Recently,  former head coach  George Karl was let go by the Denver Nuggets after nine seasons at the helm. Many, including writers on this site, have begun to question the Nuggets for this decision. Karl was let go, despite leading the Nuggets to a 57-win season, the best record in the franchise’s history and winning 2013 Coach of the Year award. With all the success, the Nuggets were bounced again in the first round of the playoffs by the Golden State Warriors. The Nuggets GM was also let go as the team decided not to match the offer he accepted from the Raptors. So why did a team that just set a franchse-best for wins fire its coach and not retain its General Manager?

The Nuggets have managed to lose their GM and coach in a single off-season. By Keith Allison, via Wikimedia Commons

This was the year the Nuggets were thought to finally take the next step and compete for the Western Conference title against the likes of the Lakers, Spurs, and Thunder. They looked poised to do so, clinching the number-three seed in the tough Western Conference and ended up with a first round match up with the up an coming Golden State Warriors. Led by second-year coach Marc Jackson, the Warriors showed potential, but the Nuggets were definitely the favorites. After game one of the series, the Nuggets were clearly in big trouble, even though they won. The mere fact the Warriors could lose a game only by two points when Stephen Curry shot 7-20 told me something. The Warriors did end up winning the series in six games and eliminated the Nuggets. Was it just a bad matchup for the Nuggets or something more?

Based on the fact that Karl was fired, I wasn’t the only one who thought it was something more. Yes, the Nuggets were a good team all year, but they weren’t that good on the road. Their home/road split was 38-3 at home and 19-22 on the road. To be below .500 on the road is a pretty good indicator that their top-3 seed in the Western Conference might not have been completely legitimate. The Nuggets’ up-tempo style is a fun one to watch, but in the playoffs you can’t just run up and down the court like the old Phoenix Suns. To win in the playoffs, you have to be able to grind and you need to be able to win on the road, something the Nuggets couldn’t do.

Grinding and winning on the road are things that can be about the coach. George Karl, a coach with one of the highest win totals (7th all-time in regular-season wins and 10th all-time in regular season winning percentage) in NBA history and thought of as a great coach, was fired. I believe Karl should have been let go long before this year. People call me a hater for it, but look at the facts. Karl has coached 25 years in the NBA and has only coached his teams out of the first round 8 times, 17 of 25 years he has either failed to make the playoffs or not get out of the first round. He is the Peyton Manning of coaching, being he only does well during the regular season. Unlike Karl, though at least Manning has a ring.

Don’t get me wrong, Karl is a good coach but isn’t as good as people think he is, and I think the move to fire him now was the correct move made by the Nuggets. Over the years, he’s had players who could play including Carmelo Anthony, Chauncey Billups, Allen Iverson, and more. But much like the Philadelphia Eagles in the NFL with Andy Reid, Karl was a long-tenured coach who wasn’t performing the way he could after all these years. Like the Eagles, the Nuggets need a new voice in their locker room and they finally will get it in whoever they hire.

In the world of sports fansmanship, when our teams experience less success than we’d like, there are a myriad of excuses we rely on in our grief. Some are more interesting than others — for example, rumors that Pau Gasol’s poor playoff performance in 2011 was caused by a scheming Vanessa Bryant instigating the breakup of his romantic relationship — but one of the oldest standbys in Fan Excuse Bingo has always been the dichotomy between big market and small market teams, the haves and have-nots of the NBA. This kind of rationalizing to justify unmet expectations only intensified prior to the current season as the team executives making roster decisions and the owners picking up the tab feared the financial ramifications of the much harsher luxury tax looming based on the new collective bargaining agreement.

There are certainly a number of factors, both tangible and perceived, that stack the deck against small market franchises with tight wallets, from the very limited revenue available from local television contracts to the undeniable allure of the big cities for top-level free agent talents looking for new homes. While success and failure in the NBA can often hinge as much on sheer dumb luck as anything else, owners and executives from the most successful small market teams have learned to rely on their own diligence and savvy decision-making to close the gap. The long-term brilliance of San Antonio Spurs general manager RC Buford and the rise of protégé Sam Presti for the Oklahoma City Thunder highlight the benefits of discipline and patience when building a successful small market franchise. Furthermore, if you can land a head coach with the ability to cultivate and get the most out of young, raw talent (Rick Adelman in Minnesota, Frank Vogel in Indiana) this can only accelerate a small market franchise’s growth.

The Nuggets have managed to lose their GM and coach in a single off-season. By Keith Allison, via Wikimedia Commons

This makes the recent developments in Denver all the more mystifying. Despite being plagued by injuries, most notably Danilo Gallinari’s season-ending torn ACL, and falling victim to Steph Curry’s awe-inspiring playoff debut in their first round series against the Golden State Warriors, the prognosis for the Nuggets was very good. Taking the helm as GM for the Denver Nuggets in 2010, Masai Ujiri earned considerable credibility around the league with his masterful handling of Carmelo Anthony’s departure in 2011. As tension grew between the disgruntled superstar, the Denver fan base, and the national media, Ujiri faced mounting pressure to take any deal from the New York Knicks or the then-New Jersey Nets that would inevitably return cents-on-the-dollar for a player widely considered Top 10 in the league. In the face of constant scrutiny, Ujiri insisted on holding out for the best possible deal, and reaped the benefits when he managed to land four valuable pieces (Gallinari, Raymond Felton, Wilson Chandler, and Timofey Mozgov) in a blockbuster trade with the Knicks. Ujiri has continued to make smart roster decisions since then; Ty Lawson remains the lone pre-Ujiri holdover on a team that overachieved their way into the third seed in the highly competitive Western Conference. For his efforts, Ujiri was voted by his peers as NBA Executive of the Year, and was promptly offered a significant raise by the Toronto Raptors, which Nuggets owner Josh Kroenke declined to match.

The overachievement of the roster Ujiri built can be heavily attributed to the work done by NBA Coach of the Year George Karl. On a team with no All-Star and no player averaging more than 16.7 points, Karl’s young squad notched a franchise-record 57 wins by consistently out-running and out-working opponents. Bolstered by the rising star of Lawson at the point, the defensive swagger of a less-burdened Andre Iguodala, and the hard-hat mentality of the Kenneth “The Manimal” Faried, the Nuggets rightfully struck fear in the hearts of most of the NBA’s top contenders, many of whom lost their season series against the Nuggets this year (including the Thunder, Grizzlies, Clippers, Warriors, and Rockets). There’s little to suggest that Karl was unsuitable to lead the Nuggets well into future seasons, and it’s not unreasonable that the reigning Coach of the Year would want an opportunity to continue developing this young, exciting team, as well as some job security with a multi-year contract extension. And yet Karl finds himself back on the market, with no shortage of interested suitors.

And this is why small market teams can’t have nice things. Big market franchises can withstand bad ownership; I’m fairly certain that we could replace Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling with Amanda Bynes on a bender and she would still manage to be less offensive and deranged than the man in charge. However, despite the odds, many of the most successful teams in recent history have shown that small market teams can keep up. They keep up by being patient, disciplined, and most of all, making smart decisions. And doing everything they could to keep the reigning Executive of the Year and Coach of the Year were the most obvious of no-brainer decisions that the Denver Nuggets still managed to mess up.