Allen Iverson, the Man Without a Team, Scores 51, But the Nuggets Lose to the Lakers 111-107

The Nuggets were out foxed by Phil Jackson, Kobe Bryant, and the other Lakers in the 4th quarter, for the second time in a week, and lost at home 111-107, despite 51 points by Allen Iverson, and I can’t believe I just had to write that because it’s like a Greek tragedy and I can not stand Greek tragedies because I don’t understand how the people in them can be so stupid. One of your players scores 51 points at home and you didn’t have a way to win. Are you both crazy and stupid, just crazy, or just stupid? Iverson made 14 of 21 jump shots, mostly midrange and from the left side. Iverson's 51 points are the most by a Nuggets player since Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf had 51 at Utah on Dec. 7, 1995. The Nuggets' franchise record for points in a game is held by David Thompson, who had 73 against Detroit on April 9, 1978.

Don’t be fooled by popular misconceptions. Many think that the Nuggets are a running team but they are not, as I have discussed in several recent reports. Many think they are a team where Carmelo Anthony and Allen Iverson are depended on to win games, but they are not, because there is no system in place for that and, for that matter, George Karl wants the possessions and touches to be shared in the approach to scoring, though his player rotations and lack of offensive planning doom that from the start. And many think the Nuggets can’t beat good teams because they are terrible at defending, and that is not true either. The Nuggets are just about average in defending talent wise, although they are below average in desire to defend. But their offense is so inconsistent that they give up a lot of points in transition. Keep in mind that the Nuggets have more turnovers than just about any team in the NBA.

I’m going to be honest with you, I am really, really mad at the Nuggets not having done squat in the off season to improve on their almost nonexistent offensive schemes and strategies. Too many players don’t have a clue as to what is going to happen from one Nuggets possession to the next. Is Iverson in the do it all himself mode, as he was for 3 quarters in this game, before the Lakers shut the party down by ramping up the intensity of the double teams, or is he going to start looking for who is open and who is cutting? Only Iverson knows at any given time. There is no planning in advance and, more importantly, there is little consistency from one game to the next, from one quarter to the next, and from one play to the next. There are no role players on the Nuggets, because no one knows what their role is.

Allen Iverson has scored 21,298 points and Kobe Bryant has scored 19,811, but Bryant has won three rings and Iverson has been stuck with teams that don’t know what they’re doing, so all his fantastic scoring games, unlike those of Bryant, have been for the player records only and not for any championships. Iverson’s career ESPN rating is 40.23, whereas Bryant’s is 38.05. But Iverson has always been the man without a team, and I’ll be damned if he doesn’t remain that today, because the Nuggets are not really a team at all. They are just a bunch of expensive free lancers. They don’t come correct with the right moves that a team makes if it wants to maximize the chances of winning. For example, they don’t have the right players in at the right times, and they don’t do squat for offensive planning. The extent to which they make it up as they go along puts the Nuggets in a League of their own, maybe even a Universe of their own.

I’m embarrassed to be a Nuggets fan and to see Iverson just about as wasted on the Nuggets as he was on the 76er’s. I’m sorry, but I warned you that I would be a major grinch if the Nuggets lost to the Lakers despite having what I call a double home court advantage. They had the actual home court advantage, plus the advantage of playing after two nights off, whereas the Lakers were playing on back to back nights.

I told you recently that Iverson’s minutes are a key indicator of how little confidence George Karl has in the Nuggets, and probably also how little confidence he has in his own abilities to coach. The greater the number of minutes Iverson plays, the more broken down Karl’s confidence is in the rest of the team. So since Iverson played literally the entire 48 minutes (isn’t there a union rule against that?) you can conclude that Karl has lost all confidence, and so he has no where near enough confidence to be qualified to coach a professional basketball team. If you are the coach and you don’t think a team that some respected experts have said has the potential to be in the West final or even the NBA Championship this year, it’s time to leave. Retire now before the Nuggets, who are always teetering on the brink of total collapse under Karl, do in fact collapse.

So I warned everybody in advance that there would be hell to pay if the Nuggets lost this game, and I certainly am not in a position to back down from that after Iverson’s historic game. Always take my advance warnings seriously, because I can see losses that should have been wins from miles away. The only way to get hell paid is for Karl to go. Don’t look at me, I have nothing the devil wants.

Because Iverson is a living legend, he is the only player that Karl can not claim has a bad personality, one not suited for NBA playoff basketball. Karl’s inaccurate analysis of the connection between personality and athletic performance torments him and, obviously, damages his ability to coach a team. But he feels a little bit of peace with how he looks at Iverson, because Iverson is untouchable, since Iverson took his team to the finals and competed with the heart of a champion. Notice I didn’t say “personality of a champion.” Sorry George, it was Iverson’s heart, talent, and hard work, and not his personality, that had the 76ers in the 2001 NBA Championship.

The bottom line is that George Karl is one of the most negative and least confident coaches in the NBA today, and also one of the most negative and least confident of all time.

It was a disgrace to the Nuggets and a crime against Iverson that only 6 players played along side Iverson, who scored 51 points on 18/27 shooting. It was an absolute and total disgrace that Iverson was too tired in the 4th to overcome the double teams and win the game while making it up as he went. Yakhouba Diawara, the defensive specialist and the 20th most accurate 3-point shooter in the NBA, was benched for no known good reason. GF Linas Kleiza, in his 3rd year, vastly improved in shot selection, and improved defensively, was almost entirely benched. As usual, when I saw the ridiculously low 7 minutes that he played, I searched and searched for how he was injured. But there was no injury, and Kleiza was benched for no known good reason. Bobby Jones, with raw offensive and defensive talent that will, if nothing else, disrupt the best laid plans a little of masterminds such as Phil Jackson, was benched for no known good reason. I would have been happy if two of the three between Diawara, Kleiza, and Jones were given 25 minutes in total. But no, they were all kept out of action and unable to help Iverson out by the guy who sees a bad personality everywhere he looks.

The way Karl runs the team, the Nuggets are more like a circus than a basketball team. The entertainment value is high but the Championship potential is rock bottom. Is this the Denver owner Stan Kroenke’s real objective in paying all the huge salaries on the Nuggets, and in paying the luxury tax, and in having Karl as the Coach: to provide great entertainment, but not a fully competitive team? Maybe this whole Nuggets thing is nothing more than a huge experiment to see how many tickets and how much merchandise can be sold if the team is run as if it was a circus, for maximum entertainment. Running it that way is, of course, inconsistent with running the team as a Championship seeking basketball squad. I’m just speculating, but this whole Nuggets odyssey sure is suspicious, isn’t it?

ALERT STATUS PROBLEMS
As of December 5, 2007

The Nuggets are under an unusually dangerous and damaging alert status, so the following update is provided.

INJURIES
1. Nene injury 9 Points
2. Chucky Atkins injury 7 Points
4. Steven Hunter injury 3 Points

UNEXPECTED STAR PLAYER PERFORMANCE PROBLEMS
1. Carmelo Anthony a little off from recent years and a little inconsistent 2 Points

2. Inability of Melo and Najera to give Camby enough rebounding and defending support inside: 5 Points

BAD OR INADEQUATE COACHING
1. George Karl over relies on his starters and won’t play the non-starters enough: 5-20 Points. The severity varies depending on the circumstances, mainly Karl’s beliefs and moods, and whether the other team is playing well enough to take advantage of the Nuggets playing with not enough breathers. Karl will normally be in the 5-13 range, but it could spike to as much as 20 in the event of the benching of a major player such as Kenyon Martin. The current points reported are for the use, or should I say the misuse, of the reserves for the most recent games, with the most weight being given to the game being reported on here. The bad use of reserves score for this game is 12 points
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2. Lack of adequate offensive schemes: 11 Points. This would be up to 17 points, except that Iverson reduces the damage. Another way of describing this is that the team has failed to decide whether it wants Melo alone, Iverson alone, Melo and Iverson together, or neither of them to be firstly responsible for scoring enough points to keep the Nuggets in the game. If it were neither, I call the name of that strategy the "share the wealth" strategy.

INTENSITY, HUSTLE, AND HEART
1. The Nugget’s intensity, hustle and heart is lacking: 0 Points. It’s not anywhere near bad as some fans who are panicking think it is. This is a relatively small problem.

TOTAL PROBLEM POINTS: 49, which constitutes YELLOW ALERT.

YELLOW ALERT (40-54): Minor damage is occurring to the season. The entire season is under medium threat. Beating quality teams is much more difficult and will be pretty rare. About 1/2 of all wins against good teams will now be losses. Beating mid-level teams is a little more difficult. About 1/4 of games that would be wins against mid-level teams will now be losses. Beating low level teams is still relatively easy, but no longer almost a sure bet. A good team like the Nuggets has become in between a good team and a mid-level team when it is under this alert.

RESERVE WATCH
It’s under development. The complications involved explain why (a) there are no formal statistics anywhere on the internet on the subject of how much non-starters contribute to different teams and (b) why coaches are not compared statistically the way players are. There are a lot of variables that come into the use of reserves that interfere with the objective of judging their use. Statisticians call this “statistical noise,” and if you have a substantial amount of it, then what you are trying to do with your statistics becomes very difficult or next to impossible.

GEORGE KARL CONFIDENCE IN HIS TEAM RATING (Scale of 0 to 10)
3.0 He’s thinking seriously of and getting ready to make a break for the exits.

ESPN PLAYER RATINGS FOR THIS GAME:
You Can Tell How Well They Played at a Glance.

Here is the formula for the ESPN rating of a player:

Points + Rebounds + 1.4*Assists + Steals + 1.4*Blocks - .7*Turnovers + # of Field Goals Made +1/2*# of 3-pointers Made - .8*# of Missed Field Goals - .8*# of Missed Free Throws + .25 *# of Free Throws Made

All players on each team who played at least 8 minutes are shown. The number after “game,” is how well the player did in this game, whereas the number after “season” is that player’s overall average for the entire season.
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NUGGETS
Allen Iverson: Game 73.9 Season 38.9
Carmelo Anthony: Game 40.4 Season 37.7
Eduardo Najera: Game 24.9 Season 14.5
Marcus Camby: Game 18.1 Season 32.0
Kenyon Martin: Game 15.8 Season 17.6
Anthony Carter: Game 8.6 Season 18.6
J.R. Smith: Game 1.9 Season 17.5

Linas Kleiza: Did Not Play-Coach’s Decision
Yakhouba Diawara: Did Not Play-Coach’s Decision
Bobby Jones: Did Not Play-Coach’s Decision
Jelani McCoy: Did Not Play-Coach’s Decision
Von Wafer: Did Not Play-Coach's Decision

Nene: Did Not Play-Injury
Chucky Atkins: Did Not Play-Injury
Steven Hunter: Did Not Play-Injury

LAKERS
Kobe Bryant: Game 46.0 Season 42.9
Derek Fisher: Game 35.8 Season 20.0
Vladimir Radmanovic: Game 33.5 Season 15.7
Lamar Odom: Game 25.2 Season 23.3
Luke Walton: Game 15.7 Season 16.1
Andrew Bynum: Game 15.4 Season 25.7
Chris Mihm: Game 14.2 Season 8.7
Jordan Farmar: Game 12.9 Season 18.2
Trevor Ariza: Game 9.7 Season 8.1
Sasha Vujacic: Game 4.0 Season 9.8

NOTE: these stats do not correct for the big differences in playing times. Players with small minutes would get a higher rating if they had more minutes.

COMMENTS ON RATINGS:
The thing that jumps out the most besides Iverson's off the charts rating is the fact that the Lakers had 10 players out there, giving them 10 chances for a player to help his team to victory, whereas Coach Scrooge for the Nuggets fielded only 7 players.

NUGGET’S PLUS—MINUS
This tells you how the score changed while a player was on the court. All Nuggets who played at least 8 minutes is shown.

Carmelo Anthony: +1
Marcus Camby: -8
Allen Iverson: -4
Anthony Carter: +2
Kenyon Martin: -5
Eduardo Najera: +5
J.R. Smith: -11

NUGGETS MADE WHAT?
All Nuggets who played at least 8 minutes are shown.

Eduardo Najera played 23 minutes and was ¾, 2/3 on 3’s, and 2/2 from the line 10 points, and he made 7 rebounds and 3 assists.

Anthony Carter played 23 minutes and was ¼, 0/1 on 3’s, and 2/2 from the line for 4 points, and he made 3 assists, 1 steal, and 1 rebound.

J.R. Smith played 21 minutes and was 1/10, 0/5 on 3’s, and 5/6 friom the line for 7 points, and he made 1 steal and 1 rebound.

Kenyon Martin played 34 minutes and was 2/8 and 2/6 from the line for 6 points, and he made 8 rebounds, 3 blocks, 2 assists, and 1 steal.

Marcus Camby played 39 minutes and was 0/3 and 0/2 from the line for 0 points, and he made 20 rebounds, 1 block, and 1 assist.

Carmelo Anthony played 44 minutes and was 10/23, 0/3 on 3’s, and 6/7 from the line for 26 points, and he made 8 rebounds, 4 assists, and 4 steals.

Allen Iverson played literally the entire game, 48 minutes, and was 18/27, 0/1 on 3’s, and 15/18 from the line for 51 points, and he made 8 assists, 2 rebounds, and 1 steal.

NEXT UP
The next game will be Thursday, December 6 in Dallas to play the Mavericks at 6 pm mountain time. Both the Mavericks and the Nuggets will be playing on back to back nights.