Kenyon Martin Has a Breakout Game and the Nuggets Get by the Kings 101-97

In yet another appearance in Denver of a team that has fallen on hard times, the Nuggets played rough and sloppy, but were able to get by the Sacramento Kings 101-97. Each team has a very important player with the name ‘Martin’. For the Kings, SG Kevin Martin, who is by far the most important scorer on the team, is out until early to mid January with an injury. Meanwhile, for the Nuggets, PF Kenyon Martin had a huge breakout game. Overall, neither team played well, and it was disturbing to say the least that the Kings were in the game until the very end, because they didn’t do anything to deserve to be in the game at the end.

Denver did play a very good harassing defense much of the time and had 13 blocks in this game. Even more important than the blocks was that the Nuggets defended fairly well without fouling much. The Kings though, could not seem to defend without fouling often, and the Nuggets ended up with 27/34 free throws to just 12/13 for the Kings.

The Kings turned it over 23 times, while the Nuggets, the NBA leader in turning it over without ever getting a shot off, had a staggering 26 turnovers. The Kings are just about the worst rebounding team in the NBA, so the Nuggets own shortcomings in that area were hidden in this game. Between Kenyon Martin’s huge game, and the Kings having relatively poor rebounding players, the Kings were unable to put up and make a lot of second chance shots. The Kings’ overall shooting was not that great either: they were 40/90 overall for an accuracy of .444.

The Nuggets were terrible on 3-point shooting, with Carmelo Anthony missing all 4 of his 3-pointers and J.R. Smith missing all 5 of his. The Nuggets overall were 2/13 on 3’s. But the Kings, playing without their 3-point ace, SG Kevin Martin, were not a whole lot better. They were 5/18 from long range.

Kenyon Martin was the biggest factor on both offense and defense for the Nuggets in this game. On offense, Martin made 5/6 layups and dunks, along with 3/4 short jumpers, for 20 points. On defense, aside from good made you miss defending in general, Martin made 12 rebounds, 5 blocks, and 3 steals. Were Martin able to be even 2/3 this good in the months ahead, it would be a huge gain for the Nuggets.

This game was a throwback to last season in the sense that the Nuggets almost blew a game to a struggling team at home for no good reason. By 2:16 to go in the 3rd, Sacramento had stormed back from being down 59-47 at the half and lead 76-71 on a PF Mikki Moore dunk. As is usually the case in Nuggets games of this type, the 3rd quarter was a real let down for the Nuggets. George Karl failed to call time out during a Kings run about half way through the 3rd, until that run had gone to the extent of 10-2. The better coaches will call at least a 20 second time out after an 8-2 or sometimes after even a 6-2 run if they see that their team is about to give up even more on the scoreboard by the way they are playing.

The last Denver turnover was nearly a killer. With Denver leading 99-97, PG Beno Udrih stole an Iverson pass with 8.9 seconds left. SF Ron Artest drove to the bucket but kicked it out to GF Francisco Garcia for a 3, but Garcia missed it with 1.9 seconds left. According to Garcia, “I got fouled on that last 3. I thought (Iverson) hit my hands; that's why I fell." And then as if to emphasize that they never should have been in it at the end, the Kings threw away the ensuing inbounds pass with 0.7 seconds left.

Had there been two Martins in the game instead of just one, the Kings would have almost certainly won this game.

From watching the Nuggets like a hawk I have picked up on a lot of traits of George Karl in how he manages, or mismanages, as the case may be, the Denver Nuggets. One thing about Karl is that he depends on guards to win games much more than the average coach does. That the Nuggets have no dependable pick and roll, and not much in the post offense in general, does not concern him. He thinks guards should be the floor leaders, and that they should create a balance between running and fast breaking and laying up on the one hand, and passing and jump shooting on the other hand. Karl is the CEO and his favorite guard is the Head Manager, so to speak. He always has at least one guard who will be his floor leader, somebody who will on the fly make up for his unwillingness or inability to provide the nuts and bolts of playmaking.

Early last season, the 5’5” PG Earl Boykins was the floor general. After Boykins was traded to Milwaukee, and PG Steve Blake was acquired, Blake became Karl’s right hand guard. Whoever has this position gets heavy preferential treatment in terms of playing minutes and accolades from Karl in the media. That player’s actual performance is no where near as important as the position that the player has achieved in Karl’s mind: Court Manager.

This season, with Chucky Atkins, who was supposed to be the starting point guard, going out injured before the season got underway, and with Blake traded to the Trailblazers, Karl needed a new floor general. The candidates were all the guards except of course J.R. Smith, whom Karl regards as a load of dynamite ready to go off at any time. To outsiders, Allen Iverson would be the obvious choice. But Karl seldom if ever thinks the way the average person does. So after the Atkins injury, Karl set about trying to build justification for Anthony Carter being the floor general, with Iverson being the second in command.

In the four seasons prior to this one, Carter played more than a trivial amount in just two seasons, 2004-05 and 2005-06. In those two seasons, out of 164 games, Carter played in just 111 games, averaging 12 minutes a game. In the other two seasons, Carter hardly played at all in the NBA. This season, after informally being named Co-Captain along with Iverson, Carter has been averaging almost 30 minutes a game, more than in any year of his career, which began in 1999-2000. His previous high in minutes per game was in that first year, 1999-2000, in Miami, when he played 23.5 minutes a game. The point I am making is that Karl has gone off the deep end with his glorification of Anthony Carter, just like he did last year with Steve Blake. Minutes that should have been distributed among J.R. Smith, Bobby Jones, Linas Kleiza, and Yakhouba Diawara have all been monopolized by Carter.

As with Blake, Boykins, and others that Karl has latched on to before, Carter’s performance, while decent, is not close to justifying his big scale playing time. To give someone who has never been regarded as anything more than a decent player the minutes of a Manu Ginobili is the kind of mistake that you see George Karl make time and time again.

As for Iverson, Karl thinks of him as the soul or heart of the Nuggets offense and, arguably, of the team as a whole. But Karl thinks that Iverson is too intense a competitor and too blue collar to be able to handle the official floor general duties of a Karl coached team. So that is why Carter has been the official floor general, while Iverson has actually produced the goods that have allowed the Nuggets to win 14 of their first 22 games. Karl does not understand that, aside from having the heart of a champion, Iverson is also one of the most intelligent basketball players playing the game right now. A.I. always seems to know intuitively how he should adjust how he is playing for a particular game. But he has little experience in looking at the big picture that is needed for managing a team as a whole, and he, as was shown so well in the Spurs playoff series, is subject to being made to look bad when he is out there making things up on the fly against a really good team.

Karl’s “floor general” position does not include coaching duties like what drills are run in practice and what plays are run off time outs and in other situations. So Iverson is fully qualified to be Karl’s official “floor general,” instead of just the unofficial one. Shame on George Karl for relying on Iverson to win games, but for not giving him either the full respect due to him, or the offensive schemes needed to make his extremely hard work pay off with more wins more reliably.

And what is Karl going to do with his Anthony Carter obsession when Chucky Atkins returns about two weeks from now or so? We wait nervously to find out, because I have not studied Karl long enough to know what happens when his floor general is a substitute for an intended starter. My best guess would be that Atkins will not be given the playing time that would be his automatically with most other coaches. In other words, he will pay some kind of penalty for having the nerve to get injured on a team coached by George Karl. As Nuggets fans, let’s hope that the spirits cut us a break and that George Karl does not muck up the return of Chucky Atkins too badly.

ALERT STATUS PROBLEMS
As of December 9, 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 5 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 9 points.

2. Lack of adequate offensive schemes: 7 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: 45, 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)
2.0 He’s making a run 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 7 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.
.
NUGGETS
Kenyon Martin: Game 44.8 Season 19.9
Allen Iverson: Game 40.8 Season 40.3
Anthony Carter: Game 36.4 Season 21.1
Marcus Camby: Game 34.1 Season 32.8
Carmelo Anthony: Game 26.2 Season 36.6
Linas Kleiza: Game 10.8 Season 16.4
J.R. Smith: Game 8.7 Season 15.6

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

Eduardo Najera: Did Not Play 7 minutes-Injury
Nene: Did Not Play-Injury
Chucky Atkins: Did Not Play-Injury
Steven Hunter: Did Not Play-Injury

KINGS
John Salmons: Game 41.6 Season 26.0
Beno Udrih: Game 40.4 Season 24.9
Francisco Garcia: Game 31.5 Season 20.4
Mikki Moore: Game 25.5 Season 14.4
Ron Artest: Game 24.9 Season 33.4
Brad Miller: Game 13.4 Season 24.9
Kenny Thomas: Game 2.0 Season 6.0
Quincy Douby: Game 1.5 Season 5.7
Spencer Hawes: Game -0.8 Season 6.3

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.

OBSERVATIONS ON RATINGS:
With injures to Kevin Martin, Mike Bibby, and Shareef Abdur-Rahim, the Kings needed some big performances from little used players, but they got none at all. There just isn’t enough depth on the Kings squad to deal effectively with the multiple injury situation they have. The loss of Kevin Martin alone is pure devastation for Sacramento.

This is almost certainly the first game in the Carmelo Anthony years in Denver that Melo has finished behind 4 other players in performance rank. I’ll explain what is going on with Carmelo Anthony and his role on the team in my next game report, the one for the December 12 game versus the Hornets.

Kenyon Martin’s minutes are no longer being limited to reduce the risk to his rehabbed knees. To the contrary, he is now, like most of George Karl’s starters, being given more minutes than he would get on the other teams. All worry about the knees aside, this was Kenyon Martin’s breakout game for the Nuggets, and it was certainly fantastic to see him lead the Nuggets for the first time. Congratulations to the Nuggets sports medicine and rehab teams for jobs very well done. Kenyon Martin is really back now!

NUGGET’S PLUS—MINUS
This tells you how the score changed while a player was on the court. All Nuggets who played at least 7 minutes are shown.

Linas Kleiza: +14
J.R. Smith: +8
Allen Iverson: +6
Kenyon Martin: +3
Marcus Camby: -5
Anthony Carter: -5
Carmelo Anthony: -9

OBSERVATIONS ON PLUS—MINUS
Good things seem to happen when Kleiza is on the court lately. J.R. Smith, for the second game in a row, did not produce that many goodies for the Nuggets, but at least the Nuggets did quite well while he was on the court, which should calm Karl down a little about J.R.’s mini slump. And also what you see here is some stark evidence of Carmelo Anthony being pushed aside by George Karl and Allen Iverson in favor of Kenyon Martin and the Lithuanian Kleiza. Melo’s big negative on the plus/minus shows that the on the fly playmaking the Nuggets are doing is leaving out Melo to some extent. All of a sudden, Iverson, Kenyon Martin, and Linas Kleiza seem to be more or less in charge of how the offense is run.

Melo has mellowed himself out of the dominant offensive role and become the odd man out. Ominously, neither the coach nor anyone else on the Nuggets is all that concerned at this time about what Melo’s role should be on the New Nuggets. I’ll have much more to say about this surprising yet predictable bad development for the Nuggets in the next game report.

NUGGETS MADE WHAT?
All Nuggets who played at least 7 minutes are shown.

Anthony Carter played 37 minutes and was 7/16, 0/1 on 3’s, and 3/4 from the line for 17 points, and he made 9 assists, 4 steals, 2 blocks, and 3 rebounds.

Linas Kleiza played 26 minutes and was 3/8, 1/2 on 3’s, and 2/3 from the line for 9 points, and he made 3 rebounds, 1 assist, and 1 steal.

J.R. Smith played 12 minutes and was 3/8, 0/5 on 3’s, and 3/3 from the line for 9 points, and he made 2 rebounds.

Kenyon Martin played 38 minutes and was 8/10 and 4/8 from the line for 20 points, and he made 12 rebounds, 5 blocks, 3 steals, and 1 assist.

Marcus Camby played 38 minutes and was 3/4 and 2/2 from the line for 8 points, and he made 13 rebounds, 4 assists, 3 blocks, and 2 steals.

Carmelo Anthony played 39 minutes and was 5/16, 0/4 on 3’s, and 4/4 from the line for 14 points, and he made 7 rebounds, 3 blocks, 3 assists, and 1 steal.

Allen Iverson played virtually the whole game, 45 minutes, and was 7/16, 1/3 on 3’s, and 8/8 from the line for 23 points, and he made 10 assists, 4 rebounds, and 1 steal.

NEXT UP
The next game will be Wednesday, December 12 in Denver to play the Hornets at 7 pm mountain time. Neither the Hornets nor the Nuggets will be playing on back to back nights.