If you want to be successful, you've got to do something else besides what you do best

Here is more about the Nuggets change to a defensive minded team, this time from the NY Times:

DENVER (AP) — When Anthony Carter first heard that Nuggets Coach George Karl was talking about a defense-first philosophy after two seasons of running up scores, he was a bit skeptical.

“To tell you the truth, I didn’t think we would really do it because he’s said that before and then when we needed some scoring, the defensive guys went back to the bench,” Carter said, chuckling. “But I’m glad we stuck with it this year.”

The Denver Nuggets are in the Western Conference finals for the first time since 1985. They will play the Los Angeles Lakers, who defeated the Houston Rockets on Sunday, 89-70, in Game 7 of their second-round series. Game 1 is Tuesday in Los Angeles.

The change in Karl’s thinking took place during a tumultuous off-season that started with the Nuggets’ fifth straight first-round playoff exit and continued with the departures of the defensive stalwarts Marcus Camby and Eduardo Najera and the assistant coaches Doug Moe and Mike Dunlap.

Before Camby and Najera were out the door, Karl’s right-hand man, Tim Grgurich, convinced him that he had to return to his roots.

Mark Warkentien, who was named the league’s executive of the year, did his part by signing two big bargains in Chris Andersen and Dahntay Jones. Then came the trade of Allen Iverson to Detroit for Chauncey Billups, who has helped transform the Nuggets into contenders.

Kenyon Martin said he bought into Karl’s approach immediately.

“Just look at it, if you want to be successful in any sport, no matter if it’s individual or a team sport, you’ve got to do something else besides what you do best,” Martin said Saturday. “We always knew we could score. Shoot, we’re top three in the league in scoring for the last five years.

“But we’ve been in the bottom in defense all those years as well. So, you’ve got to fix it. How do you fix it? You get in the gym and work at it. And that’s what we did every day in training camp, and we got good at it.”

So, in the Nuggets’ summer league, “the whole game was defense,” Karl said.

“Everything went back to the old-school drills, the shell drills, all the rotation drills, all the old-school stuff we had done in Seattle,” Karl said. “We talked to everybody about it.

Changing the Culture

A look into the turnaround of the Nuggets. I blogged last month on this issue with the Nuggets but have come across another good article which is similar from the Denver Post:

This is the peek behind the curtain, the fly on the wall moment.

Nuggets coach George Karl is leaning back on a stool a few feet away from the court in the team’s Pepsi Center practice facility. He is spilling the beans on how an offseason of purging took the Nuggets from run-down to a team now three wins away from the Western Conference Finals. All of the essential moves and conversations that happened before the regular season arrival of guard Chauncey Billups took a decent Nuggets team and pushed it to among the NBA’s best.

Karl starts with an admission that the run-at-all-costs offensive philosophy he preached two years prior to this season – though it resulted in a combined 95 wins (50 last season) – was the wrong way to go.

“I may have taken too much of a risk,” Karl says.

And that’s just an appetizer.

We’ll start last spring, after the Nuggets were swept out of the playoffs by the L.A. Lakers. Assistant coach Tim Grgurich, Karl’s longtime right hand man, wanted the coach to wipe his hands of emphasizing offensive basketball. Grgurich wanted to turn back the clock to the defense-first system that was a success when the two were winning games by the boatload in Seattle.

“We can’t do this anymore,” Grgurich said to Karl. “We can’t coach like this anymore. It just doesn’t work.”

Karl paused.

“He was saying it for himself, but he was also saying it for me,” Karl recalled. “And I just looked at him and said ‘Grg, you know something, you’re right.’”

But Karl also said he had some early opposition from another assistant, Adrian Dantley, who wondered why he would scrap the system that had the Nuggets ranked among the NBA’s best on the offensive end.

“Dantley said, ‘Why in the (heck) are you changing? You score in the top five, why are you changing your philosophy?’” Karl recalled.

But his mind was made up. Karl rose through the ranks as a defensive-minded coach with offensive flair. In Seattle, his teams got after the opposition with relentless effort, turning Gary Payton pressure-induced stops into Shawn Kemp show time dunks.

More importantly, there was a hands-on approach to how the coaching staff handled the players. In the summers coaches stayed close to the athletes. There were talks and visits and one-on-one practice sessions. That extra personal attention was non-existent in Denver.

Grgurich wanted to get back to that. Karl agreed. They divided up the roster. They were the point men, but all of the assistants were responsible for keeping track of two or more players.

“He had Kenyon, I had Nene,” Karl said. “A.I. (Allen Iverson) is impossible to touch in the summer time, but we at least got in some phone conversations with him. Melo was in China (for the Olympics), so we were ok there. All the other guys were fairly easy.”

Karl, who had past run-ins with Martin, thought he’d be the toughest to get on board with the changing philosophy he wanted to implement – more discipline, improved professionalism, better leadership, and a focus on defense on the court.

He was wrong.

“The guy that jumped in really quick, was Kenyon,” Karl said. “We thought Nene and Kenyon were the hardest guys. Kenyon basically said this is the only way we can survive. And as soon as he got back (for training camp) we met and he said ‘You’re not going to have any problem with me. I’m going to be your leader.’ He jumped in and basically called himself out.

“We had our first (team) meeting of the season and he said ‘I’ve been a problem for coach, but it’s not going to happen anymore, and I’m going to be the policeman.’ Our off the court activity was part of it, too.”

Martin admitted he had a bad attitude much of his time with Karl, and that a lot of it was due to frustration with having to deal with two microfracture knee surgeries that limited his ability to play at the level he was accustomed. His knees hurt. His pride hurt. He took it out on Karl and others in the organization on a near daily basis.

Martin knew he had to change.

“I had to get out of my own way,” he said.

As for Nene, who had been branded as a player who was not living up to his six-year, $60 million contract, he and Karl vented over dinner at the ritzy Capital Grille restaurant downtown.

“We yelled and screamed a little bit,” Karl said. “He didn’t say all nice things. I didn’t say all nice things. My line to him at that time was ‘Nene, you’ve gone from an overpaid bench player to an underpaid starter, in one trade (the Marcus Camby trade). If you’re as good as I think you’re going to be, at the end of this year, they are going to call you an underpaid star. Right now, they are calling you an overpaid bench guy.’ I said, ‘What a great opportunity. What a great challenge to show people that they don’t know what the (heck) they are talking about.’”

Karl demanded harder work from Nene, who took it easy during the summers only to report to camp out of shape and thus, more susceptible to injury.

“I said ‘You’re not going to be able to do it with your habits,’” Karl said. “He would be complaining about this guy and (that guy’s) professionalism. I said ‘If you want that to change, you’ve got to help me. The first way you help me is get in the gym.’ And on August 15, he was in the gym probably four or five days every week from that point. He had never done that before.”

That all set the stage for the Billups trade, sending Iverson to Detroit, which occurred on Nov. 3.

“The culture was changing before Chauncey came,” Karl said. “And then Chauncey comes and here’s the spokesperson for everything I was basically saying. So I’m not fighting and ego managing and molding.”

He's the head coach alot

Another good article on the leadership qualities of Chauncey Billups, who has led Denver to a 2-0 lead over Dallas in the Western Conference quarterfinals. This is from the Denver Post:

Chauncey Billups sauntered to the scorer's table with about eight minutes left in the fourth quarter and shouted instructions — and no doubt encouragement — to the players who were on the court.

It just another small detail in Mr. Big Shot's leadership drive. There is almost never a stone left unturned.

But for Billups so far in this series, the small things have been his biggest contribution. Scoring has eluded the all-star guard, but he has made up for it in assists, steals, and keeping the Nuggets' offense on schedule.

"Chauncey didn't have a good offensive game from the standpoint of scoring points, but you don't understand how good he is running the team; you don't understand how good he is cerebrally making sure things are going the right way," Nuggets coach George Karl said. "Our interaction during the game . . . He's the head coach a lot."

In the locker room, Billups' leadership has been a key to the Nuggets' success. He and Karl collaborate on what they think will work for the Nuggets going into each game. Billups has helped Karl get their game plans executed while still challenging the coach to put the players in the best positions possible.

"He overrides me a lot," Karl said. "But in the same sense, we whisper to each other a great deal during the game, during timeouts."

Said Billups: "George trusts me out there. I think it's important for the point guard and the head coach to have that kind of relationship."

Communication, discipline, leadership helping the Nuggets

Very good inside look at the George Karl and the Denver Nuggets this week by Ian Thomsen at cnnsi.com. Nugget teams of the past few years were known to put up lots of points and give up tons as well. This year, the coaching staff is focusing more on the defensive side of the floor. Come playoff time, George Karl felt that they didn't have an identity defensively to go deep into the playoffs. Here is a look at the turnaround, which hasn't always been a smooth ride:

1.Going back to basics: Over the previous two seasons in Denver, Karl had focused on developing a passing-game offense aimed at creating gaps to attack the basket. He won't try making that a priority again. "I learned a lot, it was a good experiment, I'm glad I survived it," Karl said. "But there's no question I'm better when I coach the game from the defensive end of the court. My staff is more comfortable when I coach from the defensive end of the court, and deep down inside most players have a trust in that end of the court."

When his Nuggets lost in the first round last season for the fourth successive year -- having won three playoff games in that span -- Karl and his longtime assistant Tim Grgurich agreed on a new way forward: Return to the old system, based on the aggressive trapping defense that dates back to his long run of success with Gary Payton in Seattle.

"I remember the next two or three days [after the playoffs]. We said, 'We've got to go back to the old way,' '' Karl said. "There's too much freedom and openness to coaching offense. The discipline and the toughness and the soul of the game come from the defensive end of the court most of the time."

Karl understands why people say he didn't appear to be plugged in over the last couple of years: He was thinking his way through the game instead of reacting to it.

"So much of coaching is the trust and passion that the team feels from you, and if you're faking that over a 100 games a year, they find that out," Karl said. "I'm not sure I was faking it, but the last couple of years I was confused. When a problem came up, I didn't know how to address it based on my experiences. Now I think I'm back to feeling much more comfortable on how to attack a weakness that we've developed or a situation that has arisen."

2.Embrace discipline: "We were at Grg's camp [in Las Vegas] the first week in August and he said, 'Not only do we have to go back to the defense, but we've got to go back to touching our players and telling these guys that we can still win,' " Karl said. "Because the cloud in Denver was, We're done. No one thought we could win. Everybody predicted the doom."

Each of the assistant coaches reached out to players over the summer.

"I went to Nenê the second week in August, I had dinner with him and his fiancee," Karl said.

"He said some hard things to me, I said some hard things to him. Nenê has never been a guy who went to the gym until he had to. I would say within a week [of that dinner], he was in the gym five days a week from August on.

"Grg went to Dallas -- I think twice in that time -- to talk with Kenyon [Martin], and he talked about how we can't have the nonsense that we've had. And Kenyon bought into that. In our first team meeting, Kenyon stood up and said, 'I have been a problem, but I'm not going to be a problem anymore.' "

Both Nenê and Martin have had resurgent seasons. Nenê is averaging career highs of 14.6 points and 7.8 rebounds while shooting 60.3 percent, and Martin is playing his most minutes since the 2004-05 season.

3.Call it like you see it. "In the NBA we do not coach enough," Karl said. "We manage. We attitude-adjust, we call the league office, we talk to agents.

"I tell Pop [Spurs coach Gregg Popovich] all the time, 'Pop, you coach different than we coach. You have a no-nonsense, low-maintenance superstar.' How many of them exist? When you have a disciplinary problem with Melo Carmelo Anthony and you have an injury here and you have a dysfunctional personality on your team, that's not coaching; that's managing. The more that we have to manage what I call the de-energizers of basketball -- selfishness, non-commitment, not playing hard, attitudes in the locker room -- you're not coaching."

"Melo and I are now at the stage where I can talk to him about everything," Karl said. "Sometimes I do it with [the help of] Chauncey [Billups], and there are still the sensitive areas of shot selection and selfishness and commitment to defense, where sometimes it's easier to be with an assistant or do it through a video. But I would say Melo and I are at the stage now that whatever the headache is, even when he's [angry] he can bring it to me, and when I'm [angry] I can bring it to him. Before we always kind of walked around, holding back."

"I went to Chauncey and Melo in a couple of instances [this season] and said, 'You've got to take this off my plate. You've got to police this team. You've got to take responsibility.

4.Import leadership: The Nuggets were already committed to a new (or old) approach when they dealt Allen Iverson to Detroit in November for Billups, a blockbuster trade that enabled them to eventually limbo underneath the tax threshold even as their team improved -- a most improbable dream in this recession-based league.

"I'm blessed, for the first time in a long time, of having [leadership from a player like Billups]," Karl said. "Sam Cassell was my leader in Milwaukee. Now, come on, Sam's kind of crazy. Sam believes the right stuff, but he doesn't present it on a daily basis. Chauncey presents it on a daily basis. He reminds me a lot of Nate [McMillan] when I had Nate in Seattle, and I didn't know how valuable Nate was because I was still a young coach. People ask me at the clinics, 'Who was your most favorite player you ever coached?' And I say Nate McMillan, because on a daily basis he brought winning and leadership to [our] locker room and to [our] court.

"Chauncey does that. He makes your words be listened to. And when you're coaching five or six years with a team, that's important. Because they get tired of hearing my stories and my repeats and my desires and my demands. But Chauncey has kind of lifted that up."

"There is going to be a surprise team. And what I don't want [my team] to do is throw away the opportunity because of not knowing what it takes. Because we don't have the mature toughness that a Utah might have. We do have a lot of talent that we can throw away five possessions or 10 possessions and make it up, but that's not how you win big. And too many times I say, 'OK, we won, and yeah, you didn't play those first five minutes -- but this is not how you beat L.A. This is not how you beat Houston in Houston. You don't do it this way.' "