George Karl: I Struggled Because My Players Didn't Have Good Dads 

Longtime NBA head coach George Karl has written a book, titled Furious George, and in it he partakes in the time-honored and always-wack tradition of coaches talking shit about players they used to coach. (Or so we are told by the New York Post, which got its hands on a copy of the book.)

The Post has plenty of eyebrow-raising quotes to enjoy, mostly about Carmelo Anthony, but the ones that stick out most involve Karl’s seeming obsession with his players lacking strong father figures:

Karl wrote Anthony and Martin not having fathers in their lives became a detriment to their personalities.

“Kenyon and Carmelo carried two big burdens: all that money and no father to show them how to act like a man,” Karl wrote.

[...]

Regarding Smith, Karl wrote that Smith’s father, Earl Sr., “urged his son to shoot the ball and keep shooting it from the very moment I put him in the game.’’

Aside from the, uh, problematic nature of an old white coach grousing about someone needing to put a stern, fatherly hand on the shoulders of his young, black players, Karl is doing nothing but telling on himself here. Carmelo Anthony and J.R. Smith were super talented players who sometimes had trouble committing to defense and taking smart shots? Hmmmm, if only an accomplished basketball thinker who’d seen it all had been making a lot of money to figure out how to reach them and help them fulfill their potential.

If this was just about those two that might be one thing, but note that George Karl has never not clashed with the star players on his teams. Kendall Gill hates him, Ray Allen hates him, Andre Iguodala hates him, Carmelo Anthony hates him, J.R. Smith hates him, and DeMarcus Cousins definitely hates him. Crazy theory here: maybe George Karl’s inability to get along with his stars had nothing to do with those players’ fathers, and everything to do with George Karl.

[ New York Post]