As you may have noticed, I have remained silent on the early playoff exit of the Nuggets. You could take this as a sign I quit following them, but unfortunately that is not the case. I actually followed them more closely this year than probably any other time. But I also recognize that I have limited use as a basketball analyst so I have learned to keep my mouth shut.

No comments on my football analysis please.

That close inspection however also led me to the realization in the last month of the regular season that this team was not going to match last year’s thrilling run to the Western Conference Finals. They just didn’t have the same drive this year – too many injuries, inconsistent play, etc.

Above that, they also lost their leader when George Karl began cancer treatments. Adrian Dantley seems like a nice guy (or is it seemed? I think he died about February14th) but he just never got the Nuggets to play with the passion they had for Karl.

Dantley’s failure at getting much of anything out of the Nuggets made me respect the job George had done even more while making me chuckle to think back about the below post. As you will see shortly, I wasn’t always a believer in Karl.

Written two years ago after a first round sweep by the Lakers, I decided it was time for Karl to go. Thankfully Nuggets management ignored me on firing Karl (though I must admit my prescription for the on-court savior that Nuggets needed was pretty close to what they got from Chauncey Billups the following November and what I list as the main problems for the Nuggets – lack of defense and playing to the level of the opponent – remain to this day).

However, I am not re-posting to make fun of how big of an idiot I am (that should be pretty self-evident and there are plenty of posts already up that demonstrate that to an abundance) but rather in the wake of the Cavs loss to the hands of the Celtics I thought it would be interesting to throw Mike Brown against my criteria and see if he deserves to keep his job.

My opinion? Under the by-laws of the Schottenheimer factor: Brown should go.

Tapping your Inner-Donald 

I gave myself 72 hours to cool down before putting anything on the record.

So now three nights after watching the Nuggets go down in four straight games to the Lakers, I feel it is the appropriate time to discuss the question on every Nugget fan’s mind:

Should George Karl be fired?

I don’t want to come off like some crazy sportswriter whose first instinct when a team does poorly is to yell ‘fire the coach’ from every rooftop (<cough> Skip Bayless <cough>). But after investing more nights over the last year watching the NBA and the Nuggets than the last decade combined, the odds are high that emotion would override any logical argument I could make. With Avery Johnson going down (and Mike D’Antoni possibly being the next to fall), I took a step back and decided to try and look at this rationally. What should really be the criteria for firing a coach?

Here then, is my attempt at categorizing the offenses that should result in a coach being shown the door. For the record not every example cited has resulted in firing, it is just my opinion of whether firing would be justified.

Category One – The Grady Little

Category One are offenses that are completely made by the coach and have a direct impact on the team winning games: game planning and in-game decisions. Obviously many of these are done in the course of an actual game, but regardless of when the action taken there is a direct and obvious connection to the team’s losing. Examples include:

• Avery Johnson changing the starting line-up of the best regular season team in the NBA when playing the Golden State Warriors in the first round of the 2007 playoffs.
• Grady Little leaving Pedro Martinez in one inning too long in the 2003 AL Championship Series
• Any NFL coach who started Jeff George and/or Vinnie Testaverde at quarterback

Category Two – The Mike Ditka

Category Two covers personnel moves personally led or championed by the coach that result in catastrophic team performance.

• Cam Cameron selecting a wide receiver/punt returner (with a bad foot) at the tenth overall pick in the NFL draft for a team coming off of a 6-10 season with an aging defense, weak offensive line and no quarterback.
• Mike Ditka trading away an entire draft worth of picks to draft Ricky Williams
• Shanahan, Mike: 2004-2007 (sorry, couldn’t resist)

Category Three – The Marvin Lewis

Category Three includes all programs in which the number of off-field incidents is so great and consistent, that it illustrates an obvious lack of control by the head coach.

• Marvin Lewis and the eight, nine, ten…whatever the number is this week…arrests of Bengals players.
• Barry Switzer and his quarterback/coke dealer Charles Thompson at Oklahoma
• What’s that? What did you say? Bobby Bowden?!? How dare you, sir! How dare you!

Category Four – The Marty Schottenheimer

Category Four is reserved for perennially underachieving teams. Teams that never performed as well as their talent level would indicate they should, whether it was due to poorly designed schemes, chemistry problems or teams just plain quitting.

• Marty Schottenheimer – Let’s just say that Norv Turner got more out of the Chargers in the playoffs than Marty did.
• Joe Torre’s consistently had the most (high priced) talent in the majors and yet they haven’t won a World Series since 2000.
• George Karl – how many titles did he win with Gary Payton? How about the number of playoff series he won with Carmelo Anthony and Allen Iverson. Yeah, exactly.

On the opposite side of the coin, are offenses that don’t warrant a pink slip:

• Personnel moves not coach-led. See, D’Antoni, Mike and O’Neal, Shaq
• A short slump in the course of the season – only one person loses their jobs when this happens – Pat Riley but that’s because he quits.
• Obvious chemistry problems – Did Phil Jackson warrant the blame for the Shaq/Kobe feud? Ok, but definitely not all of the blame.

So there you go, definitive proof that under Category Four, it is completely within Stan Kroenke’s right to fire George Karl. I don’t blame Karl completely for the underachieving Nuggets. Despite their immense talent they have never found that on-court leader who can step up in crunch team and guide the team. A.I. was brought in to play that role (presumably) but it is clear after all those years of having to be a one-man show in Philly that is his always going to be his fall-back position. He can’t lead a team; he can only try to take over.

However, after 4 years, Karl was never able to get this team to buy into his program, they never played defense consistently and probably the least discussed aspect of their game was their penchant for playing to the level of their opponent. They could beat anyone in the league (except the Lakers, apparently) but then had the tendency to lose games a 50-win team shouldn’t (see late season losses to the Kings at home and then at the Sonics or the mid-season road trip that saw them lose at the Bulls and Bucks on consecutive nights).

Sorry George, I have been a big supporter since you came to Denver, but it is time.

It is only fitting that at the dawn of the month of my 34^th birthday I am feeling old.

NOTE: I know that some portion of you just said something along the lines of ‘oh, bite me. You aren’t old’. Well, sorry. Get over it. I can’t do anything about you being older than me. Think of all the cool stuff you got to live through that I didn’t –  the Vietnam War, Watergate, Super Bowls I – IX, Deep Throat, the UCLA dynasty and…well, that other Deep Throat.

NOTE #2: To the other portion of you that just said ‘wow, he is old’. Bite me.

Anyway, it isn’t just my completion of another trip around the Sun making me feel old, it is the world of sports. When I hear about the latest sports news, I inevitably end up sounding like Statler and Waldorf when responding. Damn kids these days.

It wasn’t always this way. It used to be I would cheer for teams based almost solely on them being the new, young up-and-comers. I adopted the New York Mets back in the mid-eighties in part because I was fascinating by this young phenom pitcher named Dwight Gooden. I even went out and put a Gooden poster on my wall and bought all the rookie baseball cards I could find. Until, of course, my mom threatened to ring the nose on my poster with White-Out.

Later, as the Lakers, Celtics and Bad Boys of Detroit ruled the NBA, I had a soft spot for this young kid playing in Chicago who seemed to have a little talent.

Now, when I hear about LeBron James, not shaking hands with the Magic after losing Eastern Conference Finals and then skipping the press conference, I think he sees himself above the every day requirements of being a professional. Do you think anyone that lost a playoff series wants to go in and face the press? No, but when you get millions of dollars to play a game, there a few obligations you have. You have to practice, you have to show up at charitable events for long enough to be photographed for those NBA Cares commericals, you have to do whatever your shoe company tells you to do and you have to talk to the press after games. These are especially true when you are the greatest player on the planet. An excuse that ‘you are a winner’ and you aren’t happy about losing doesn’t fly. You think anyone in the NBA is ok with losing? Other than Shawn Marion of course. You don’t become a pro athlete unless you are a fierce competitor who wants to win at any cost. But being a professional (or even being a man) means sucking it up and facing the music when things don’t go your way.

Of course, if you were given a Hummer in high school and were never held to account for it, why would I expect you to understand what responsibility and accountability means?

And it’s not like David Stern is going to call out his meal ticket of the future. Sure, Phil Jackson gets fined $50,000 for correctly pointing out publicly what we all know (that the NBA refs are slightly less incompetent than Sling Blade), but LeBron can act like the biggest baby this side of the Cutler family ranch and never get a slap on the wrist.

LeBron isn’t alone in making we worry about this entire generation of athletes. In the same week that LeBron took his ball and went home, Brandon Marshall appeared on Outside The Lines to explain why (yet again) he has been accused of domestic battery. While I don’t know the details of this charge, I have had enough. Less than a year after being suspended for three games (reduced to one) for a multitude of offenses to the extra-touchy NFL, Marshall found a new woman and more trouble. Is it so hard for a guy to find a stable woman and not get in massive fights with them? B-Marsh (as I call him) is entering his fourth year in the league and he has seen a team mate get shot and killed, shouldn’t it be about time he realizes that professional athletes are always targets? Whether by women or thugs, athletes are always going to be in the sights of those seeking money and fame. Understanding that and learning who you can trust should be the first thing that pro athletes learn.

Actually make that the second thing. The first thing is that no player is above being traded. No player. Especially not players that haven’t had a winning season since high school. Get it, Jay?

I won’t go into my feelings about B-Marsh’s contemporary, Mr. Cutler. I think I have sufficiently beat that story into the ground. What can I say, I am to Jay Cutler as Skip Baylees is to T.O. 

I don’t mean to say it is just the off-the-field antics by the players these days that I don’t understand. I know that athletes have gotten in trouble for as long as there have been sports (or at least as long as newspapers have been willing to report it) but the growth of the me-first sports celebration drives me nuts.

When I was young…I can’t believe I just used that phrase, just shoot me now…the best known celebration in the game was the group high-five by the Smurfs on the Redskins. Now, we have the celebration dance of the week by a ridiculously overrated wide receiver on an awful team who legally changed his name to the incorrect translation of his jersey number. Maybe if his team had, you know a winning record and wasn’t just the punch-line of every joke about football teams with legal problems, his self-serving attitude might not have worn thin about 4 years ago.

Even on my teams, there are players who I don’t understand. Look at J.R. Smith. We get it J.R., you are a great athlete and made a great play. You know if you consistently did that rather than once every other game maybe you wouldn’t need to celebrate when you make a great play. It would happen so frequently it wouldn’t be worth going nuts every time.

Wow, just look at all that ranting about the players above. I am not sure what makes me sicker, how these guys act or my old man, holier-than-thou, things-were-better-in-my-day attitude.

It’s funny because my least favorite TV Sports opinionater is Skip Bayless and this is the exact reason why. He hates everyone and everything in sports and is so sure about what he thinks, he makes Bill O’Reilly’s opinions seem balanced and considered. Now I am starting to sound like him. When did this happen? What happened to the happy-go-lucky kid I used to know?

Getting old sucks. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go have some warm milk and go to bed.