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Things aren’t looking good for George Karl in Sacramento. Several reports from respected journalists made that clear after the loss to the Brooklyn Nets on Friday, and his seat will only get hotter after losing to the Boston Celtics on Sunday.
It’s not really surprising to hear these rumors. All the ingredients for a rocky relationship were there, from the moment he signed on.
The Kings are the most dysfunctional franchise in the NBA, with a meddlesome owner who’s decided to change courses several times, at the cost of continuity in the front office and coaching staff. They have a mercurial yet supremely talented star who doesn’t fit the type of offense Karl likes to run. The pressure to make the playoffs only mounted as the team made win-now moves. It was a perfect storm of unrealistic expectations, an ill-fitting roster and volatile personalities.
Even the start of the relationship was a bit odd. Karl really wanted the Kings’ job despite them not being close to good at the time. No one was ready to give him the reins to a contender after his dismissal from Denver despite an impressive resume. That was a red flag Sacramento shouldn’t have ignored.
Karl had a history of clashing with stars and struggling to build good defenses, but it didn’t matter. Sacramento got its splashy hire and Karl got a shot at chasing the all-time winning record for a coach. It was a marriage of convenience based on the two parties getting what they wanted, for the short term. Nothing more.
Unfortunately, Karl forgot that. He made a move that truly doomed any viability of the pairing from working long term when he shopped DeMarcus Cousins around in the offseason. Whatever chance he had to make a connection his star and get him to buy in went out the window then and there, amid snake emojis and tweets. Once that happened, only exceeding expectations in the win column was going to keep the situation from deteriorating.
The Kings did that for a while thanks to their potent offense and took advantage of a weak bottom half of the West to stay in the playoff hunt, but the team’s recent regression threatens to end their season. They’ve lost seven of the last eight, including five to below .500 teams. They’re now 4.5 games back from the surging Utah Jazz for the eighth seed, and it’s looking more and more like the will miss the playoffs for the 10th season in a row.
It’s not just the mediocre results that have Karl’s job in jeopardy, but how the team has looked at times. The defense is a mess. The Kings score a lot of fast-break points but also surrender a lot of buckets early in the clock. They allow the most three-pointers in the league, thanks to poor transition defense and miscommunication. Their guards are lazy on that end or freelance and over-help, especially Rajon Rondo:
It’d be easy to exonerate Karl because the personnel to build an elite defense isn’t there in Sacramento, but his teams typically underachieve in that area. The Kings certainly seem to be on the wrong path, as their effort has waned and their defense gotten worse lately. Karl’s refusal to give more minutes to Willie Cauley-Stein while inserting the defensively-challenged Marco Belinelli into the starting lineup haven’t helped things.
Cousins has taken a step back as a defender as well. In their best times under Michael Malone, the Kings played at a slow pace that allowed Cousins time to set up and use his size to carry the scoring load without having to run up and down. That allowed him to focus on his defense, which made tremendous strides during that time. With Karl around, Cousins is putting up career-best per-game numbers playing at a faster pace, but his play on the other end has suffered, especially when he’s asked to defend in space and guard power forwards:
Karl is in all likelihood gone after this season at the latest, as he hasn’t solved any of the problems Sacramento had before his hiring. The defense is still bad, Cousins hasn’t reached his ceiling on that end and the losses keep on piling on. So the question is whether he’s capable of fixing those issues now, and whether it’s worth it to keep him around.
The problems with open three-pointers and poor transition defense have been around all year. Considering the chemistry issues that arose even before the season started and the fact that the team isn’t performing on the court, it doesn’t seem like he has the attention of the locker room. It’s hard to imagine a drastic turnaround with him around, and unfortunately there’s a downside to his continued presence: he could alienate Cousins, who has a history with him and has clashed with head coaches before.
Because there’s so little upside to him staying on, the best course of action seems to be a clear break sooner rather than later. Firing yet another coach midseason is probably the last thing the Kings’ brass wants to do, but there’s no need to postpone the inevitable.
Karl was never a good fit in Sacramento. Not with Cousins there. It’s not his fault. He’s clearly still good at what he does. There’s a good case to be made that it’s entirely not his fault the Kings are reeling and he shouldn’t be the only one suffering the consequences. Unfortunately, that’s how things work in the league.
Unless he can magically turn things around quick, he has to go. It’s what best for everyone involved.