June 13, 2013

George Karl on his firing: ‘I think I called it stupid’

By Dave Krieger

George Karl is still more perplexed than angry. A week after Josh Kroenke fired him as Nuggets coach following the best regular season since the team joined the NBA in 1976, he’s still trying to figure out how anybody looks at a 57-win team without any all-stars and decides the coaching staff needs to be blown up.

But a week after the fact Karl was finally ready to talk, so we sat down over breakfast Thursday morning and went through it.

“I think I called it stupid,” he said, recalling his final meeting with Kroenke, the one where he was dismissed after eight and a half seasons. “I think I did say, ‘I want you to know I think this is really stupid.'”

He said he’s had preliminary conversations with the Memphis Grizzlies and Los Angeles Clippers about their coaching vacancies, but nothing substantive to this point. And he admitted he feels a little hypocritical about that because he doesn’t think Lionel Hollins or Vinny Del Negro deserved to lose their jobs, either. Each won 56 games last season.

But Karl suggested that his regular-season success in Denver — the Nuggets have won 62 percent of their games since he took over Jan. 27, 2005 — made it seem easy, and that perhaps a young CEO like Kroenke, who has never been affiliated with a pro team not coached by Karl, sees only the potential upside from here, and not the potential downside.

“I think (former GM) Masai (Ujiri) and Josh both thought it was easy to win,” Karl said. “It is not easy to win.”

But let’s start at the beginning . . .

The lead-up

“I had felt since the trade deadline that Masai and Josh were over here and we were here and it seemed like we were getting further and further apart,” Karl said.

“But I thought it was just my paranoia and just coaching. It seemed like I would piss them off with what I said in the papers or how I handled the game or whatever. But the harmony of our team, I thought, was in a very good place.

“There’s never a true, beautiful love affair between player personnel and management and coaches. There’s always going to be a window of conflict. I could feel that Masai was edgy on some situations, but I didn’t think it was ever a problem.”

What situations?

“Situations, games. Mostly about quotes in the paper and stuff like that. I don’t really want to go into detail. There are mistakes that you make when you talk to the press so many times. You make little mistakes. Sometimes it bothers the management, sometimes it doesn’t. But that was the only thing.

“And then Masai had a meeting with the coaches after the season. It was not an easy meeting, but I thought it was a fair beginning of re-evaluating where we’re going, what we’re going to do, day by day.”

I asked him how much the first-round playoff loss to the Warriors weighed on that meeting.

“It was, I think, a week after the playoffs, maybe 10 days. Everybody expressed their disappointment. The coaches were disappointed, but excited. The team is an exciting team to the coaching staff. We thought we had guys that could have great summers. It’s the first time we could have Wilson Chandler in during the summer because of injuries and circumstances of the lockout and stuff like that. We think we could help him become a better player.

“There were all types of things that were energizing — (Kenneth) Faried and Ty Lawson making the USA team — that suggested to us we could have a great offseason and continue the process into another great year next year. That was the coaches’ feel, I thought. Obviously, upstairs they were thinking something different.”

The contract

Kroenke explained his decision to fire Karl largely in terms of his contractual situation. Two years ago, coming off two seasons dominated by Karl’s neck and throat cancer (2010) and the Carmelo Anthony trade (2011), Kroenke gave Karl a three-year contract with a team option for another three. It was an unusual structure. Options are more often for single years, and easier to pick up, than for multiple years, requiring a commitment similar to that of a brand-new contract.

“It turns out to be a bad option,” Karl said. “It put me and them in a bad position. But the only meeting that I had directly with Josh, I was very, very aggressive, I thought. I think it was on a Sunday (June 2). The first 15 minutes, I was definitive, and I want the fans to know this, that I wanted to coach this team. I had no problem coaching the team on a one-year deal. I was fine with a one-year deal.

“I mean, I want to coach, maximum, four or five more years. I would love it to be in Denver. And I said that to him: ‘I want it to be in Denver.’ But do I think I deserve a three-year extension? No.

“I said, ‘And if you want me to coach next year on a one-year deal, I’ll coach. But there are ramifications to that situation.’

“And I explained that to him — my coaching staff, how I protect my coaches, the passion for the game, the anger of being on a one-year deal will fester up and then it will go back down. You’re on a winning streak, it won’t be a problem. You’re on a losing streak, it’ll be a problem.

“That’s the discussion we had. Maybe I convinced him that it’s not the best way to go; I have no idea. But I want the fans to know that I definitively wanted to coach this basketball team, and if I had to do it on a one-year deal, I would have done it. I was just trying to explain the environment it might bring.”

Karl has made good money during his career and is financially secure. So his concerns about a one-year deal had more to do with his assistants. He has fretted privately over the years about the steady exodus of assistants who left for bigger pay days. He was afraid that an entire staff in the last year of its contracts would be ripe for poaching.

“The negative scenario for me was, like (Oklahoma City coach and former Karl assistant) Scottie Brooks loses an assistant coach. Like, (new Detroit head coach) Mo Cheeks, gone. Say Mo Cheeks takes another guy, and someone comes in here and takes John Welch or Chad Iske from me and offers them a four-year deal for $1.3 million. The thing that worried me on a one-year deal was losing my staff. We’ve been doing that for a long time and it’s frustrating to me. We lose guys every year — Scottie Brooks, Jamahl Mosely, Stacey Augmon. I mean, the list is long.”

So that’s how they left it. According to Karl, he made it clear he would coach the final year of the deal if necessary, but that there were drawbacks to that situation. He felt he had planted the seed of an idea that maybe  killing the three-year option and adding one more year to the year remaining on the deal might be a workable compromise.

“I thought it was a very positive meeting and I was energized by it,” he said. “We had a couple of workouts on Monday and Tuesday. It was fun being in the gym, starting to talk about the draft. And Wednesday night he said, ‘Let’s meet Thursday morning.’ That meeting took 30 minutes and his mode was he wanted a change. It was basically, he wanted to go a different way.

“I thought about fighting, but I didn’t fight very hard. I didn’t want that emotion. I wanted to control myself and I did, I think.”

Did he ever mention explicitly the contract compromise he had envisioned?

“I said, ‘There could be a compromise here.’ Did I say there had to be a compromise? I don’t think I ever said that. He might have envisioned my passion for that as that, but I know I said, ‘I’m ready to coach this team. I want to coach this team.'”

The basketball issues

Much of what Karl has read about the club’s motivation since his firing perplexes him because he doesn’t recall meetings with Kroenke or Ujiri at which the criticisms now coming out were brought up.

“This stuff that I didn’t play the young players. I don’t remember those meetings. First, the quote should be that I didn’t play the young players enough, because I played a lot of young players. I didn’t play JaVale McGee enough. I didn’t play Jordan Hamilton enough. Evan Fournier probably should have played more minutes, but even he got a good rookie year. I think he got a good rookie year and we won 57 games and he’s ready for next year. He’s going to be in a great place.

“Kosta Koufos is a young player and he’s turned into a 25-minute NBA basketball player. Kenneth Faried is in a great place. Could he have played a few more minutes? Probably. But I think the maturity of understanding winning and what it takes to win and seeing why certain things win, seeing how a smart and experienced player is maybe better than a young and talented player, all those things, I think JaVale McGee has gotten better because of it, I think Kenneth Faried understands it better now than he ever has.

“And the next step was ready to be made: ‘OK, Kenneth, you want this responsibility? Remember, you’ve got to take the responsibility that Al Harrington showed. You’ve got to be a leader in the locker room.’ There are little things other than just the games and the stats of the games.

“I don’t remember the meetings where anybody ever told me that if you don’t play this or don’t do this it’s injuring where we want to go. They’re making it out that I was insubordinate. I don’t remember that. Other than my attitude of playing and winning and trying to win, possessed by winning, being aggressive to win.”

I mentioned the criticism of his loyalty to veteran Andre Miller, who won Game 1 of the Warriors playoff series with a last-minute shot but went downhill from there, finishing the series with a .420 shooting percentage.

“I think that’s a fair assessment,” he said. “I think that’s a fair evaluation of the games. But Andre Miller, the year he had, he’s a foundation of the team. I thought he earned that. I thought he had an incredible year. I didn’t expect a year like that out of Andre Miller. And then he’s basically the reason we won Game 1. By Game 6 you’re bailing on a guy who just won Game 1?”

The complication for Karl was that he had mostly played a three-guard rotation of Lawson, Miller and Andre Iguodala, with Corey Brewer moving to the backcourt at times when he wanted more length. But in the playoffs, Brewer disappeared about the same time Miller did, which left Karl with only inexperienced options like Fournier, a 20-year-old rookie, and Hamilton, who had barely played during the regular season.

“Corey wasn’t playing very good,” Karl said. “The next guy was Evan. I’ll admit that in hindsight maybe I should have tried to build his confidence up rather than, as the series went on, pull the plug on him.”

In any case, it was Ujiri who kept pointing out that the Nuggets had the third-youngest roster in the association. Karl assumed that meant the front office saw the same growth curve he saw.

“From the one meeting I had beforehand, I never felt something was about to happen, but my friends in the league had started saying, ‘Hey, George, be careful.’ I probably had half a dozen phone calls from guys in the league saying that.”

The postseason issues

Karl’s career regular-season record is 1,131-756, a winning percentage of .599. The last time he had a losing record in a regular season was 1987-88 with Golden State — 25 years ago.

But his postseason record is 80-105, a winning percentage of .432. This is mostly what his critics point to when they talk about the Nuggets taking the next step — winning in the playoffs.

How does he view his postseason record?

“Disappointment,” he said. “I don’t think I have a big foundation to fight my record. It’s not good. But I think my last five years is better than people think it is.

“Four years ago, we went to the conference finals. Three years ago, I think we would have gone to the conference finals if I didn’t get sick.”

Karl was forced to leave the team down the stretch in 2010 to be treated for neck and throat cancer. Assistant Adrian Dantley coached the team to a first-round playoff loss to Utah.

“Two years ago, we make the Melo trade. I don’t care what you want to say, we did a hell of a job keeping that team together and playing Oklahoma City pretty damn well in that playoff series. We lost one on a referee’s call, and (Kevin) Durant started his greatness in that series by kicking our ass, stealing a game from us. Disappointing? Yes, but if you go back and put that video on today, I think you’ll see a lot of good stuff.

“The next year was the lockout year and the Nene trade, so we’ve made another major change and we now have a team that basically has one guy from the conference finals team — Ty Lawson. All new faces, Nene gone, everybody gone, and we almost beat L.A. Without Wilson Chandler.

“And this year, disappointment. No question, disappointment. Did we think we could win without (Danilo Gallinari)? Yes. We went 7-1 without Gallo down the stretch. Maybe that was an illusion we should have been more worried about.”

So what happened?

“A good young team got the momentum and cockiness in their head. I thought we fought hard from Game 3 on, but both series, including L.A. the year before and this year, and this is on my shoulders, we had trouble getting into the fight, understanding the playoff fight, understanding it is cutthroat, mean, dirty, ugly. We came in with our kind of regular-season attitude. It’s a different world.

“That’s on me, but it’s on the young guys, too, to understand. You’ve got young guys out there trying to figure it out. In the Laker series, when you’ve got (Pau) Gasol, Kobe (Bryant) and (Ron) Artest going against Gallo, Corey Brewer and Ty Lawson, it’s interesting.

“I remember after the series Ty coming up and saying to me, ‘Do you know what Kobe told me in the fourth quarter? He told me, “I’m going to foul you every time down and they’re not going to call it one time.”‘

“That’s the type of intimidation that comes into a playoff series. There is verbal, mental, emotional intensity that you have to live in to learn about. And this year that was probably my disappointment, is Golden State found that magic and I thought we could be the team that found that magic. If we would have found that magic and won that series, scramble around and maybe steal Memphis, and the reality is that’s not that far from happening.”

What’s next

I asked Karl if he has had contact with any of the teams now looking for head coaches.

“I will say I’ve had preliminary conversations with both the Clippers and Memphis,” he replied. “Nothing that’s to say something’s going to happen. I definitely think it’s in the first stage of a process that has however many stages. I have interest in both jobs. I think both teams are very good.

“The one thing I don’t like about it . . . I feel bad. I feel a little slimy, because I don’t think Lionel should have lost his job and I don’t think Vinny should have lost his job. So all of a sudden now I’m being hypocritical because I’m bitching about, ‘This should not have happened, this is wrong, this is the wrong stuff for basketball.’

“It might be the right stuff for Josh Kroenke, but it’s the wrong stuff for the game of basketball. And it’s sick and a little sad that coaches are losing this much respect or appreciation. I don’t think the game is going to be healthy if we continue down this path of blowing up coaches who have done well.

“But I also want to say that the Kroenkes have treated me well. My eight and a half years is a special eight and a half years. I found a home. I’m going to live in Denver. And the fans, for me, I mean, the connection the fans made with me here was deeper than it was even in Seattle. And both ways. The fans who don’t like me are pretty intense. But I mean, I get people who are pretty emotional coming up to me now, almost crying, making me cry.

“In time, it’s going to be eight and a half great years, and eight and a half fun years of coaching. A lot of different personalities on the court, in the front office. The league is going through a tremendous change right now from the standpoint of marketing and internet and media coverage and social networking. It’s eight and a half years of an amazing amount of interchange and information and I think we did it pretty good.

“The stories are tremendous. Coaching staffs, the people who came here and left here and went on to do pretty good. Brooksie in Oklahoma City, Chip Engelland in San Antonio, Jamahl Mosely (in Cleveland), Stacey Augmon out in Vegas. Coach (Tim) Grgurich.

“And I think we’ve got three great assistant coaches now. I think Chad Iske and Melvin Hunt are NBA head coaching candidates. John Welch is such a great basketball guy that if he wanted to be a head coach, I think he could be, but he loves the gym so much I don’t know if that’s what he really wants. But those guys are A+ coaches and I have no idea what the next guy wants to do with those guys. I know I want them on my staff. And then the guys underneath them, Patrick Mutombo, Ryan Bowen and Vance Walberg, are tremendous guys. We have six NBA guys, and that family is very close to me. That family is why I probably fought the ugly battle that probably cost me my job, or they’re accusing me of, because they’re the ones that need security.

“I’m old enough, I got enough money, I’m going to be fine. Security to a 40-year-old guy that has three kids in fifth and sixth and eighth grade, security is a lot more important to him than it is to me, who now has a million dollars in the bank. And they do so much work for me and show so much loyalty to me, I think it’s my right to fight for them. And if Josh thought that was wrong, so be it. I’m going to probably continue to do that in my next job. I’m going to fight for the guys that fight for me.”

His message to fans?

“Thanks for touching my inners. Most fans, it’s always outside. But because of my cancer, because of my identity with the community and the closeness I’ve gotten with some hospitals, I think there’s a soulfulness to what I’ve gone through here that I don’t want to give up, and I probably won’t give up.”

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June 11, 2013

Doug Moe: Nuggets ‘could go right down the tubes’

By Dave Krieger

Keep in mind Doug Moe has seen this before. He was the Denver Nuggets’ coach in 1990, coming off nine straight playoff appearances, when the organization decided to go in a different direction.

Here’s a list of the directions they chose:

Paul Westhead (44-120)

Dan Issel (96-102)

Gene Littles (3-13)

Bernie Bickerstaff (59-68)

Dick Motta (17-52)

Bill Hanzlik (11-71)

Mike D’Antoni (14-36)

Dan Issel (84-106)

Mike Evans (18-38)

Jeff Bzdelik (73-119)

Michael Cooper (4-10)

Fourteen and a half seasons later, they finally resorted to George Karl, who went 423-257. After missing the playoffs for 11 of the 13 seasons after Moe was fired, the Nuggets embarked on a streak of 10 straight postseason appearances, the last nine under Karl.

Considering the polarities of their personalities, Moe and Karl have a lot in common. They’re former players from back in a day when pro basketball was not yet a license to print money. They carry Carolina blue basketball blood. They came to Denver a generation apart and coached some of the fastest, highest-scoring basketball the National Basketball Association ever saw. Following Karl’s dismissal last week, they’re likely to share the franchise record for consecutive playoff appearances for quite some time.

Karl did better in the regular season (.622 to .548), coming within nine wins of Moe’s total in 109 fewer games. Moe did better in the postseason, getting out of the first round four times to Karl’s once.

Neither coached in a championship series while in Denver, and neither has anybody else. The Nuggets have never been there. These two are the royalty of Nuggets coaches through nearly a half-century of existence. Each made the conference finals once; each lost there. (Karl, of course, made it to the NBA Finals in 1996 with the Seattle Sonics and lost in six games to Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls.)

More than a decade after his last NBA gig, Moe agreed to serve as a bench assistant to Karl shortly after his arrival. He was like a tour guide on a new planet, explaining the elevation thing and how it made Hakeem Olajuwon suck oxygen out of a bottle on the bench. Moe left the travel grind behind — again — as soon as he could without hurting anybody’s feelings.

Karl leaves a young roster where Moe left an old one. The rebuild that was inevitable after Moe’s firing isn’t inevitable now, although it remains to be seen whether the current roster is a fit for the new coach.

So Moe is a Karl guy, and might be expected to defend him. But he’s also an irreverent Brooklynite, condemned to say what he really thinks because he can’t keep from laughing at the other choices.

On the Logan show Monday, for example, when Logan asked Moe, a resident of San Antonio these days, whether Spurs fans think their team can win three in a row over the Miami Heat and capture the Finals without going back to Florida:

“Are you serious?” asked Moe. “You’ve got to be kidding. I mean, it’s like a lock. Miami has no shot. This is San Antonio, this isn’t some other place in the world. That’s a comical question.”

But what does Moe think will happen?

“Oh, I think Miami will probably end up winning, mainly because normally I think the team that wins the third game wins, in a series where one team’s a little better than the other. But San Antonio, having three games at home is, you know, if they win two of them that’s great and then they’ve got to go back and a team as good as Miami, they should be able to hold their home court on two final games. So I think the 2-3-2 really helps out Miami and I think they probably end up winning it.”

Moe has systems, ideas that turn long division into shorthand and make it easy to know what you think. Whether it helps you find the right answer in any particular instance is a different question.

“I always go on the theory . . . like what happened in the previous series,” Moe said. “As soon as Miami beat Indiana in the third game, it was over. As soon as San Antonio, and they were awful in the first two games against Golden State and should have lost both of them, but as soon as they won the third game, it was over. So I go on the third-game winner is the team that will win the series.”

This is Moe’s explanation for what happened to the Nuggets in their first-round series against the Warriors, too. Before we got to that, I asked him what he thought of the decision to fire Karl.

“Well, George is terrific. George did a great job, and I think it was a bad move. I think it will turn out to be a bad move. But in this business you can’t get upset at anything that happens. They want to go in another direction and it’s kind of a whole new face on the organization and stuff, so, those things happen. I feel totally confident George will end up in a pretty good place.”

And the roster?

“The roster’s good. It’s a nice team, a good team. But I think one of the big question marks they’re going to have is who they get in, can he handle the job. They could go right down the tubes. I mean, that’s a possibility.

“It’s not a great team, it’s a good team. They have a lot of depth and that was the strength of their team last year . . . There’s enough good teams in the league, or teams with average talent, you know, you slip, you can drop out of the playoffs.”

Moe does not believe the Nuggets are suited only to the full-court cirque du soleil displays they’ve made famous in the last couple of seasons. But he does give Karl, the sixth-winningest head coach in NBA history, credit for what versatility they displayed.

“I happened to see the Memphis games,” Moe said. “And the Memphis games were all basically half-court games. (The Grizzlies) got ’em slowed down. (The Nuggets) won ’em all. They can play that style. At least, they could last year. George was a good enough coach, he could adapt to things, and I didn’t think they had any problem. In fact, I remember saying to myself when I saw them play there, if it came down to the playoffs, they had to play Memphis, they could beat ’em in any style. That was my thought.”

The Nuggets took three of four from the Grizzlies last season, sweeping the two in Denver and splitting the two in Memphis. Neither team scored 100 points in any of the four.

I asked Moe about the playoff series that seems to have cost Karl his job, the first-round loss to the Warriors.

“Again, I thought the Nuggets had to win the third game out there, and they didn’t. It turned out to be their downfall,” he said.

“To be perfectly honestly, they didn’t step it up enough defensively. They just didn’t make it tough enough on Golden State. Golden State was hot during that period. It was one of those things. They ran into a team that couldn’t miss and they weren’t able to take ’em out of it.

“I saw the same thing down here. I went to the San Antonio-Golden State games. San Antonio totally, 100 percent, lucked out in the first game, got killed in the second game, but they were able to step it up and actually shut down Golden State defensively and that was the difference in that series. And Golden State was the type of team you probably had to put a little more pressure on defensively than Denver did, looking in hindsight.”

As for Karl’s future?

“I think he’ll coach this year,” Moe said. “That’s my opinion, but then again, what do I know? I think he’ll end up with the Clippers, and that’s a totally wild guess. I mean, I haven’t talked to George. I’ve just seen a couple of things said. But that would be my guess, that he ends up with the Clippers.”

As for the playoff follies that got Karl fired — seven first-round eliminations in eight tries (not counting the year he underwent treatment for neck and throat cancer and Adrian Dantley coached them in the playoffs) — Moe offered the calm reason of a 75-year-old retiree:

“You’ve got to remember, Denver was playing against L.A. and San Antonio most of the time in the playoffs, which makes it a little bit more difficult to get out.”

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June 9, 2013

Is Josh Kroenke the Nuggets’ Jim Buss?

By Dave Krieger

Some of the obstacles awaiting 33-year-old Josh Kroenke as he steps out from behind the curtain are not of his own making. Being a 30-something named Josh, for example. That rustling sound you hear is Broncos fans thrashing involuntarily in their seats.

As chief executive of the Nuggets and scion of an empire builder forced to hand over the reins, at least officially, by NFL cross-ownership rules, the younger Kroenke has done something unprecedented in NBA history: He has lost the league’s executive of the year and coach of the year the same year.

In fact, the same month. Nearly the same week. Masai Ujiri and George Karl won their awards on consecutive days in early May and both were gone by early June. Karl had talked about the coach-of-the-year award being a jinx, but this is a bit fast, even by the standards of that checkered award’s dubious history.

Nuggets fans don’t have Karl to kick around anymore. They don’t have Ujiri to credit for making chicken salad out of . . . well . . . the 20th and 22nd picks in the NBA draft, which isn’t as easy to do as it sounds.

The team is now all about the young Kroenke. He is not pretending to be a hands-off owner who will select a new general manager, hand over the basketball operation and wish him luck. In fact, he left open the possibility he’ll select a new coach first, which would make it clear he’s the chief basketball operations executive.

As Kroenke patiently explained it last week, he has been the Nuggets’ chief basketball operations officer since hiring Ujiri as executive vice president of basketball operations nearly three years ago. When I asked about the shadow of his famous father, Silent Stanley, and speculation that Karl was the latest victim of the elder Kroenke’s hardball negotiating style, the younger Kroenke insisted he was on his own.

“There wasn’t any involvement with my dad other than he said to do what I think is best,” Josh Kroenke said.

With Ujiri and Karl gone, I asked if he was ready to be held personally accountable for wherever the Nuggets go from here.

“Yeah, I mean, I was prepared for it in 2010 and I’ve been prepared this whole time,” he said. “It’s never fun jumping into a volatile situation such as, you know, people could view that with the uncertainty around here with the two main positions as volatile, but I’m fully confident in myself, in my own abilities.”

I mentioned Jim Buss, the second-generation owner in Los Angeles who, by all accounts, made the decision to hire Mike D’Antoni as Lakers coach rather than Phil Jackson despite having a well-respected general manager in Mitch Kupchak.

“I can’t speak for Jim Buss,” Kroenke said. “The Lakers organization is one that’s bounced us from the playoffs several years and I have first-hand experience at that, so I’m never going to say a negative thing about the Lakers because I’ve got to beat ’em before I can say anything.

“As far as myself, I’ve prepared for these moments most of my life, whether it was riding around in the car as a teenager with my dad, listening to him on the phone, talking to other business associates about professional sports, interning with the NBA league office right after college, playing basketball in college. I was a sponge while I was at the University of Missouri regarding the game of basketball and different strategies that are implemented. So I don’t think I’m a typical person in this position.

“But it’s going to be a big challenge going forward and I think that there is, judging from the reaction that I’ve gotten around the league and some of the people that have reached out to me about the positions that are available, there’s a lot of people that would want to come work with me in Denver.”

So let’s look at the two big decisions that stripped the Nuggets of their award-winners and swept back the curtain to reveal the young Kroenke as the man pulling the levers.

Masai

To hear Kroenke tell it, there really was no decision with respect to Ujiri. They had a handshake agreement on a new contract — reportedly at about $1.2 million per season, more than doubling Ujiri’s rookie GM deal — but also an understanding that Kroenke would let him out of it if something truly extraordinary came along. In various retellings, this option included only the Raptors, for whom Ujiri previously worked, or was more general in nature.

Tim Leiweke, the former Nuggets president and longtime AEG executive in Los Angeles, is the new poobah at Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment, charged with making its marquee franchises — the Maple Leafs and Raptors — relevant again. He made Ujiri an offer he couldn’t refuse — reportedly $3 million a year for five years. Kroenke mentioned the handshake deal, then shrugged, congratulated his friend and wished him well.

The obvious question was why not fight for him? Why not match the offer? It’s not as if the Kroenkes lack the money. Josh’s parents are both among the nation’s 100 wealthiest individuals, according to Forbes, with a combined net worth of $8.5 billion.

Why should the Raptors, of all teams, be able to afford a GM’s salary the Nuggets could or would not? When I posed this question to Kroenke at his press conference last week, he off-loaded the decision to Ujiri.

“Masai told me not to,” Kroenke said. “He said, ‘Josh I’m not going to tell you to match. I think I have already made my decision.’ His press conference was very revealing because it showed his love for the city of Toronto. In his opening statement he said ‘I am home’ several times and that is a great thing for Masai to feel. I don’t think it was his intention to move on from Denver this quickly, but Toronto was always a special place for him, as well as Denver is.”

I totally get why both Kroenke and Ujiri chose to frame the move this way. It takes them both off the hook — Ujiri for disloyalty, Kroenke for cheapness. But I don’t believe this sentimental story about going “home” for a minute. Toronto was one of many global stops for Ujiri, a native Nigerian, and not a particularly long one.

Of course he called Toronto home at a press conference in Toronto. If he’d signed a new deal in Denver, 10-to-1 he would have called Denver “home” at that press conference. In fact, he may have said he was coming home when he returned to Denver from Toronto in 2010; I don’t remember. This is how mercenaries bond with local communities, by claiming a loyalty that doesn’t actually exist. After two stints with the Nuggets, he’d lived in Denver longer than in Toronto.

Ujiri is not looking for a sentimental landing spot. He cares much more about succeeding at his trade, about becoming the architect of an NBA champion, than about his mailing address. He’s 43 years old. Do you think Toronto is his final stop? Me neither.

No, the appeal of Toronto was all about the money, and not just the salary, although Ujiri, who goes from being the lowest-paid GM in the NBA to one of the highest-paid, did not deny its importance.

“Financially, I think it was big,” he said.

But there is also the general looseness of the purse strings under Leiweke, who needs to make an immediate impact on a sad sack NBA franchise — the facelift includes new uniforms and possibly a new name — and has been given the resources to do it. It’s not just Ujiri’s salary that would have been smaller in Denver. His budget would have been, too.

This is the thing about Kroenke Sports Enterprises that sometimes perplexes fans. On the one hand, it represents deep-pocketed ownership by a certified billionaire for a franchise that operated on a shoe string for much of its history. That means stability: It’s not moving. It’s not getting sold. The owner isn’t getting his possessions thrown out on the sidewalk, not to get Nuggets fans thrashing involuntarily to flashbacks of their own.

On the other hand, you’re not getting what a hard-nosed businessperson would consider irresponsible spending. You’re not getting the exuberance of Mark Cuban or the late Jerry Buss. You’re getting competitive rates for players and coaches and bargain rates for pretty much everything else. You’re getting a mandate to operate in the black, meaning the size of Silent Stanley’s bank account is seldom relevant. Ujiri will have more scouts in Toronto, more freedom to ask for other things that may come up and more financial support for his basketball development campaign in Africa.

Now, KSE may be right in this case. It may be right that Ujiri at $1.2 million is a sound investment and Ujiri at $3 million is dramatically overpaying the latest hot executive. We won’t know until we see where the franchise goes from here. If the Nuggets continue to draft well and trade well and win a lot, the decision to let Ujiri go will be vindicated.

Under the Kroenkes, the Nuggets have adopted a “team” approach to the front office, which is probably why the younger Kroenke believes he can replace Ujiri and go on as before.

But this “team” approach can have unintended consequences, too. Before Kroenke hired Ujiri, the team was a triumverate of Mark Warkentien, Rex Chapman and Bret Bearup, who didn’t particularly like each other and produced palace intrigue that made the Kremlin envious.

A word of caution: Finding good NBA players in the middle or bottom of the draft’s first round is not as easy as it’s looked lately with Ty Lawson (drafted by the previous regime), Kenneth Faried and Evan Fournier. Once upon a time, near the end of the Doug Moe era, the Nuggets’ inability to jump from good to great was blamed largely on the mediocre players they kept drafting because of poor draft position.

The notion that Kroenke can step in for Ujiri is worrisome. Ujiri has been scouting basketball players on a global basis for most of his adult life. Kroenke has been preparing for a role as a sports owner and executive most of his. These are different paths.

John Elway has demonstrated that someone not steeped in scouting and film work can make good personnel decisions if he has good people around him. Over the past three years, Kroenke may have done essentially the same from behind the curtain. But Ujiri was a big part of those calls. Who will have Kroenke’s ear next? One hesitates to mention the Jerry Jones model — the owner who was a college player and thinks he knows more than he does.

However it turns out, I would suggest you take the prodigal-son-returns-home story with a shaker full of salt. Ujiri went back to Toronto because of the money — not only for him, but for his operation.

George

Try as he might to be accountable — and the younger Kroenke spent more time talking to reporters last Friday than his father has in 20 years — he could not address the real question hanging over his firing of Karl:

What, specifically, did he object to about a coach who just led the Nuggets to the best regular season in their NBA history, 57 wins without a single all-star on the roster, who was 423-257 — a .618 winning percentage — over eight seasons and part of a ninth?

Was it that his teams were eliminated in the first round of the playoffs in eight of their nine consecutive appearances? That’s a valid reason, but a risky one. The last time the Nuggets decided nine consecutive playoff appearances weren’t good enough, they fired Doug Moe and missed the playoffs 11 of the next 13 seasons.

Kroenke didn’t want to say anything that might be construed as negative with Karl now looking for work, so he denied that the first-round playoff loss to the Warriors had anything to do with his decision. I’m going to operate on the assumption he said this out of courtesy to Karl and that it is not true.

The irony is everybody in the organization pretty much agrees now that it was the magic act of wringing 57 wins and a No. 3 seed out of a young, interesting but obviously incomplete roster that created the expectations that led to Karl’s firing.

“The 57 wins that we had, was it a little bit much for this young team?” Ujiri asked on his way out the door.

“Those guys played hard. They’re talented. I think George did a great job. And so, did we get ahead of ourselves? When you sit back and think about it, the third youngest team in the NBA. They still have to grow, they still have to get better. I don’t think out of the core group of maybe eight, nine, 10 players, I don’t know if there’s one person that you’d say is not going to get better. They’re all going to be better players.”

As Kroenke explained it, Karl’s contract status was the heart of the problem.

“There were a couple different factors, but the main one that was coming up consistently was there was a contractual issue with George,” he said.

“George is entering the final year of his contract. We have a three-year option after next year and after several discussions with George it was a tough situation because I don’t think he was comfortable going in on the last year of his contract and I was in a tough position because I couldn’t extend him at this point in time.

“So, with the status quo being like that, I just decided it was best for us both to get a fresh start. I have an immense amount of respect for George as a coach and as a human being, and for us to get a fresh start now and allowing him, if he chooses to continue his coaching career elsewhere, I thought it was best for all parties involved.”

Why couldn’t he extend him at this point in time?

“You know, we’ve gone under a huge, I don’t want to say rebuild, I just say retool, kind of on the fly here over the last several years, and we have a completely different roster than we did when we made the Western Conference finals a few years ago,” Kroenke said.

“I think as teams evolve, their personality evolves as well, and with a lot of younger players on our team now and those guys are going to be under contract for the foreseeable future, I couldn’t make an accurate decision on if George was the right guy for the long term and so at that point in time I needed to make a decision for the short term.”

Odd, because this latest iteration of the Nuggets seemed clearly the one Karl liked best. No superstar to placate, no compromises to get certain people enough touches or compensate for certain no-shows at the defensive end. It is hard to dispute that Karl got the very most out of this roster during the regular season — hence his award.

But it is also hard to dispute that the Nuggets were not the same team in the playoffs. They shot .478 in the regular season, .438 in the playoffs. They shot .343 from long distance in the regular season, .311 in the playoffs. They gave up 101.1 points per game in the regular season, 107.2 in the playoffs.

The Warriors did not do what most of Denver’s first-round opponents have done — slow down the pace and make it a half-court game. The Warriors ran and shot, and boy, did they shoot. Karl’s defenders will point out that the Warriors were a buzz saw to begin the postseason, then slowly cooled off. They shot .576 from the floor in their first three wins over the Nuggets.

There was grumbling in the front office that Karl was outmaneuvered by Golden State’s second-year coach, Mark Jackson. Going into the series, Karl seemed eager to play small against a Warriors team anchored up front by the limited mobility of Andrew Bogut and David Lee. Even without the injured Danilo Gallinari, Karl thought he could play a small forward — in this case, Wilson Chandler — for long stretches at power forward. Chandler rebounds well enough to play the part and would have a big offensive advantage against the slower Lee.

When Lee went down with a torn hip flexor in the first game, everything changed. It was Jackson who went small, announcing he would start Carl Landry in Lee’s place but actually starting a third guard, Jarrett Jack. Small forward Harrison Barnes moved up to power forward and Chandler lost his matchup advantage. With power forward Kenneth Faried hobbled and center Kosta Koufos ineffective, Karl felt he had little choice but to go small, a matchup that didn’t work against the Warriors’ suddenly small lineup.

I’m told Ujiri and Kroenke were frustrated by Karl’s reluctance to start center JaVale McGee, whom the executives awarded a four-year, $44 million contract just last summer. Belatedly, Karl went big in Game 5, starting McGee for the first time, and the Nuggets got a win, although McGee was a minor factor. That was the Andre Iguodala game. McGee started again in Game 6 and the Warriors closed out the series.

For their part, Karl and his staff cringed at McGee’s defensive lapses. One trip, he was swatting away an opposing shot and drawing ooohs from the crowd. The next, he was nowhere to be found. Starting him next to Faried, another unpredictable defender, made the defensive game plan seem optional, which was not the message Karl was trying to deliver to his young team.

The front office was also frustrated by Karl’s loyalty to veteran Andre Miller, who had a great Game 1, winning it on a final shot, but went steadily downhill from there. The front office would have liked to see more of Fournier, a 20-year-old rookie who shot .353 in the series.

For all the quibbling, the main issue was whether to commit for multiple years to a coach who couldn’t seem to figure out the postseason. If this sounds familiar, it is pretty much the same criticism aimed at Moe a generation earlier. Both coaches took advantage of Denver’s elevation to produce a decade of regular-season winning by running other teams out of the gym. The Nuggets had the best home record in the association this season at 38-3.

When the playoffs come around, everything changes. Opponents are no longer coming to town after playing the previous night, getting to their hotels at 4 a.m. They are no longer forced to adjust on the fly to Denver’s unconventional offense. They acclimate to the elevation and they game plan to stop a team that lacks anyone who has to be double-teamed consistently.

Is this Karl’s fault? It is not. But it’s a conundrum the Nuggets have to face at some point. If Brian Shaw and Lionel Hollins are at the top of Kroenke’s coaching wish list, as has been reported, the Nuggets will at least entertain playing a slower style that might produce less regular-season success but have more of a chance to succeed in the postseason. That’s a risky tradeoff because seeding still plays the biggest role in determining whether a team advances in the playoffs. Not to mention the fact that the Nuggets roster, as currently constituted, lacks both the outside shooting and inside power game a half-court team needs.

“I wouldn’t have made the decision that I made if I thought that we were going to take a gigantic step back in the near term,” Kroenke said. “Do I expect us to win 57 games next year? We’re going to have our work cut out for us. One, we have some injuries, and two, we’re going to have to be working through a new system, a new coach, and everybody’s going to have to be getting comfortable with each other.”

Well, yeah, that’s what happens when you fire a coach who just won 57 games. For better or worse, it’s all on Josh now.

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May 30, 2013

Colorado’s trip down memory lane: Tradition or nostalgia?

By Dave Krieger

John Branch once covered the Colorado Avalanche for the Colorado Springs Gazette, so the shots he took last week at the club’s foray into the past were not ill-informed, even if he now works for The New York Times.

Branch looked at the spate of hirings of former star players by Denver pro sports franchises — John Elway with the Broncos, Walt Weiss and Dante Bichette with the Rockies, Joe Sakic and Patrick Roy with the Avs — and concluded Colorado is now mired in nostalgia, an instinct that is seldom rewarded in pro sports.

He wrote in part:

It would be like trying to channel the overlapping heydays of the Mets, the Jets and the Knicks by hiring Tom Seaver, Joe Namath and Phil Jackson. (A few years ago, the Rangers hired Mark Messier, the captain of the 1994 Stanley Cup team, as a “special assistant to the president,” hoping his mojo would be contagious. So far, it has not.)

Picture the Bay Area in 2030 if its teams hired Buster Posey, Joe Thornton and Stephen Curry.

That would be preposterous. But not in Colorado, the sports recycling capital of the nation. Around Denver, old athletes do not fade away; they return to remind everyone what probably will not happen again.

Memo to my old friend John: This might not be just a Denver thing. The Kansas City Royals announced just today that George Brett is joining the club as hitting coach.

It is true, of course, that the roster of legendary players who have tried unsuccessfully to recapture the magic of their playing days as coaches or front office executives is long and familiar:

Bart Starr was a two-time Super Bowl winner as the Packers’ quarterback, but went 52-76-3 as the team’s coach.

Magic Johnson was one of the best basketball players in history, leading the Lakers to five NBA championships, but he lasted only 16 games as their coach before throwing up his hands in frustration.

Ted Williams was one of the best hitters in baseball history, but over four seasons as manager of the Washington Senators/Texas Rangers, he went 273-364.

Isiah Thomas was the heart of the Bad Boys’ back-to-back NBA championships in Detroit, but he was 55-108 in two seasons as head coach of the Knicks.

And, of course, there was Wayne Gretzky, the Great One, the best hockey player ever, who was decidedly not the best hockey coach ever. He went 141-161-24 in four seasons as a coach in Phoenix.

Attempts by great players to bring back their glory days from offices in the executive suite have generally not gone much better. Thomas, Michael Jordan, Kevin McHale, Bobby Clarke and Elgin Baylor are among those who have taken swings from the front office with limited success.

Elway has so far proved an exception to this latter pattern, and it was arguably his success that got Denver’s other franchises on their current nostalgic roll.

Elway took over the Broncos’ front office a little more than two years ago. In 29 months, he has remade the roster, attracting top free agents such as Peyton Manning and Wes Welker and giving the Broncos their best chance to contend for a Super Bowl since he retired as a player in 1999.

Following the Broncos’ 13-3 campaign last season, the Rockies dipped into their own brief history, hiring Weiss, their former shortstop, as manager, and Bichette, one of the original Blake Street Bombers, as their hitting coach. Now it’s the Avs’ turn, naming Sakic to run the front office and Roy to coach the team — Hall of Famers who owned the town during the Avs’ glory days, which included Stanley Cup championships in 1996 and 2001.

Only the NBA’s Nuggets have so far escaped F. Scott Fitzgerald’s assessment at the end of “The Great Gatsby” that “we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

Branch finished his essay in the Times by suggesting they’re next. With Chauncey Billups’ playing career winding down, how long can it be before the best basketball player to come out of Colorado assumes a navigational role with his hometown team?

So I asked Roy about this charge that he’s the latest resort in a trip down memory lane.

“I read that article,” he said.

“It’s very simple. I don’t think I’m here because I’m an ex-Avalanche. Just think about it: Those years in Quebec (as coach and general manager of the Quebec Remparts, a junior hockey franchise), if I was just Patrick Roy the player, I wouldn’t have lasted eight years.

“At first, yes, the player’s going to look at you and he’s going to say, ‘Wow, it’s our coach.’ But that doesn’t last very long. Eventually, you have to show them that, ‘Hey, he’s got the solution, he’s got ideas, he’s getting us going.’ At the end, they’re not going to see me as former Avalanche goaltender Patrick Roy. They’re going to see me as their coach.

“Yes, the past is part of the Broncos, the Avalanche, could be the Nuggets and all the team sports here in Denver. But I’m not looking at the past. I’m not going to go in the dressing room and say to the players, ‘Oh, yeah, in my time, we were doing this and that. It was like this.’

“No. I’m going to go say, ‘Hey, guys, this is what I think we should do to become a better team. It’s your time, it’s your opportunity to be difference-makers in this town and have fun coming to the rink.’ The excitement’s going to be back; no doubt about it. And you know what? I want to bring that passion. That’s probably my biggest challenge.”

As Branch pointed out, earlier forays into the past have not worked out that well for Colorado sports teams, whether it was Dan Issel as coach and general manager of the Nuggets or Bill McCartney protege Jon Embree as coach of the University of Colorado football team.

But Branch’s brush is a bit broad. Weiss and Bichette were good baseball players, but they are not Hall-of-Famers, so they don’t face the same daunting history as Elway, Sakic and Roy. Lots of former players have played the roles they’re playing now for the Rockies, many of them successfully.

Among the Hall-of-Famers, Elway is off to an auspicious start with the Broncos, and Sakic and Roy have a few things going for them as they take over operations for the Avs. For one thing, the team has nowhere to go but up. It has missed the playoffs four out of the past five seasons and competed with Florida last season for title of worst team in the NHL.

For another, the NHL draft on June 30 will provide the Avs with their third top-three draft pick in five years.

As Roy pointed out, he is not trying his hand at coaching for the first time, as Gretzky was when he took over the Coyotes. Roy cut his teeth at the junior level for eight years. He knows the job, he likes it, and he was good at it working with players from 16 to 20 years old. Now he’ll have to see how he does with grown-ups.

Is his hiring in part an attempt to take advantage of his popularity and name recognition? Certainly. The Avs need the buzz, and nobody creates buzz around hockey in Colorado like Patrick Roy. But it’s hardly out of left field. In fact, of all the nostalgic hires in Denver over the past three years, Roy has paid the most dues to earn his opportunity.

History makes it easy to be cynical about the move, and it’s certainly possible that it won’t succeed. But the fact remains that Roy and Sakic can’t do any worse than the men they’re replacing. If the question is why, the answer is, why not?

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May 20, 2013

Rockies learning how to take a punch

By Dave Krieger

There are baseball games that appear to tell a larger story than a 1/162nd slice of a languorous season, and last Thursday’s looked like one of those for the Rockies.

They were facing a Giants team that swept them early in the season and had beaten them nine straight times dating to last year. Seven of their next 10 were going to be against San Francisco, sort of a lie detector test for a Rockies team that had roared out of the gate. If the Giants did what they did last year, winning 14 of 18, or the year before that, winning 13 of 18, the Rocks’ early-season pretensions to contention would do what they did in 2011 — crash and burn in May.

So they rocked Matt Cain for three home runs in the first three innings, including back-to-back jacks from the past and the future — 39-year-old first baseman Todd Helton and 22-year-old third baseman Nolan Arenado — handing Opening Day starter Jhoulys Chacin a 6-0 lead.

Chacin promptly gave it all back, surrendering five runs in the fourth and leaving in the sixth with the score tied and the eventual winning runs on base. Following its early explosion, the Rockies’ offense shut down, collecting one hit after the third inning against Cain, Jeremy Affeldt and Sergio Romo.

It was the most discouraging loss of the year. Not only had the Rocks seemed to prove they couldn’t beat the Giants on a bet, they had confirmed the worst suspicions about their character as a team — frontrunners who fold when the going gets sticky. After winning 13 of their first 17 games and spending 16 days in first place, the 8-6 defeat dropped them to 21-20 and third place.

So how did they respond to this soul-sapping loss? They swept the next three from the Giants, battering Madison Bumgarner, Tim Lincecum and Barry Zito for 20 runs and getting a six-inning shutout of their own from Juan Nicasio, who, prior to that start, had been flirting with re-education camp.

“I think our team showed who they were early on,” said first-year manager Walt Weiss. “Had some opportunities to overcome some things and they did that. That’s why I don’t get too down when we struggle, because I know that that’s part of the deal up here. You’re going to get beat up a little bit in this league, but I have confidence that our guys will do what they did in the last three days. When it looks like they start to slide, they turn it around. They’ve done it a handful of times already this year. That’s a great trait to have.”

Many fans still base their expectations on the larger sample size of the past two seasons, but the Rocks’ weekend bounce-back against their nemesis over that span was the best sign so far that things actually might be different this year.

“I really think this bunch is extremely competitive and we’re sick of losing,” said reliever Matt Belisle, part of the four-man shutout in Sunday’s 5-0 series finale. “And these Giants have beat up on us quite a bit and we want to turn the tables.”

With the additions of Arenado and catcher Wilin Rosario to the core of Troy Tulowitzki, Carlos Gonzalez, Dexter Fowler, Michael Cuddyer and Helton, the middle of the Rocks’ order has grown truly prodigious. They lead the National League in runs (221 in 44 games, an average of five per game), home runs (58), batting average (.272) and slugging percentage (.445).

Individually, Tulowitzki leads the league in runs batted in (37) and ranks third in batting average (.336). Gonzalez is tied for fourth in home runs (10) and is fifteenth in batting (.308). Rosario has nine homers, Fowler and Tulo have eight apiece and the disabled Cuddyer has seven.

So, yeah, they can rake. But the big story so far is on the mound, where the Rocks have cut more than a run off their worst-in-baseball staff earned-run average of a year ago. After posting a 5.22 staff ERA and earning laughingstock honors with rotation and pitch count experiments in 2012, the Rocks rank in the middle of the pack so far this year with a staff ERA of 3.85. That includes a 3.04 mark out of the bullpen, fifth-best in the NL.

Any team that plays half its games at Coors Field is going to be challenged to be competitive nationally in pitching statistics, and the Rocks have never finished a season with a staff ERA lower than 4.00 in their 20-year history. Still, injuries were a big part of the story last year. Chacin, Nicasio and Jorge De La Rosa were all out most of last season, and their return has made a huge difference, as has replacing Jeremy Guthrie with Jon Garland as the veteran free agent. A team that had 27 quality starts all last year has 18 less than two months into the season.

It also presents them with exactly the opposite of last year’s problem. They have too many starters. Tyler Chatwood, called up for a third spot start when Jeff Francis suffered a pulled groin, deserves to be in the rotation. Not only is he 2-0 with a 2.55 ERA, he’s done damage with the bat (he’s a former shortstop) and demonstrated a competitive grittiness that shows up well among the Rockies’ many nice guys.

But whose spot does he take? A week ago you might have said either Francis or Nicasio, who were struggling. But Francis gave up one run in six innings in his last start before going on the DL and Nicasio gave up none in six Sunday against the Giants.

Of the five starters, only De La Rosa has an ERA below 4.00, so the rotation is not exactly impenetrable. And Drew Pomeranz, the prize of the Ubaldo Jimenez trade, will be knocking on the door soon enough. He’s 6-0 with a 3.22 ERA for Triple-A Colorado Springs.

Nicasio remains the most enigmatic of the existing starters. There are those who think he’s better suited to the bullpen considering he’s basically a one-pitch pitcher. But when Nicasio’s fastball is electric and down, he doesn’t need much variety. Lately, he had been building up vast pitch counts early in games trying to be too fine. So Weiss paired him Sunday with veteran catcher Yorvit Torrealba.

“I just say, ‘Whatever I put down, you throw it,'” Torrealba explained when asked about his pre-game instructions for Nicasio.

“I mean, I don’t try to take any credit or anything, but I told him I just want him to go out there and have fun. I don’t want him to think at all. Just go ahead and throw it and execute down. And then, whatever happens, happens. If you get killed, blame it on me, I don’t care. I just want him to throw strikes and see what happens. And he did.”

Considering what they went through last year, deploying starters who clearly weren’t ready because everybody else was hurt, it’s a nice problem to have.

Things can change in a heartbeat, of course. The Rocks conclude the current homestand with three against the Diamondbacks, who are now in first place, leading both the Rocks and Giants by a game, and then travel to San Francisco for three more with the Giants. Those first couple of days at sea level after a homestand are still a challenge for them. The last time they hit the road, the Cardinals threw consecutive complete-game shutouts at them.

Still, the weekend demonstrated something about this year’s Rocks that wasn’t all that clear before: They can take a punch.

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May 11, 2013

Time to test Rockies’ resolve

By Dave Krieger

An oft-quoted truism of baseball says good pitching beats good hitting, although the practical reality may be closer to the remark attributed to Bob Veale, the 6-foot-6-inch left-hander who pitched for the Pirates and Red Sox in the 1960s and ’70s:

“Good pitching will beat good hitting anytime, and vice versa.”

In other words, as Roseanne Roseannadanna would say, it’s always something. If it ain’t one thing, it’s another.

The Rockies went into their weekend series in St. Louis leading the National League in batting and runs, but there were signs of trouble. They had lost three of their previous four games, scoring a total of eight runs.

After the first two games against the Cardinals — a one-hit, complete-game shutout by Shelby Miller and a two-hit, complete-game shutout by Adam Wainwright — they have lost four in a row, scoring a total of three runs in 36 innings. The last time they scored was the first inning of their final game against the Yankees, meaning they take a 26-inning scoreless streak into Sunday’s series finale in St. Louis.

“Wainwright commanded everything,” Rockies manager Walt Weiss said of Saturday’s second consecutive 3-0 defeat. “I think it was a combination of things — us going a little cold and at the same time running into a couple pitchers that aren’t missing.”

Everybody likes to beat up on Rockies pitching, but it has surrendered just three runs in each of the last four games — and the club is 0-4 over that span. Troy Tulowitzki, their leading hitter, missed two of the four with tightness in his groin. Michael Cuddyer, their second-leading hitter, missed the last three with a bulging disc in his neck that sent him to the disabled list Saturday.

Between Eric Young’s first-inning single off Miller on Friday night and Todd Helton’s fifth-inning base on balls from Wainwright on Saturday afternoon, 40 consecutive Rockies batters were retired, tying a major league record.

Between Young’s hit and Nolan Arenado’s eighth-inning single Saturday, which broke up Wainwright’s no-hit bid, the Rocks went 0-for-49 at the plate. Fifty consecutive batters, counting Helton’s walk, went hitless.

Dexter Fowler is 1-for-21 over the past six games — he broke an 0-for-20 skein in his final at-bat against Wainwright — his batting average falling from .310 to .264.

Carlos Gonzalez is 0-for-15 since homering against the Yankees on Tuesday, accounting for both runs in a 2-0 victory, the last time the Rocks won. His average has slipped from .322 to .288.

In the space of ten days, the Rocks have gone from first place with a record of 17-11 to third place at 19-17. The first of the bandwagon fans are already looking for landing spots. After all, we’ve seen this before, right?

In 2011, the Rocks were in first place from April 6 through May 10. By the end of May, they were below .500 and in third. After going 17-8 in April, they went 8-21 in May to give it all back. They ended up 73-89.

This year, they went 16-11 in April. In May so far, they are 3-6.

They are off to an excellent start on the mound, where they had the best bullpen earned-run average in the National League before Josh Outman gave up a single run to the Cards on Saturday. A team that had 27 quality starts all last year has 15 already.

They were off to an excellent start offensively before this last week, when they faced good Yankees pitching and great Cardinals pitching.

“Both guys we’ve faced these first two games have pitched on the edges of the strike zone with all their stuff, which makes it very difficult,” Weiss said.

So now comes the test. Are the Rocks tougher than they’ve been the last couple of years? Will they shrink from adversity and fold up their tent or will they fight back?

“These guys do their work every day,” Weiss said. “They prepare for the game. Everyone gets beat up a little bit in this game at some point. But our guys will keep grinding and will come out and try to turn it around tomorrow.”

They get another good Cardinals starter, Jaime Garcia (2.25 ERA), on Sunday. Then they move on to Wrigley Field, where the Cubs are struggling but will deploy three starters who are pitching pretty well — Travis Wood (2.33), Carlos Villanueva (3.02) and Jeff Samardzija (3.70).

Baseball may seem understandable merely by swimming through its ocean of numbers, but at times like these numbers are not that helpful. The numbers say the Rocks are pretty good. They have hit well and they have pitched well in the season’s early going. But it is not yet enough of a sample size to tell you much.

Now they face some adversity. Cuddyer, one of their best hitters in the early going, is on the shelf.

“You feel like you’re leaving your teammates, but it is what it is,” said Cuddyer, who has had issues with his neck twice before during his career. “Injuries happen and you can’t do anything about it. You just try and get healthy and get back on the field.”

Helton, their other veteran leader, is no longer capable of leading the team offensively. So the weight falls on the younger stars — Tulowitzki, Gonzalez and Fowler.

Can they carry it? Is this the fragile team of the past couple of seasons or has it grown up enough to bring a little fight to the party?

We’ll know soon enough.

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May 1, 2013

Mark Jackson’s fine whine

By Dave Krieger

Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he was playing to the three guys who will suit up as referees for Game 6 in Oakland on Thursday night. Otherwise, Mark Jackson’s whine about the dirty, dastardly Nuggets following the Warriors’ 107-100 loss in Game 5 sounded like the indignation of a schoolyard bully who finally got his.

For their part, the Nuggets should take it as a compliment. It’s the first time in history they’ve been mistaken for the Bad Boys.

“They were the more physical team,” Jackson said. “They were the aggressor. They hurt us in the first half scoring the basketball, points in the paint. Made us pay for our turnovers. They tried to send hit men on Steph. But give them credit. It wasn’t cocky basketball. They outplayed us. It wasn’t magic. They outplayed us.”

Uh, hold on, you sort of buried the lead there, Mark. Hit men?

“You know, some dirty plays early,” he said. “It’s playoff basketball. That’s all right. We own it. But make no mistake about it: We went up 3-1 playing hard, physical, clean basketball, not trying to hurt anybody.”

Self-righteousness has always been a Jackson trait , but this was a dizzying passive-aggressive two-step in which every allegation of malfeasance was accompanied by an assurance that it was fine; to be expected, in fact, in playoff basketball. Thus his assessment of Kenneth Faried’s performance:

“He set some great screens, and some great illegal ones, too. He did his job. Hey, I played with guys like that. You’re paid to do that. Dale Davis, Anthony Davis, Charles Oakley. You’re paid to do it. So give ’em credit. But, as an opposing coach, I see it, and I’m trying to protect my guys.”

It is not clear, exactly, how whining in public about one of the softer teams in the NBA protects his guys, unless it’s an attempt to influence the next officiating crew, in which case it might be delivered more effectively the day before Game 6 so it’s all over the media during the 24 hours those referees are in town preparing to do the game.

Jackson takes many things personally and this was one of them. That line about how the Nuggets’ win wasn’t magic? That had been simmering 48 hours. Nuggets coach George Karl used the word after Game 4 to describe the Warriors’ incredible shooting — .530 through the first four games, .576 in their three wins.

“The next 48 hours is going to be difficult, to say the least,” Karl said then. “They’ve found some magic and we got to somehow take it away from them.”

Apparently, this qualifies as disrespect these days. I don’t know who described the Warriors as “cocky,” but Jackson got back at him, too.

The Nuggets were by turns perplexed and amused.

“They play dirty every night,” said Faried, who was shoved to the floor beyond the baseline by Warriors center Andrew Bogut in perhaps the most replayed scene of the series so far. “And they target me. Every rebound, they try to hit me and try to hurt me. It’s basketball.”

Faried, like Steph Curry, the Warriors guard Jackson said was targeted by hit men, is recovering from a sprained ankle.

“I think I’ve taken the hardest hit throughout the series,” said Andre Iguodala, the star of the Nuggets’ Game 5 victory. “I think it was Game 1 or 2. Bogut leaned into me. Fullcourt screen. And I didn’t remember what happened the rest of the game. So I think they kind of brought the physicality to the series and we’ve just stopped being the receivers and we’re starting to hit back a little bit.”

The only specific play Jackson cited was a glancing collision between Faried and Curry at the free throw line that sent Curry sprawling. From my vantage point, I couldn’t tell if Faried tripped him or gave him a little hip or knee check on the way by. Either way, it was a message that Curry no longer had a letter of transit through Denver’s defense.

This is pretty mild stuff by NBA playoff standards, as Charles Barkley, Shaquille O’Neal and Kenny Smith confirmed in their conversation on TNT later that night. They agreed nothing particularly heinous had occurred in the Nuggets-Warriors game and that Jackson’s remarks were ill-advised. Then they showed video of truly dirty playoff fouls.

Jackson’s fusillade did manage to divert the Game 5 storyline from the fact that his marvelous shooters did, for one night anyway, lose their magic touch. The Warriors shot a rather mortal .432 and Curry, the star of the series so far, made just one of seven three-point attempts.

Superficially, at least, the difference was that Karl went back to a standard NBA lineup. He had abandoned it first when Faried sprained his ankle just before the end of the regular season and then because center Kosta Koufos was such a stiff in the first two games of the series, especially the second, when the Warriors became just the fourth visitor all season to win on Denver’s home floor.

After Jackson lost power forward David Lee to a torn hip flexor in Game 1, he moved small forward Harrison Barnes to power forward and added guard Jarrett Jack, making it a three-guard lineup. In Games 3 and 4, Karl followed suit, keeping small forward Wilson Chandler at power forward, a position he’d assumed during Faried’s absence. Faried moved from power forward to center and Koufos moved to the bench. With Faried still hampered by the ankle, this lineup was so small that it was obliterated on the boards, usually a Nuggets strength.

Jackson got a lot of credit for this tactical move, which was shrouded in a strangely transparent ruse. In each of the Warriors’ wins, he offered for pre-game introductions a lineup in which a traditional power forward, Carl Landry, was in Lee’s place. Then, when it was time to actually start the game, he deployed the one with Jack in Lee’s place and Landry on the bench. If Karl took offense as easily as Jackson does, he might have viewed this odd gamesmanship as an attempt to deceive him.

In any case, Karl went back to a standard lineup for Game 5, but substituted JaVale McGee, his erratic but athletically sensational backup center, for Koufos. The Nuggets led 36-22 after one and 66-46 at intermission.

When I asked Jackson about this tactical move, he declared it irrelevant.

“We lost the game because they scored in the paint, we turned the basketball over, they got it going in transition and we made mistakes,” he said. “No matter who’s on the floor, when we play our brand of basketball, we’ll be just fine. We put together a run with small guys on the floor, so it has nothing to do with size. We have to stay true to who we are.”

When Jackson went small in the second half, Karl matched up and the Nuggets’ big lead — 22 at its height — melted away. The Warriors got within five three times in the final minutes. I asked Karl why he thought that happened.

“We can go to switching more of their pick-and-rolls and play smaller or we can go bigger and try to rotate,” he said. “That’s a game-time decision for us most of the time. I think we actually slowed down more in the second half. We only scored 41 points in the second half. We somehow got to get enough energy on the court to keep the tempo and pace fast.”

As if anticipating Jackson’s allegations, which came minutes later, Karl closed his interview session with a joke, an unprompted rhetorical question:

“Did Draymond Green play football or basketball at Michigan State?”

Green is the Warriors’ 6-foot-7, 230-pound, rookie defensive specialist. He managed four personal fouls in 14 minutes of action.

The Nuggets desperately needed a big game from somebody other than Ty Lawson and they got it from Iguodala, who put up 25 points, 12 rebounds and seven assists. The last Nugget to post 25 and 12 in a playoff game was LaPhonso Ellis. Throw in the assists and you have to go back to Fat Lever.

“Honestly, I didn’t really change anything from the last two or three games,” Iguodala said. “I felt like Game 2, the shot felt really well. Same with the two games in Oakland. I feel really good in that arena. So I didn’t change too much. I just tried to be a little more assertive once I got the ball because either I’m going to make a play for someone else or I can make a play for myself. So the guys relied on me to do that tonight.”

In fact, Iguodala has been shooting well in the series — he was at .512 from the field and .400 from long distance going into Game 5; those numbers are .534 and .429 now — but not to nearly as much effect. He was averaging 14.8 points a game before his 25-point explosion.

The Nuggets also got a big first half from Chandler, who struggled through the first four games, shooting .356. Chandler’s splits alone may account for the big first half lead and the disappearing second half lead. He had 16 before halftime, three after.

Still, the big story heading into Game 6 will be the allegations of dirty play, even if Jackson’s coach on the floor, Jack, didn’t seem to share the perception.

“It was good defense and we welcome good defense,” he said of the Nuggets. “It felt like good defense. We liked it. There is nothing further to it. We’re a close-knit bunch, a battle-tested bunch; nothing can get us out of our character. I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

Iguodala knew, and he was pretty sure it went both ways.

“Are the Warriors taking cheap shots?” he asked, repeating a question. “I think it’s just part of the big game of basketball. I’ve been hit a few times and I’ve wondered who it was or how they caught me. I had to go back on tape because I’ve been hit with some shots and it wasn’t a ghost hitting me.”

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April 24, 2013

Bushwhacked! Do the Nuggets have an answer for the greatest-shooting backcourt ever?

By Dave Krieger

In Mark Jackson’s brain, there was a certain intrigue to the starting lineups for Game 2 of the Nuggets-Warriors playoff series Tuesday night.

Kenneth Faried, the Nuggets’ power forward who missed Game 1 with a sprained ankle, was cleared to return, but his coach, George Karl, told reporters he would bring him off the bench rather than return him immediately to the starting lineup.

Karl tends to be more transparent about such things than some coaches because he figures his opponent will know soon enough anyway. If he says he’s not starting Faried and then he does, it would be a simple matter for Jackson to alter his own lineup in response, or to substitute early if he felt the matchups were going against him.

But Jackson, in his first playoff series as a head coach, thought Karl, an old hand, might be trying to snooker him. Knowing the visiting team’s lineup would be introduced first, he sent out a group that included Carl Landry at power forward, replacing the injured David Lee. Landry would be a suitable matchup for Faried.

When the Nuggets did what Karl said he would do, starting Wilson Chandler in Faried’s big forward spot, Jackson called Landry back and replaced him with guard Jarrett Jack, giving the Warriors a smaller, three-guard lineup.

Why didn’t Landry actually take the floor after being introduced with the starters?

“I’m not really sure,” Jackson said. “He may have had to go to the bathroom or something.”

So Jackson didn’t change his mind between introductions and tipoff?

“No,” he said. “Just covering all the bases.”

In other words, if Faried was in the Nuggets’ lineup, Jackson had Landry ready to match up. If he wasn’t, Jackson would make a last-minute switch. The decision had actually been made earlier in the day.

“I came to my coaches early this morning,” Jackson recounted. “I said, ‘Am I crazy to start Harrison (Barnes) at the four (big forward)? I mean, somebody talk me out of it.’ They all just smiled and they co-signed it. And I knew it was the right thing.”

If Karl or any member of his staff was surprised by the last-minute change, it didn’t show. The effect of Jackson’s decision was to go small against a small Nuggets lineup that also featured three guards — Ty Lawson, Evan Fournier and Andre Iguodala. The Nuggets held their own early, winning the first quarter 28-26. It was their only competitive episode of the evening.

“Did it throw us off?” Karl asked, repeating the question. “I mean, we play small as much as any team. The first quarter, we actually had somewhat control of what was going on. So we kind of knew what was going on.”

Whatever happened after that, it should have been accompanied by alcoholic beverages of some kind. The Nuggets saved their biggest stinker of the six-month season — a 131-117 blowout that was even worse than it sounds — for the first round of the playoffs. It’s like an allergy or something.

The game takes its place in the Nuggets’ book of dubious records. It was not only the most points scored against the Nuggets this season, it was the most scored against them in a playoff game in 23 years. It was the most scored against anybody in a playoff game in 18 years.

The Warriors’ 14 three-pointers were a new record for a Denver playoff opponent. The Nuggets collected a total of 26 rebounds, their most meager postseason total ever. Faried, the rebounding Manimal, had two in 21 minutes.

You get the idea. The Warriors made nearly two of every three shots, an astounding shooting percentage of .646. It’s been 22 years since anybody had a bigger number in the playoffs.

When I asked Karl if it was his team’s worst defensive performance of the season, he didn’t argue.

“I would think so,” he said glumly. “I can’t recall another one. We didn’t do very much of anything very well. Pick and rolls, give up the paint, three ball, transition.

“We let their shooters get into the game, and the frustration of covering shooters making shots broke down our team concepts some. Our shot selection offensively broke down and that gave them the fast break a lot of times. I don’t think I’ve ever coached a game where a team got three 35-point quarters, maybe in my career. I don’t remember that.”

After that first quarter, the Warriors’ shots rained down from everywhere and everyone. Jack hit 10 of 15, Barnes nine of 14, Klay Thompson eight of 11 and Steph Curry 13 of 23. Success energized the Warriors. Failure drained the Nuggets. The Warriors moved the ball until the Nuggets quit chasing it, then made the open shots.

Iguodala had the hot hand for the Nuggets early, hitting five of six first-quarter shots, including two three-pointers, and doing his part to fire up the full house as he ran back up the court. He got only five more attempts the rest of the game, and he didn’t seem that happy about it.

“We have so many guys who are attacking,” he said. “We’ve got to stick with some things that if they’re working, we’ve got to continue to go with it. But they went zone in the second half and kind of threw us out of our rhythm a little bit. And it kind of takes away from one guy being able to attack.”

Chandler, in particular, suffered in Golden State’s switch at big forward to Barnes from the injured Lee.

“We matched up better on defense,” Curry said. “Wilson had a huge game last game. D. Lee did a great job guarding him, but when you have Harrison able to defend him, that’s a better matchup for us.”

Chandler took one more shot than Barnes and scored 10 fewer points. Matched up against another natural small forward, he lost the quickness advantage he has against bigger, slower power forwards.

“Harrison Barnes, for a rookie, hasn’t been getting the respect that he deserves,” Jackson said. “A rookie that starts for a No. 6 seed all year long, defends, doesn’t kill you with numbers but does everything the right way.”

Barnes said Jackson didn’t tell him he was going to play big forward until he was about to walk out on the court for the opening tip.

“I think Carl even came out in the starting lineup when they announced it,” Curry said. “So I think Jack knew right before the game started that that was what we were going to do. He was ready for it. We had that lineup a lot during games, but just a different look to start with it. But defensively I think it helped us to start the game that way.”

Having removed the Nuggets’ matchup advantage, the Warriors proved better, for one night anyway, at pretty much every position. Curry put up a dazzling line of 30 points, 13 assists, five rebounds, three steals and one turnover. Thompson scored 21 points on only 11 shots. He took six threes and made five.

“We’ve got guys that can knock down shots,” Jackson said. “When you talk about Klay Thompson and Steph Curry, in my opinion they’re the greatest shooting backcourt in the history of the game. And I’m a guy that’s just not throwing that out there. I followed basketball my entire life. Not only played, covered it, but I was a fan as a kid. I watched the great players. And these two guys are absolutely off the charts. I would have put Reggie Miller and myself in there, but I held him down.”

So the Nuggets got smoked. What do they do now? Games 3 and 4 are in Oakland this weekend. New schemes? New lineups? Try harder?

“We’re going to have to play harder,” Karl said. “There’s no question that to win in Golden State is going to take much more energy than we’ve put into these two games. I’m not saying we didn’t try hard. We played hard. But we didn’t play hard enough. They played harder than we did.

“They made shots, they get cocky, they get enthusiastic, they get into it. They were urgent and desperate. I can’t say that we didn’t play hard, we just didn’t play playoff hard. A little bit, I think they were more physical than we were. Their big guys hit us more than we probably banged them. The momentum and pendulum of urgency and desperation comes on our side in Golden State when we get there.”

Speaking of big guys, if anybody has seen center Kosta Koufos, please alert local authorities. Somehow, the Warriors managed to outscore the Nuggets by 18 points in the 14 minutes he spent on the floor. Might this be an opportune time to start JaVale McGee? Or does Faried, who was ineffective off the bench, return to the starting lineup?

“I’ll evaluate everything,” Karl said. “We will evaluate everything. And we will try to make the adjustments that put the best team out there for more minutes than we did tonight, and that won’t be that difficult.”

Each playoff game is its own story, and one doesn’t necessarily influence the next. But the Warriors were the more aggressive, skilled team in the first two games of the series. Only Andre Miller’s miraculous 18-point fourth quarter in Game 1 prevented the visitors from winning both.

“This series is far from over,” Jackson said. “We’ve got a tremendous amount of respect for them and they’re more than capable of coming into Oracle (Arena) and beating us. So we’ve got to relax, and then we’ve got to get back to work.”

The Warriors are much better outside shooters, so the Nuggets have to do what they did all season, which is get to the rim. But they aren’t rebounding, the catalyst for the fast break, and the Warriors are frustrating penetration by turning to a zone defense at times that turns the Nuggets into jump shooters or turnover machines.

Curry has been better than Lawson. Thompson has been more efficient than Iguodala. Barnes outplayed Chandler in Game 2. And Koufos vs. Andrew Bogut has been no contest.

“This process has just begun,” Karl said. “We’ve beaten this team four out of six games. Someone’s always said the series doesn’t begin until someone wins on the other team’s court. Now the series in a lot of ways, the process has begun.”

Well, if we’re in a battle of cliches, the pressure is on the Nuggets now. They do not look like the team that finished the regular season on a 24-4 roll. Their 24-game home winning streak is over. Now we find out if they know how to counterpunch.

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April 21, 2013

So Andre Miller is ready for the playoffs; anybody else?

By Dave Krieger

For most of the last two months of the NBA regular season, the Denver Nuggets seemed impermeable to bad news.

Leading scorer Ty Lawson goes down? Andre Miller takes over at the point. Miller is lost to one of the best bench units in the association? Twenty-year-old Evan Fournier steps into the rotation.

Second-leading scorer Danilo Gallinari goes down? Wilson Chandler steps into the starting lineup. Chandler is lost to one of the best bench units in the association? Young Anthony Randolph steps into the rotation.

Leading rebounder Kenneth Faried goes down? The ever-versatile Chandler moves from Gallo’s small forward spot to Manimal’s big forward spot and Fournier, who couldn’t find the floor a month ago, moves into the starting lineup.

Through it all, the ensemble kept winning — 13 out of 15 in March, seven of eight in April. The Nuggets were 24-4 after the All-Star break. Their 57 wins were the most since the franchise joined the NBA in 1976.

They remained impermeable Saturday in Game 1 of their first-round playoff series against the Warriors, but just barely. Miller’s game-winning layup with 1.3 seconds to play was a nice story. At 37, he said it was the first game-winning shot of his long career.

On the other hand, the fact that the ageless Miller had to bail out his team with an 18-point fourth quarter — the rest of the team scored eight — didn’t say much for anybody else. The Warriors’ starting backcourt of Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson outscored their Denver counterparts, Lawson and Fournier, 41-23, leaving the bench a lot to make up. Miller outscored the Golden State bench by himself.

The Nuggets’ finished the regular season third in the NBA in assists at 24.4 per game. They managed only 16 in their 97-95 Game 1 victory. Without that active passing game, they were forced to play one-on-one, which is not their strength. They shot .447 as a team after averaging .478 for the season. Lawson was 6-of-15, Chandler 5-of-16 and Corey Brewer 4-of-12.

“We didn’t shoot the ball with much confidence all night long,” coach George Karl acknowledged. “We won tonight basically because of Andre Miller and our defense . . . . It’s just the beginning. One win is a good start. I think Golden State has shown that they’re going to be able to play on the same level as us and we’re going to have to continue to get better and continue to find other ways to win games.”

One way would be to score more. The Nuggets led the league in scoring this season, averaging 106.1 points per game. They scored fewer than 100 only 19 times in 82 games. Yet the Warriors, who gave up an average of 100.2 points per game during the season, held them below 100 on Denver’s home court.

“I thought we had a very good performance of executing our game plan,” Warriors coach Mark Jackson said. “We made plays. We made shots. We defended. . . . Overall, we kept a body on them. We were physical. I thought at times we were a little bit careless. That’s to be expected with a young basketball team. But I’m proud of my guys. We put ourselves in position to win the ballgame; unfortunately, fell short.”

If you suspect that Curry will shoot closer to his season average — .451 — than his Game 1 average — .350 — going forward, the Nuggets will need to improve their own offensive efficiency.

The good news is the war of attrition seems to be turning in their favor. Warriors all-star forward David Lee tore a hip flexor in Game 1 and was lost for the remainder of the playoffs. Meanwhile, Lawson is back from a torn plantar fascia and Faried may be sufficiently recovered from a sprained ankle to play in Game 2 on Tuesday.

“The strength of our team is we find ways to win,” Karl said. “Anthony Randolph has helped us win games. Corey Brewer has been spectacular at the end of games, as our lead guy. Our big guys, you don’t know who’s going to perform at a high level. We don’t have one guy that wins it, but Andre was obviously the guy tonight.”

Miller’s shot chart was characteristically unbalanced. Of his 16 field goal attempts, not one came from left of the lane. Even on the final play, when he drove the paint, going left around Warriors rookie defensive specialist Draymond Green, he slipped back to his right to make the winning layup, avoiding center Andrew Bogut, who was a tad late coming to help.

“He’s a big-time defender and I’ve got a lot of confidence in him,” Jackson said of Green. “We’ve got a group of rookies that came in the day after the draft, drilled every single day, got prepared and understand how to be successful on this level. And Draymond Green is an elite defender. And I feel extremely comfortable putting him on anybody, one through five. Andre Miller made a heck of a play.”

Asked to compare the winner to previous big shots, Miller had a quick answer.

“Well, I never hit a game-winning shot,” he said. “Never. I’ve taken a couple and missed or turned the ball over, but that was big for a first playoff game.

“I was tired, actually. I think both teams were tired. Me and Ty was going back and forth on who was going to get the ball — you know, ‘You bring it, I bring it.’ He saw that I was in a rhythm and I was just like, just suck it up. I knew who to put in the pick and roll to get to my sweet spot and I just took the shots.”

But even Miller acknowledged that with Bogut guarding the rim behind a Warriors zone defense — Golden State outscored Denver by 10 points while the 7-footer was on the floor — the Nuggets’ offense was largely stymied.

“A lot of things went wrong,” Miller said. “They got into a zone, slowed us down, we started relying on jump shots. You’ve got a couple young guys out there that’s not out there much.”

Having clawed their way back into the game in the fourth quarter without Lee, the Warriors seemed to gain confidence in defeat. Sunday’s news that Lee is out for the duration may moderate that confidence, but the Warriors know they have a defensive game plan that worked in Game 1.

“We haven’t played ’em since January,” Curry said of the Nuggets. “Their style hadn’t really changed since then. We knew what to expect. It was going to be an uptempo game. That’s how we like to play as well, so we tried to implement our own strengths throughout the course of the game. Hard-fought all the way to the end. One big play by Andre Miller changed the game. So we feel good about where we are going into Game 2.”

All year, the debate around the Nuggets has been whether their high-flying, rim-rattling, star-starved ensemble concept could thrive in the postseason the way it did in the regular season. Conventional wisdom says no. Even with a legitimate star in Carmelo Anthony, their full court, uptempo style got them out of the first round only once.

But they were so good in the regular season this year that they improved their postseason odds, earning home court advantage in the first round over a team that won 10 fewer games over the course of the first 82. Anything seemed possible, including gathering confidence while making quick work of their first-round opponent and giving themselves a chance to compete with the best of the West.

All of that is still possible, but the Warriors served notice in Game 1 that their strategy is to turn the Nuggets into jump shooters. If they continue to succeed at that, it’s going to be a long series, because the Nuggets aren’t particularly good jump shooters.

If the Nuggets are to gain credibility as a contender, they will need to dominate the Lee-less Warriors in Game 2 and demonstrate that they have an answer to the strategy that largely baffled them in Game 1.

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April 18, 2013

The 5 movies you need to know if you want to be Peyton Manning’s teammate

By Dave Krieger

In his first meeting with the wretches since the end of last season, Peyton Manning opened the door. Earlier this week, from the podium at Dove Valley, he dropped a little gem on the inquiring minds from Nuke LaLoosh. He was talking about returning to the NFL last season after missing all of 2011 with a neck injury.

“Being back out on the field, playing with my new teammates, it was a new atmosphere for me, totally different culture and a huge transition, but I did not take it for granted one single moment, being out there on the field,” he said.

“Now, once you’re out there, you certainly want to win. It’s more fun, as the great Ebby Calvin ‘Nuke’ LaLoosh said in Bull Durham, ‘I like winning. It’s like, uh, you know, better than losing, you know?’ One of my great quotes that I’ve always used to motivate me.”

So naturally, when Manning joined us on the Dave Logan Show a couple of days later, I followed up, asking whether he found wisdom in other sports movies as well. Apparently happy not to be taking another question about nerve regeneration, he gave us an overview of sports films.

Then, without further prompting, he revealed the five movies he wants teammates to watch so they’ll understand his casual references to famous lines. Only one of the five is even nominally a sports movie.

“Well, I’ve always been a big fan of sports movies,” Manning said. “There’s probably better baseball and basketball great sports movies. If you had to name your No. 1 baseball movie, you’ve got to go with The Natural and Roy Hobbs. Basketball, you’ve got to go with Hoosiers, obviously.

“In football, it’s kind of up for debate. I mean, you could go with The Longest Yard — the original, not the remake, clearly — but it’s really more of a prison movie than it is a football movie. And, you know, there are some bad ones out there, right? There are some bad ones.

“But you could get into a little maybe R-rated with North Dallas Forty, and those kind of movies, a little more old-school. Kind of your era there, Dave. That’s kind of yours.”

“I know, I know,” Logan acknowledged.

“But Any Given Sunday, with (Al) Pacino, not necessarily what I would define as the classic football movie,” Manning continued.

“Listen, dude, you could never have played for Pacino as a head coach,” Logan interjected.

“No, absolutely not,” Manning agreed. “There’s no way. But I think there’s still that great football movie to be made out there. But Bull Durham, it’s a classic.”

That’s when he let us in on his strategy for connecting with younger teammates.

“I tell you, the past few years, as I’ve reached my elder years as a quarterback in the NFL, I’ve kind of tried to get to know these rookies and try to get on the same page with them,” Manning said.

“But what I’m finding out is we don’t speak the same language because we don’t know the same favorite movies. In order to get on the same page with me, you need to watch these five movies, so we can repeat lines and all that. I’ve kind of changed it up over the years, but the main five are going to be Vacation, Fletch, Stripes, Caddyshack and probably The Jerk.

“That’s kind of my top five. But most of these guys have never heard of these movies, and they really don’t think they’re funny because it’s a different kind of humor. It’s this ’70s-’80s-’90s humor. But whatever you can do to get on the same page.

“So right now (Broncos backup quarterback Brock) Osweiler is kind of working on that project and he’s trying to get to know those movies. I don’t think he likes ’em either, and he probably shouldn’t because I’m 37 and he’s 22 and that’s just the way it is. But it’s all about trying to establish the connection.”

“Honestly,” I asked him, “doesn’t Nick Nolte in North Dallas Forty remind you a little bit of Logan?”

“Absolutely,” Manning said. “Absolutely, he does. And I can be Mac Davis.”

“I couldn’t get out of bed on Monday, I can tell you that much,” Logan said.

There are several interesting aspects to Manning’s list:

First, they were all made between 1979 and 1985. Manning was born in 1976, meaning they all came out before he turned 10. So either Archie Manning gave him an early education in adolescent humor or Peyton went back to discover these classics later on.

The Jerk was released in 1979, when Manning was three; Caddyshack in 1980, when he was four; Stripes in 1981, when he was five; Vacation in 1983, when he was seven; and Fletch in 1985, when he was nine.

Second, they were all built around early members of the cast of Saturday Night Live: Chevy Chase (Vacation and Fletch), Bill Murray (Caddyshack andStripes) and Steve Martin (The Jerk), one of the most frequent early hosts of SNL.

Third, of course, each sports some memorable repartee that can be applied, often inappropriately, in other contexts. A few aren’t even profane. For example:

From Fletch:

Dr. Joseph Dolan: You know, it’s a shame about Ed.

Fletch: Oh, it was. Yeah, it was really a shame. To go so suddenly like that.

Dr. Joseph Dolan: He was dying for years.

Fletch: Sure, but the end was very sudden.

Dr. Joseph Dolan: He was in intensive care for eight weeks.

Fletch: Yeah, but I mean the end, when he actually died. That was extremely sudden.

From Stripes:

Recruiter: Have you ever been convicted of a felony or a misdemeanor? That’s robbery, rape, car theft, that sort of thing.

John Winger: Convicted? No.

Russell Ziskey: Never convicted.

From The Jerk, when a sniper keeps missing Steve Martin, hitting cans of motor oil instead:

“He hates these cans. Stay away from the cans.”

From Vacation:

Cousin Eddie: I don’t know why they call this stuff Hamburger Helper. It does just fine by itself. I like it better than Tuna Helper, myself. Don’t you, Clark?”

Clark Griswold: “You’re the gourmet around here, Eddie.”

From Caddyshack:

Sandy: I want you to kill every gopher on the course!

Carl Spackler: Check me if I’m wrong Sandy, but if I kill all the golfers, they’re gonna lock me up and throw away the key.

Sandy: Gophers, ya great git! The gophers! The little brown furry rodents!

Carl Spackler: We can do that. We don’t even have to have a reason.

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