Once upon a time, there was a baseball team that had a philosophy. They believed in their philosophy completely, but they weren’t getting results. After many years of frustration that their philosophy hadn’t produced better outcomes, that same baseball team decided to try something different.
The only problem was that the team wasn’t sure how to go about that. As a result, their attempt to retool was poorly thought out and backfired on them, resulting in a lot of lost money and no shortage of public embarrassment.
Because it was so costly to them as a franchise, that baseball team used their one misguided and poorly researched attempt at change as an excuse to never try anything outside their comfort zone ever again.
If you haven’t picked up on it yet, the situation I’m talking about is the Colorado Rockies, in the franchise’ one and only attempt to date to put real honest-to-God money into their pitching staff. They picked pitchers that were never likely to have success at Coors Field to begin with and the rest, as they say, is history. The Rockies vowed to never pay big money for elite pitching and have struggled to put together a competent pitching staff ever since.
Yesterday morning when the Denver Nuggets fired Brian Shaw, I couldn’t help but wonder if the Nuggets will make the same mistake that the Rockies did.
Despite the fan base’s well-documented split on their opinion of former head coach George Karl, it is, by its very essence, a bizarre scenario when the NBA’s reigning Coach of the Year is fired. I have no problem counting myself among those who were happy with his ousting at that time, and you still won’t convince me that the move was inherently the wrong one. Though many won’t admit that now, I certainly wasn’t alone at the time.
There is nothing wrong with aspiring for more as a franchise, even if the odds of an NBA championship in Denver are a long shot at best. That Denver chose the wrong coach to succeed Karl is more of an indictment of the front office’s ability to judge an unproven commodity than anything else.
While the Karl supporters would argue that that was a reason to keep the beloved coach in place, I don’t actually believe that every good basketball coach who has ever lived is already a head coach in the NBA. That is to say that just because we, the general public, do not know the name of the next great championship-caliber basketball coach does not mean that he does not exist.
But I’m not here to start a fight with the Karl faithful, so let’s throw something out there that (hopefully) we can all agree on: In the NBA, it is better to have a good half-court team and play good defense than it is to not have either of those two things.
The Nuggets haven’t had those two things in more than a decade. Despite Karl’s pleas to play defense, his teams almost always ranked in the bottom third of the league in points surrendered, as well as many other defensive metrics. He was never much interested in a half-court offense, either. As for Shaw in those two categories; do you really want to rehash all this while the wounds are so fresh? It was bad, okay?
However, it’s worth noting that a lot more coaches with Shaw’s style of play have won NBA championships than coaches with Karl’s style of play. From that standpoint, the Nuggets weren’t wrong in their line of thinking. Where they underestimated Karl and overestimated Shaw was in the realm of player acceptance.
Karl, despite his seemingly perpetual frustration with the players on his roster, was able to get the most out of incredibly average talent (although very much above average athleticism).
We hear all the time how NBA coaching is as much about massaging egos as it is about strategy. What Denver has discovered over the last two seasons is that it’s actually much, much more about the psychological aspect of coaching than the strategy. Karl, a psychological coach with a strategy that has never won a title, was able to take a team much further than Shaw; a coach with as good of a basketball mind as any who completely underestimated what it would take to keep a locker room full of millionaires in their mid-20s.
But I’m here to tell you that the principles Shaw was hired on are not to be discounted entirely, either. In the NBA, the most successful teams have both.
The Nuggets have spent most of their existence believing that you have to take advantage of the altitude in Denver and run, run and run some more, much like the Rockies believed that they needed to build the most devastating lineup in MLB. Both philosophies are solid, but they also need to be supplemented with something more. For the Rockies, 14 years later, they are just now realizing that they need to be able to pitch too.
After last night’s game, interim coach Melvin Hunt stated that running was something that the team needed to earn with stops on defense. That to me sounds like a better philosophy than Mike D’Antoni’s seven-second offense.
I don’t want to look back in 14 years and say that the Nuggets are just realizing that Shaw’s ideas of defense and half-court efficiency had merit all along. Hiring the wrong coach does not vilify every principle he represents; it just means that he wasn’t right for the job.
The next coach of the Denver Nuggets needs to have Brian Shaw’s vision and toughness, but George Karl’s touch. Whether the front office is willing to travel outside of their comfort zone again to find that coach remains to be seen.