It is no secret that Carmelo Anthony was not George Karl’s favorite player during their six or so seasons together with the Denver Nuggets, but Karl has never been more candid about the relationship than he is in his new book.
In the book, “Furious George,” Karl unloaded on several former Nuggets players, with Anthony taking the brunt of it.
“Carmelo was a true conundrum for me in the six years I had him.” Karl wrote, according to a review copy obtained by Marc Berman of the New York Post. “He was the best offensive player I ever coached. He was also a user of people, addicted to the spotlight and very unhappy when he had to share it.
“He really lit my fuse with his low demand of himself on defense. He had no commitment to the hard, dirty work of stopping the other guy. My ideal — probably every coach’s ideal — is when your best player is also your leader. But since Carmelo only played hard on one side of the ball, he made it plain he couldn’t lead the Nuggets, even though he said he wanted to. Coaching him meant working around his defense and compensating for his attitude.”
While none of that is shocking, Karl seemed determined to paint Anthony as someone who made the coach’s job more difficult on a daily basis. As Berman notes, Karl also drew attention to Anthony being arrested for DUI in 2008, getting “busted at the airport for having a bag of weed in his backpack” in 2004, getting in a “bar fight” and once refusing to play in the final minutes of a game against the Detroit Pistons.
“I want as much effort on defense — maybe more — as on offense,” Karl wrote. “That was never going to happen with Melo, whose amazing ability to score with the ball made him a star but didn’t make him a winner. Which I pointed out to him. Which he didn’t like.”
In addition to Carmelo, Karl also took aim at fellow “AAU babies” and “spoiled brats” J.R. Smith and Kenyon Martin. The former coach wrote that Smith felt too entitled and had a “distracting posse,” which is an ironic term to use given what happened with Phil Jackson and LeBron James recently. Karl said Martin and Anthony did not act like grown men because neither of them had a father in his life.
“Kenyon and Carmelo carried two big burdens: all that money and no father to show them how to act like a man,” the coach wrote.
We knew from comments like this that Karl did not enjoy coaching Anthony, but the content of his new book takes that to another level. Even though Karl expressed confidence in Anthony winning a championship someday, it’s clear he has minimal respect for the nine-time NBA All-Star.
