The coaching profession, not to mention professional sports as an industry, captures the images of many individuals through a fisheye lens. Narratives and paradigms are often thrust upon a series of events, teams, and relationships, often to serve the purpose of giving a person or group a tidier identity. Sacramento Kings head coach George Karl is familiar with this tendency, and over the course of his career, he’s seen the information age and the outrage era come to fruition. As of late, both have enveloped his legacy in the long- and short-term. This upcoming season, at the age of 64, he’ll be given a chance to reclaim his legacy and the grudging respect of the always-fickle commentators from whom he’ll have to reclaim it.
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Though he is regarded even by his contemporaries is as a coach through and through, Karl’s time in the league began, like so many, as a vivacious player. From 1970 to 1973, Karl played under the late and legendary Dean Smith at the University of North Carolina. With the Tar Heels, he began to sponge the knowledge of how to lead a team. His youthful notions of perpetual scoring and individual grandeur were replaced with a sense of belonging. Team accomplishment gave a feeling much more lasting than personal aggrandizement, and Smith’s reputation was built on imbuing that in everyone from Kenny Smith (…no relation) to Michael Jordan to Larry Brown to Roy Williams. Smith’s program at UNC was developed around a rapid-passing, fast-breaking offense and an aggressive point-zone defense that created ample quick-transition situations.
These stylistic qualities rubbed off on Karl, who today maintains a vocal idealization of Smith’s style. Karl, who sees himself as having benefited from Smith’s emphasis on unselfish play, began to see a bigger picture after his time at Chapel Hill. The scope of what Karl saw, however, was not without limits, and would require far more learning, and not always with ease or glory.
His professional career lasted five years, spent with the ABA’s San Antonio Spurs during both their pre- post-merger days. His relatively short time in the professional player ranks gave him the opportunity to hone his craft as a coach early, and to develop a sideline persona. Becoming an assistant under the untamed and unashamed Doug Moe (another Smith protege), Karl saw what raw emotion without logistic zealotry could do to players, setting them free the implement a coach’s particular style in their own fashion. Moe’s preference, one that remained strong through his years with the 1980s Denver Nuggets, was to run opposing teams ragged by making them compete in track and field. Formalized defense was not so much a concern – making sure the opposition was winded would surely be enough to keep things under control.
These small-market, fast-paced pairings would define Karl’s professional path, and would lay out a blueprint for his image.
Though his stops as an NBA head coach – Cleveland, Golden State, Seattle, Milwaukee, Denver – were all part of a grand experiment in speed, combustibility, and creation. In Cleveland and Golden State, Karl’s reputation as an enraged idealist began to take form. In the Bay Area, during the days of a young Chris Mullin, Joe Barry Carroll, and Chris Washburn, Karl’s temper gained as much attention as anything presented on the floorboards at Oakland Arena.
Frustration with Washburn and Carroll’s work ethic drove the young coach to the limits of sanity, and rather than stoically storing an ulcer as some would, Karl’s propensity was to vocalize his frustrations at high volume and act out his rage on inanimate structures. His howls were as self-attributed to his failings as to his players’ refusal to unlock their potential, push themselves, and contribute to their respective teams’ progress.
Having taken a break from NBA coaching, Karl returned from an international sojourn to lead the Seattle SuperSonics to seven straight playoff berths. Rather than leaving with bitter bile in his throat, as he had from the Cavaliers and Warriors, Karl turned the Sonics into a formidable and looming threat to any Western Conference contender. Things were not all rosy, though. Each spring for the first four years of his time under the Space Needle, the promising buds of the regular season would never come to bloom. Though all those teams were over .600, they would inevitably yield a dramatic upset victory to the Jazz, the Suns, the Nuggets, and the Lakers.
Finally, finally, they would rise to their potential… and lose to Michael Jordan’s untouchable 1996 Bulls in the NBA Finals.
This experience gave Karl’s persona another dimension – the great regular season coach whose ambitions would be reliably smothered by the supercharged competition of playoff contests. One can be forgiven for not collecting rings after having faced the greatest team in NBA history, but the fourteen first-round eliminations Karl’s teams have suffered over the years illustrate a problem with Karl’s preference for aesthetics over logistics.
In playoff situations, the repetition against an opponent allows great coaching to break through the designs and rhythms thrown at them. Karl’s specialty, employing the strengths of his players to flummox teams for drive-by single games, has solidified his place in history as one of the winningest head coaches in the league’s existence – 1,142 wins and a .596 record over the course of 26 seasons. His acumen in the post-season gives a sour twist to this accomplishment, as it does for Lenny Wilkens, Rick Adelman, and Don Nelson. All had, at one time or another, the talent to win a championship, but circumstance is a gleefully cruel demon that haunts their legacies.
Still ongoing is Karl’s struggle to cultivate lasting and productive relationships with star players. Though seeds of mistrust were planted during his Warriors tenure, Karl has always had a rocky go of things with high-profile players, and for how loose he claims his system to be, he is as high-maintenance as a Tom Thibideau or, to bring him up again, Larry Brown. While those two have the benefit of Xs and Os to mend their heartache, Karl’s tendency to react primarily through emotional outbursts may dissuade his players from buying in. In certain cases, it can lead to them departing ahead of Karl, as was the case in Milwaukee.
Maybe things can change given his surroundings. Though Karl is in many ways a classicist coach who prefers qualitative framing, perhaps having some analytic illustrations from someone like Roland Beech will help to channel his efforts and develop more concrete solutions. But there remains a cliche about old dogs, and this one is clearly on his last hunt.
Karl’s career arc is one which has remained flat for nearly twenty years. Whatever he offers to bring about the revival of his environment keeps it from flourishing too long, and keeps the highest echelons of his profession in his periphery.
So, at this point, it seems that Karl’s legacy will never contain the gleam of a Larry O’Brien trophy. If he can turn the long-suffering Kings into another of his playoff dark horses, then he should consider his time in Sacramento a success. One hopes that his old tendencies don’t turn this stop in his journey into an unfortunate exception.
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