Opinion: Plenty of reason Karl should stay as coach

DENVER - Should George Karl stay or should the Denver Nuggets coach be shown the door?

The question is being asked from newspaper columnists to radio and television announcers. There are those who have their minds made up: "One die-hard fan's crusade to salvage the 2007-08 Denver Nuggets season." Those are words from the Web site www.firegeorgekarl.com.

Watching the Nuggets get beat 107-101 by the Los Angeles Lakers and swept out of the first round of the playoffs give Karl's harshest critics more ammunition.

Then there are folks such as me who find it difficult to find a tremendous amount of fault with Karl as coach of the Nuggets.

I'm a firm believer in the distinct difference between excuses and reasons.

There are reasons why the Nuggets didn't win more games this season. And these are reasons many fail to acknowledge purely because of the present.

Power forward, Nene, missed 22 games early this season because of a thumb injury. Then Nene missed 37 games after the removal of a testicular tumor.

That's 59 of 82 games - 72 percent. That's not an excuse, that's a reason the Nuggets didn't win as much.

And let's not forget. We're talking about a 50-win team here. So, it's not like the Nuggets were bad. To win 50 games without one of the primary components of the team? If anything that's good coaching.

Kenyon Martin missed all but two games of the 2006-07 season. He missed 25 games because of injury during the 2005-06 season, the same season where Nene played one game.

Look at the championship teams of the past. How many of them had key players miss sizeable amounts of the season? Shaquille O'Neal missed the early part of the Miami Heat's championship season, but not many others, if any, had significant losses.

Chicago Bulls. Detroit Pistons. San Antonio Spurs.

Nope. Nope. Nope.

None of them lost key players for more than 70 percent of the season. I'd like to see what a Karl-coached Nuggets team could do if it experienced the same type of injuries as the majority of the NBA's teams.

We'd most likely be talking about the reasons why the Nuggets play so well.

Now do the Nuggets play horrible defense? Yes. Emphatically, yes. It's obvious to anybody watching. They give up too many layups, even in the half court. They give up too many second-chance points, too. And the Nuggets' transition defense stinks - which leads to even more easy baskets from their opponents.

How much of that is Karl's fault, especially after the amount of time spent talking about and stressing defense?

There is a dry-erase board in the Nuggets locker room. It's about 10-feet tall and when pushed together, it's about 5 to 6 feet wide.

Before every home game there is information written on the board, information pertaining to what the Nuggets need to do to win the game.

There were three key points on the board Monday. Those three points had several subsets. There were eight points under the subset that stressed defense.

More nights than not the Nuggets played as if either they didn't read the board or they didn't care what it said.

That's not Karl's fault.