How George Karl saved his career in Seattle while lifting the Sonics
Coach George Karl, pictured during a 1993 game against the Denver Nuggets, took the Seattle SuperSonics to the NBA Finals in 1996. (Tribune News Service)
SEATTLE – The voice is weaker now, the combination of time, treatment and the travails of life taking a toll. His movements are measured now that he’s 73 years old.
But give George Karl a platform and he still carries the same strong-willed thoughts and opinions that served as the foundation for a coaching career worthy of the Naismith Memorial Hall of Fame, even if he might have spent a time exiled from the NBA and rankled a few general managers along the way.
This NBA season marks 27 years since Karl was last the head coach of the Seattle SuperSonics and nine years since he last held a coaching job during a brief, mostly forgotten stint in Sacramento at the end of his career. Karl spent more time as the head coach of the Denver Nuggets – nine seasons – than he did in Seattle. Denver is his permanent home, for now.
For those who remember Karl on the sidelines, his tenure with the SuperSonics remains the most vivid, most memorable. Why is that the case? He won more games in Denver. He made the Eastern Conference finals in Milwaukee. He was NBA Coach of the Year his final season with the Nuggets, an honor he was never awarded during his time with the Sonics.
But connections with our memories are strange and not always sensical. Why is someone who found arguably more success elsewhere mostly remembered for his time in Seattle?
“My career blew up here in Seattle,” Karl said when we chatted a couple of months ago.
Maybe it’s the style his teams played, which highlighted the athleticism of Shawn Kemp and allowed Gary Payton to be Gary Payton?
Maybe it was the painful loss to the Nuggets in the first round of the 1994 playoffs when the Sonics became the first No. 1 seed to lose to a No. 8 seed?
Or was it the 1996 season when the Sonics finally reached the NBA Finals and took Michael Jordan and the Bulls to six games before losing?
Whatever the reason, mention the name George Karl and “Seattle” is usually the first connection that comes to mind.
“He allowed us to play. He demanded and challenged us to play hard and to do all the things that I believed in, so it was easy to play for him. It was easy to relate to him,” former Sonics guard and coach Nate McMillan said.
That connection to Seattle and really his Hall of Fame credentials are thanks in part to the general manager of the Sonics at the time and his willingness to take a shot on a Karl, who had been more or less exiled from the NBA because of his combative and sometimes volatile personality.
“Bob Whitsitt saved my career by bringing me back from Real Madrid,” Karl said.
From Albany to Seattle with a layover in Madrid
Because he’s become so associated with Seattle, it’s sometimes easy to forget that coaching the SuperSonics was Karl’s sixth stop as a head coach in professional basketball.
It also marked the second chapter of his career in the NBA.
The journey started in 1980 in the Continental Basketball Association as the coach of the Montana Golden Nuggets in Great Falls. In 1984 came his first shot in the NBA with Cleveland, a stint that lasted almost two seasons as he was let go late in the second year.
That was followed by parts of two seasons in Golden State where it became clear Karl was working his way out of the NBA.
“Nobody wanted to even think about working with him, and he wasn’t accomplished enough to put up with that kind of maintenance,” Whitsitt said.
So it was back to the CBA. In Albany, New York, the Patroons were a benchmark franchise in the old CBA. The place where Phil Jackson won a CBA title in 1984. And the place Karl started to rediscover himself as a coach.
“Returning to the CBA and coaching in Albany was a great thing for my career,” Karl told Saratoga Living in 2019.
It helped that his teams were pretty good, too. The Patroons went 36-18 in 1988-89, Karl’s first season. He returned for the 1990-91 season when Albany went 50-6, including 28-0 at home.
“I liked the fact that he went to the CBA, which is pro basketball, and you have to adapt. You can lose your best player the day of the game. Some team could call them up. You’re not flying first class, you’re riding in buses. You’re going to gyms, not arenas. It’s a different deal,” Whitsitt said.
Interspersed among his two seasons coaching in Albany, Karl ended up in Spain. At Real Madrid to be exact. Karl called that decision to go to Spain, “Karma in my life I didn’t know I needed at that time.”
“I needed to go to Madrid to grow up because my ego and my attitude. … I had a lot of good qualities, but I also had some bad qualities and Madrid, because of what happened there, I think it’s a big building block in my life, in my career, that I turned the corner and started living the good things in my life more often and realizing that I got to change,” Karl said in a 2020 podcast recounting his time in Spain.
Karl coached the 1989-90 season with Real Madrid, returned to Albany and went back to Madrid in 1991. During his second stint in Spain, Whitsitt believed it was time to bring Karl back to the NBA.
Doing so meant Whitsitt risking his own capital within the organization because of Karl’s past.
“I had to really sell George to (ownership), and I didn’t get to yes for quite a while on that, but ultimately it was you got to sink or swim with this guy,” Whitsitt said. “I think George knew that. I think George understood I was the only guy who gave him a chance to come back. He wouldn’t have got those next 1,000 wins or whatever he’s at.”
Seattle, forever
Hanging out for a few minutes with Karl in Seattle is an education in the power of nostalgia. He was an unknown when Whitsitt gave Karl the chance to return from being excommunicated from the NBA coaching circles. Now, fans approach and share stories from the ’90s. The nights of Payton and Kemp. The defense of McMillan. The shooting of Ricky Pierce and Sam Perkins or the chants for Detlef Schrempf.
The lows of the 1994 playoffs and Karl’s eventual departure from Seattle. The highs of watching a young group grow together and eventually reach the Finals in 1996.
And the winning. So much winning.
“Seven years of averaging 58 wins. I don’t know how many times that’s been done,” Karl said.
When he’s approached, Karl smiles and listens. He shakes hands. He doesn’t correct when a fan recites a memory incorrectly. He knows there’s a connection here that’s different from his other NBA stops where he had success in Milwaukee and Denver.
“I just really enjoyed playing for him and probably wouldn’t have gotten into coaching if it wasn’t for George encouraging me to do it and to come along with him,” McMillan said. “He tried to make me a player-coach while I was still playing, because I was injured my last year.”
Perhaps that all encompasses why he barks so loudly for the NBA to return to Seattle. Karl is not one to withhold his opinions – his regular social media posts run the gamut of topics from politics to the game he loves. In different circumstances with better health, maybe Karl would still be coaching in some capacity.
Karl appreciates while also being critical of today’s game. The big man has been diminished. He doesn’t like that. He loves watching Nikola Jokic living in Denver but knows he’s a rarity. The game is a little too much about money right now, for his liking.
“We read more about $200 million contracts. We don’t read about the soul of the game, the connection of the game. The drama,” Karl said. “We don’t read about it, the stuff that I love about the game. The purpose and the passion.”
While having those opinions and some concerns about the direction of the game, he wants Seattle fans to again have those debates. To talk trades and signings. Debate styles of play and on-court personalities. And have all of it be centered on a team with Sonics in the name.
“All I know is Seattle, the karma, the energy, the spirit, the fan base, the history, the tradition, and it’s got the best building in the world,” Karl said. “How does the NBA say no to that?”