George Karl Goes Home Again

The bowels of the Pepsi Center, home of the Denver Nuggets, are fairly easy to navigate. It's a simple loop, for the most part, with little in the way of confusion or detours. The walk from the team parking lot to the locker room is unremarkable and routine, and one George Karl has made literally thousands of times.

This was different, though, because George Karl doesn't work here anymore. He didn't drive to the arena; he took the team bus. Rather than turn right into the Nuggets locker room, he walked a few yards further and turned left into the one set aside for visitors. "It wasn't comfortable," Karl said.

Home is a mostly foreign concept in the NBA. Players, coaches, and executives change cities and teams entirely too often; the security associated with the word "home" just does not exist. Yet for Karl, who spent nine years as head coach of the Nuggets before being fired two years ago, Denver is his home, and not just because he still lives here.

This is palpable in his voice, which is normally gravelly in the manner of someone who screams a lot, but was especially so before he led his new team against the Nuggets on Sunday. It was as if Karl chewed an extra pack of rocks for the occasion. It was clearer still in his eyes, which seemed slightly teary when he saw Melvin Hunt, once his assistant and now Denver's interim head coach.

The emotions that Karl felt, under the spotlight and amid faces once-familiar and now strange, were impossible to miss. There was anguish at being let go despite his many successes here, and sadness for having to leave something he so dearly loved. Also joy for once more having a team of his own, and nostalgia for the good times now passed. There was, also, a job to do—Karl is the head coach of the Sacramento Kings, now, a team that desperately needs a head coach, and a sense of where it's headed.

"It's not been easy," Karl said of his return to Denver. "Last night was really hard emotionally, talking to my friends about some of the things that happened."

Sunday marked Karl's first game back since he was fired. In his last year, Karl led the Nuggets to a franchise-record 57 wins and claimed Coach of the Year honors. None of that was enough for an ownership tired of first-round playoff exits.

Since that time, the Nuggets have careened downhill. They hired Brian Shaw, whose personality and coaching philosophy failed to connect with the roster. There was in-fighting, spats between coaches and players. There was a multitude of injuries. There was, mostly, a steep and dark depression, eventually leveling out into apathy. Seemingly overnight, the Nuggets had devolved from one of the most entertaining, successful teams in the NBA to one of the most thoroughly lost.

When Shaw was the coach, Karl was never shy with his thoughts on how ownership screwed up by firing him in the first place, or what was wrong with Shaw's offense. In his new role, Karl was reflective, rather than critical.

"I can't deny the first year didn't feel good," he said. "Watching them play poorly, then sometimes rooting for them to play poorly, wondering why they're playing so poorly. How it disintegrated so fast was actually painful to me."

The aftermath of this breakup has always felt a lot like a relationship that ended for no good reason. For nine years, everything worked. There were disagreements and issues, but of course there were. The partnership was maybe not as successful as other couples, or as rich, or as glamorous, but it worked—except even when it worked, there was the sense that while things were great, they were also somehow tired. The serpent whispers convincingly into your ear. The end is already in sight.

That pain is still there for Karl, and he is rather startlingly honest about it, in a way that NBA coaches are not often honest about anything. This is his way, and his long-running issues with Nuggets owner Stan Kroenke are no secret to anyone who follows the NBA, but there is still something shocking about hearing anyone in the NBA saying exactly what they mean, or even fully meaning what they say. "I wanted to end my life here, my career here," Karl said. "They took that away from me."

Not entirely, though. Karl is back, if only for a day or two, as a stranger in his own home. He has shaken hands with old staff, hugged former assistant coaches and talked with familiar writers. It does not look right to see him in the Kings' purple warm-ups, at least not yet. And though Karl is still hurt by his end here in Denver, he also has a job to do, emotionally and unemotionally. He wants to beat the Nuggets, just as he would any other team, but he doesn't want them to suffer. "My greatest revenge is going to be my success," he says, "not their failure." The word revenge is in that sentence, but there are other things there, too.