It is a simple request from coaches. Give 110 percent, play your best, don’t leave anything on the floor. These tenets hold true from high school to the pros. Without doubt, the best teams are the ones that combine skill, talent, strategy and effort.
George Karl knows that. He has coached superstar-laden teams and unheralded teams all in his time in Denver.
This latest labor of love for Karl has been all about the effort.
“The longer I’m in coaching, the thing I want most on my team is — play-hard,” George Karl told Benjamin Hochman of The Denver Post. “I think I can coach almost anything with play-hard on my side.
“I’ve been trying to figure out how to say this to the players, in a different language or a different way, because they’re tired of hearing it. But we will not be great without play-hard.”
That is how the Nuggets have been since trading Carmelo Anthony last February and getting out of a strange run with ball-dominating players like Allen Iverson, Carmelo Anthony and Chauncey Billups playing point man.
Would the Nuggets be better with one star player? Absolutely. Danilo Gallinari has been good this year — averaging 15.3 points per game — but he does not strike fear in defenses like Anthony would. Ty Lawson is a strong, growing player. But everything for Denver offensively has been by committee. Karl has the luxury of being able to depend on a lot of different players. Denver has 13 players averaging at least 10 minutes per game and the highest scorer is Lawson with 15.5 points per game.
Karl offered his admiration for players like Tony Allen, Kevin Garnett, Derrick Rose, Joakim Noah and Manu Ginobili who seem to play hard no matter what.
Especially in this season, keeping up energy and keeping players going at it hard after the constant games of the season has been difficult. Often the team that plays with the most energy on a nightly basis is the one that is going to win. Especially with all the games crammed together, it is easy to give in to fatigue and brush off a bad game to the schedule.
Denver currently sits sixth in the Western Conference at 23-19, showing that the Nuggets continue to play with the energy that allows them to surpass their talent level perhaps but may be capped when it comes to the postseason when the game grinds down a little bit more.
Karl, who missed portions of last season battling cancer, certainly seems to be enjoying this team’s effort. His focus is on preaching the fundamentals of playing hard and that seems to be a lot more enjoyable of a time than managing egos, like he had been before the Anthony trade and even in the past perhaps when Iverson was in Denver or even when he reached the Finals with Shawn Kemp and Gary Payton.
His players want to play hard and show what they can do. And Karl seems to be tailoring his gameplan and pulling the strings to use all his weapons.
