort zone. So that leaves Mozgov, who at 26 is still not an old man by any stretch but is not going to be annoyingly young to Karl.

So all in all, it is no surprise at all that Karl is signaling that Mozgov is going to start over McGee even though McGee is a much better center than Mozgov is.

You see, when you know how someone thinks, you can predict in advance what they are going to do when faced with any set of facts on the ground. Or if you didn't bother or didn't have time to predict, at least you won't be surprised when that guy you know well makes his decision in that situation.

So the bottom line result will be that Koufos and even more so Mozgov are going to get some and maybe a lot of the playing time that should go to JeVale McGee. And the Nuggets are going to get shredded in the paint this year, probably even more so than they have in recent years.

Here is the actual Karl quote as he announces in advance a blunder he will be making this year. Here is Karl speaking to peasant Nuggets' reporters recently:

“Training camp is going to tell me who plays — my idea right now is (Timofey) Mozgov would start with (power forward Kenneth) Faried and JaVale would stay with (reserve point guard) Andre Miller,” Karl told me in a wide-ranging interview, which will run in Sunday’s Denver Post. “But again, I don’t give a (darnn) about starting lineups, and you guys are already stirring the pot. It’s all about how many minutes you play, who you play with, how well you play and how we play (when you’re on the court).”

This is from a blog posting at The Denver Post by Benjamin Hochman, which is located here.

Notice that King Karl (the 13th, aka "The Idiot King" laugh out loud) is as he so often does mocking the sports reporters from the peasantry by implying they don't know much of anything about basketball whereas he knows it all or at least almost all if it.

Karl is also already indirectly mocking the Nuggets fans, in effect calling them dumb asses for going along with almost all of his decisions (or literally all of them in many cases). And I have to agree with him on that one, laugh out loud; the Nuggets fans do seem to be dumb asses compared to fans in at least a few other NBA cities. (But to be fair, if you go to a Nuggets basketball forum you will always find a few smart people criticizing Karl. Unfortunately however, many of those critics are located outside of Colorado.)

So not only does Karl mismanage the Nuggets but he does it openly and brazenly. He announces weeks and sometimes months in advance just how he is going to be screwing things up. He says right out in public (to reporters, for example) some of the most dumb ass things you will ever hear a NBA coach say.

And by the way, Karl's biases and opinions about personalities and so forth are far more important for determining who will start and who will get playing time than is what happens in training camp or in exhibition games. In fact, this is true for a lot of coaches, probably most of them. The ways that coaches think (meaning both how they think and what they think) are usually far more important than anything that happens in training camp or in the exhibition games. The smartest coaches will allow what happens in training camp and in exhibition games to influence rotations and playing times in at least the early part of the season. The dumb coaches will almost completely ignore everything that happens in training camp and in exhibition games and their regular season decisions will be exclusively based on their thinking and biases. It seems to me that there are many more dumb coaches than smart coaches when it comes to this.

Always remember, if you want to win the Quest for the Ring, do not discriminate against personalities that in your opinion are not very good and do not discriminate against youth. Some of the best basketball players have questionable personalities and some are young. Give playing time based on who is really better at basketball and not based on personality ratings or age ratings.

POWER FORWARD KENNETH FARIED
With respect to young Nuggets power forward Kenneth Faried, apparently Karl is going to start Kenneth Faried this year even though Faried is the kind of young forward that Karl often discriminates against. But obviously, Karl has no choice because the Nuggets have no depth at all at the position. This year, the Nuggets are very, very weak at the power forward and in fact young Kenneth Faried is the only decent and dependable one they have. The only other one on the roster is Anthony Randolph, who was very disappointing when he played (a little) for the Minnesota Timberwolves last year.

For the record, Faried was at least slightly discriminated against last year. Faried was an aggressive rebounder and was an aggressive and quick paint defender. But it was not until Karl was 100% convinced that Faried has a "good personality" (according to how Karl looks at and rates personalities) that Faried became theoretically eligible to get most and maybe all of the playing time that he should get if the Nuggets are to have any chance at all to defeat the best teams.

GEORGE KARL TAUGHT QFTR IN REVERSE MODE
People might think I am just being sarcastic or melodramatic or cute or whatever, but I mean it quite literally when I say that George Karl has taught me a lot about how a team should NOT be managed if the objective is to win playoff games and possibly a championship. And at the same time, Karl taught me that there is a really big difference between playoff competition and regular season competition rather than just a medium sized type of difference as you might expect. In fact, Karl's failure in the playoffs was one of the things that motivated the refocusing of QFTR into "The Site that determines and explains exactly how playoff games and championships are won and lost".

So of course Karl is not completely incompetent; the situation is more complicated than that. In general, Karl's bad management has relatively minor effects in the regular season. In fact, some of Karl's strategies and tactics result in the Nuggets picking up a small number of regular season wins that would have been losses had the Nuggets been doing things exactly the way Quest for the Ring (QFTR) would advise. But when it comes to the playoffs, the Nuggets have no chance because Karl's strategies and tactics are ruinous for the playoffs. To say the same thing differently, Karl's strategies and tactics work to some extent against the average and especially the below average teams, and once in a great while they sometimes even work against a playoff team during the regular season. But those same strategies and tactics are disasters when it comes to going up against the good and the really good teams in the playoffs.

How to Find out About all of the Off-Season Roster Changes and How to Evaluate all of the Teams as the New Season Starts in About One Hour

The NBA Tracker feature of the sidebar (which is the column on the right of the Quest for the Ring (QFTR) homepage) has been updated this week. By rights it should have been updated about three months ago, but hey, it's better late then never. And always remember, QFTR is free. So sometimes that old truism, that you get what you pay for, appears (which can be a bad thing if what you are paying is nothing, laugh out loud).

The NBA Tracker feature on the sidebar, (which is so important that it is near the top of the sidebar on the homepage) consists of dozens of links that take you directly to a lot of the key information about NBA players, managers, owners and teams that you may need or want. It would take you many, many hours to find all of those links to important NBA information yourself. Why bother? Since your QFTR producer is some kind of a perfectionist and is driven to produce things such as a near perfect directory of all of the most important NBA information, all you need to do whenever you need the latest information about players, managers and owners is to visit QFTR and use the NBA Tracker which is near the top of the sidebar on the right of the homepage.

If you don't have the time to keep up with all of the off season transactions as they happen during the summer, the fall will come and you will then be disturbed that teams have changed and now all of the sudden you don't know all of the key players on all of the key teams. True, you will probably know all of the big changes, such as Dwight Howard going to the Lakers. But you are not going to know about all of the changes that will be important for determining the fate of the teams. Since you are a major basketball person (and almost or literally everyone reading this is a major basketball person, trust me) this ignorance is intolerable. You could find out about the changes gradually over the first two or three months of the season, but that would be inefficient and would make your experience of those first months of the season less valuable and interesting.

You could use the current / recent player transactions links in the NBA Tracker to update yourself, which would work and would be much more efficient than not using the Tracker at all. But there is a very easy way to update yourself on all of the roster changes very, very efficiently and quickly. Go to the NBA Tracker which starts high up on the right sidebar and scroll down to near the bottom of the Tracker section so that you arrive at the subsection called "Current Depth Charts". And then click on the first link: "Depth Charts--ESPN". What opens up is the latest, current rosters in depth chart format. These show you the end result situation following all of the doings during the off-season.

By reading through the depth charts of the thirty teams, you can accomplish the following in about an hour:

(1) You can completely update yourself about all of the off-season roster changes (through trades, the draft, and other transactions) and

(2) You can see the end result for each team. The depth chart gives you who the likely starters are for each position, who the backups are for each position, and who the backups to the backups are for each position. (But sometimes there won't be a backup for the backup, there will just be two players available for a position).

(3) Now if you know about the players you can make an initial, rough evaluation of how good each team is going to be for the upcoming season.

You just saved yourself hours of work because if you tried to do the three things above in some other way, it would be much less efficient and it would take you multiple and maybe many hours instead of about one single hour. So go to the depth charts and catch up with all that went down in the off season very, very efficiently.

And yes, your QFTR producer (who at this point is well known for having trouble coming up with the time needed for QFTR although he honestly expects that problem will be significantly less severe going forward) does exactly what was just recommended: he goes to the depth charts and studies those very, very carefully.

Just going to the ESPN depth charts will be good enough for most people. Those charts are probably updated more frequently than any of the others and they are likely to be at least as realistic and accurate as any of the others. But your QFTR producer (me) clicks on and reads all of the depth charts because as I already said, I am a perfectionist type of person and I am driven to do most everything in a high quality way. By reading all of the charts, which differ to some extent, I can alert myself to starters versus backups controversies and playing time controversies that will probably be going on in the new season. That kind of information will be needed to evaluate the coaching of the team and to help project how the teams will do in the playoffs should they make the playoffs.

So there you go, now you have a way to get completely up to date on all of the NBA teams very very quickly and efficiently.  

And just think, the NBA will NOT be having scab, chump referees who can't tell a foul from a screen. And the NBA doesn't have the trouble that the NFL has regarding what is a catch and what is not a catch. In the NBA, a catch is a catch and a basket is a basket. NBA referees are not going to be evaluating the style of the catch or the style of the made shot to determine whether the catch was really a catch or to determine whether the scored basket was really a score. Damn! the NFL has some really weird rules, don't they? And really, really bad replacement referees, laugh out loud.

NBA 2012-2013 Schedule in Excel - Plain Version

Here the Quest for the Ring (QFTR) presents the 2012-13 NBA Schedule in Excel. In this posting we have the "plain version". The other main version that we produce and publish is called the "top teams highlighted version". In that version, the four teams that are believed to be the best in each of the two conferences are selected and then games among those eight teams are highlighted in the schedule. That is, in the highlighted version, all of the games between any two of those top eight teams are highlighted.

Last year we published the top teams highlighted version at the same time as the plain version. Starting this year we are publishing them separately. The top teams highlighted version will be published sometime between October 1 and Thanksgiving Day which is November 22. (Obviously there is quite a bit of uncertainty regarding when we will be ready to show that version.) We definitely don't want to jump the gun with the highlighted version because we definitely want to be sure of which eight teams are really the best ones before we publish the highlighted version.

Also, in future posts in the upcoming days QFTR will publish some custom team schedules where all the games of one specific team are highlighted. Last year we did eight of those and we will do between eight and ten of them this year. Note that there is not an exact correlation between the teams in the top teams highlighted version (just discussed above) and the teams selected for custom team schedules. But there is a lot of overlap and you can bet that the teams believed to be the best four teams will be in both the teams highlighted version and they will also have a custom schedule produced for them.
  
USER GUIDE FOR THE NBA 2012-2013 SCHEDULE IN EXCEL - PLAIN VERSION
The regular season and the playoffs season span over eight months (not counting the last two days of October). Those two seasons run from November 2012 through June 2013. The schedule below shows November through February in the upper section and March through June in the lower section. More specifically:

November 2012: Upper Section, 1st Column
December 2012: Upper Section, 2nd Column
January 2013: Upper Section, 3rd Column
February 2013: Upper Section, 4th Column
March 2013: Lower Section, 1st Column
April 2013: Lower Section, 2nd Column
May 2013: Lower Section, 3rd Column
June 2013 Lower Section, 4th Column

Actually the regular season begins on October 30 to be exact. The regular season games of October 30 and 31 are at the top of the November column.

Last year the schedule only covered the regular season. This year we tentatively plan to fill in the playoffs schedule as it becomes known next April and May and into June and then update the schedule as necessary. Either that or we might separately publish a playoff schedule on Excel. Or we might do neither (it's up in the air at the moment.)

Continuing with the guide to the schedule below....

Primary columns are separated by grey divider bars. Within each of the primary columns there are these three secondary columns:

--Sub Column 1: There are date headers and for every game the two teams playing using the format Road Team at Home Team are shown.

 --Sub Column 2: Under the header "TIME" the game start time using Eastern Time is shown for every game. If you have not memorized the US time zones, see the conversions to the other zones at the top of the primary columns.

--Sub Column 3: Under the header "TV" the national television network that is covering the game is shown if there is one. Only a small percentage of games are covered by a national television network (but many of the most important games are). Most games that are not broadcast by a national network are broadcast regionally or locally. In the TV column, for games that are broadcast only regionally or locally there is always a blank space. Note that some or all ESPN games are also available on the Internet on ESPN 3. Some people have an internet connection provider that includes access to ESPN at no extra charge.

Thank you for visiting QFTR, the Site that explains how playoff games and Championships are won and lost, AND the Site that gives you basketball information that you were not supposed to know. Remember, to avoid losing out on future production you should definitely bookmark the page you are on right now: www.nuggets1.blogspot.com QFTR is NOT on Twitter or Facebook or any other silly and very limited platform because we have better things to do and because we do not waste time trying to get cheap and fleeting traffic. QFTR currently appears surprisingly well in Google search results, but those results change from time to time for reasons that are generally not known to the general public. So its possible that QFTR will become hard to find using Google Search in the future. So therefore, if you are serious about basketball, it is highly recommended that you bookmark QFTR (www.nuggets1.blogspot.com) and then use your bookmark to visit from time to time.

Also, please consider linking to QFTR wherever and whenever you can. If we get more traffic then we can increase production from what it would otherwise be (although we are trying our best to maintain a minimal level of production regardless of traffic). If you link to QFTR in any way and you want some kind of a link back or some kind of a public thanks, please write to thequestforthering1 at gmail (with the usual .com at the end). Allow plenty of time for a response because to be honest I have a strong dislike for email applications and I do not monitor email daily or even weekly (just being honest).

The Quest for the Ring (QFTR) Comes Back to Life With a New Banner

The banner for the second half of the year is done and posted about three months late. It's better late than never. The Quest for the Ring (QFTR) project continues on now that I have kicked some serious ass regarding obstacles and problems thrown in my way. I hope to have a Report on the 2012 temporary shut down up shortly to be followed by some NBA schedules in Excel followed by a very rare and one of a kind summary of much of what is known about how the Quest is won (and how it is lost).

This upcoming, planned report is not going to have any proof of the points made because I have already proved the points I will be making in previous Reports. Going forward, unlike in the past, I will occasionally be posting Reports that don't have much proof of the points made because let's face it, I don't have the time to repeat proof and evidence that has already been provided.

I hope everyone is ready to play and / or watch some basketball; I sure am.