Karl still stirring the pot in new book
Former Bucks head coach recalls time in Milwaukee
All these years later, it still stings. George Karl can still see Glenn Robinson missing that 10footer at the buzzer in Game 5 of the 2001 NBA Eastern Conference finals.
“I can see that jump shot and I can almost replay the emptiness I felt when it didn’t go in,” Karl said. “It was like, ‘Oh, man, we had this one. We had this one.’ ”
Had Robinson’s shot fallen, the Bucks would have beaten the Philadelphia 76ers by one point. The series would not have gone to a Game 7, which the Bucks lost. They would have instead advanced to the NBA Finals, where they would have beaten Shaq, Kobe and the Los Angeles Lakers. At least, that’s the way Karl sees it. “You know, I think we had a little bit of a formula,” said Karl, whose Bucks had gone 2-0 against Los Angeles during the regular season. “We could stretch out the Lakers and shoot the three ball. We had great offensive
weapons.”
Karl’s five seasons in Milwaukee were the last time the Bucks had real sizzle, the last time
in the city seemed to be talking about the team. Robinson, Ray Allen and Sam Cassell — the “Big Three” — had swagger and backed it up with talent. The Bradley Center rocked every night.
And then, just like that, it was over.
Karl, one of nine head coaches to win 1,000 games in the NBA, writes about it all in his autobiography, “Furious George,” published earlier this month. The subtitle — “My Forty Years Surviving NBA Divas, Clueless GMs, and Poor Shot Selection” — is a clue that Karl pulls no punches.
When I reached him by phone to talk about the book, the first words out of his mouth were, “I loved Milwaukee. I loved my time there.”
It was a great time to be a Bucks fan — a vibe the current team, with rising stars Giannis Antetokounmpo and Jabari Parker, is trying to recapture. But for Karl, his time in Milwaukee was tumultuous. His father died and his wife divorced him and, as he wrote, “cancer smoldered inside me.”
The 2000-’01 Bucks team started 3-9 but went 49-21 the rest of the way, then beat Orlando and Charlotte in the first two rounds of the playoffs.
“That team was probably my most overachieving team,” Karl said. “I don’t think it had the talent to go as far as they went.”
The Eastern Conference finals is deserving of its own book. To this day, many believe the controversial series was rigged so that the Philadelphia 76ers, led by Allen Iverson, would meet the Lakers in the Finals. Count Karl among them.
“I believe in conspiracies,” he said. “I think the world has a lot of conspiracies. When you’re thinking about a small-market team vs. Allen Iverson and Philadelphia, your mind can think a lot of things. I don’t know, other than that sometimes you can feel the presence of the officiating in the game.”
The 76ers had a 186-120 advantage in free-throw attempts in the series; Robinson didn’t even get to the line until Game 5. In that game, Scott Williams, the Bucks’ best big man, was charged with a flagrant foul but wasn’t ejected — and then was suspended for Game 7. According to Karl, he and Allen were
fined a combined $35,000 for claiming the series was rigged and team owner Herb Kohl was fined $50,000 for not controlling them.
“Maybe it was just paranoia,” Karl mused.
The next year, the Bucks went 41-41 and missed the playoffs, ending Karl’s streak of 11 consecutive postseason appearances. The team chemistry changed with the addition of the late Anthony Mason, a free-agent power forward who’d been an all-star the year before in Miami.
“That’s a mystery to me, too,” Karl said when asked why Mason didn’t work out. “Sometimes adding talent and a personality that might be difficult … it seemed like it subtracted from our team more than it added to our team. That maybe caused Ray and I to get into the wrong place.”
In August 2002, the Bucks took the first step in dismantling the Big Three, trading Robinson to Atlanta. At the trade deadline in February 2003, Milwaukee sent Allen to Seattle for Desmond Mason and 34-year-old Gary Payton.
Karl wrote in the book that it was “a relief to see Ray gone. It was like popping a blister. … I didn’t think his teammates liked him. I knew I didn’t.” In an interview with the Journal Sentinel last year, Kohl said trading Allen was his single biggest regret as owner.
“When the Senator and (general manager) Ernie Grunfeld decided that would be the best thing for our team, at that moment I was OK with it,” Karl told me. “It wasn’t one of those feel-good trades.”
Karl coached one more year in Milwaukee. The Bucks went 42-40 and lost in the first round of the playoffs. He met with new GM Larry Harris after the season and the two couldn’t agree on a contract extension.
“I didn’t quit and I wasn’t fired,” Karl wrote, “but I walked out of the meeting unemployed.”
He coached 11 more years, nine in Denver and two in Sacramento, and was fired after the Kings went 33-49 in 2015-’16. Over a 21-year span, from his first year in Seattle to his last in Denver, he didn’t have a single losing season and missed the playoffs just once.
Now 65, he would like one more chance.
“I would like to coach again, but I don’t know,” he said. “I guess the best answer is that I’m waiting for a phone call.”