It's got to be brutal being an NBA coach. You've got the most talented athletes in the world at your beck and call, and sometimes they just. Won't. Play. Ball.
Exhibit A: JaVale McGee. As skilled a big man as there is in the NBA, his highlight-to-frustration ratio is probably a solid 1:1. He's a Denver Nugget, which puts him in the purview of George Karl, and he's making the nightly sports roundups for both admirable and boneheaded reasons.
Leave it to Karl, then, to give the most concise line yet on McGee's difficulty. As the Denver Post notes, Karl summed up McGee's issues thusly:
"He's got to understand that lazy and crazy isn't going to make it work," Karl said. "We want solid and we want fundamental, and we want spectacular but only when it happens, not forcing the action where sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn't."
"Lazy and crazy" could sum up pretty much all of our lives in our twenties, but most of us weren't working under $44 million contracts. McGee earned the high expectations placed on him, but to date hasn't played like it. As the Post notes, of the 55 players earning $10 million or more per season, only 11 are coming off the bench, and only two (Golden State's Richard Jefferson and Detroit's Corey Maggette) are averaging fewer minutes than McGee.
There is hope, though, as teammate Andre Miller notes. "JaVale is starting to look and play the way we need him to play," he told the Post's Christopher Dempsey . "Not all the time, but we see glimpses of it. I think he'll make another step. There's less of those scratch-your-head moments and more of those 'now that's what I'm talking about' moments."
We'll miss McGee's scratch-your-head moments, but Denver probably won't.
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