Weekly Countdown: Karl, Nuggets adjust to doing more with less

5 steps that revived the Denver Nuggets ...

After losing in the first round of the playoffs in four straight years, George Karl has tried to coach his Denver Nuggets from a more defensive viewpoint this season. AP Ian Thomsen's Mailbag Ian Thomsen will periodically answer questions from SI.com users in his mailbag. Name: Email: Hometown: Question: SEND

... and rejuvenated George Karl, who has become a Coach of the Year candidate for steering his team away from its widely forecast place in the lottery and into contention for home-court advantage in the playoffs.

5. Go back to basics. Over the previous two seasons in Denver, Karl had focused on developing a passing-game offense aimed at creating gaps to attack the basket. He won't try making that a priority again. "I learned a lot, it was a good experiment, I'm glad I survived it," Karl said. "But there's no question I'm better when I coach the game from the defensive end of the court. My staff is more comfortable when I coach from the defensive end of the court, and deep down inside most players have a trust in that end of the court."

When his Nuggets lost in the first round last season for the fourth successive year -- having won three playoff games in that span -- Karl and his longtime assistant Tim Grgurich agreed on a new way forward: Return to the old system, based on the aggressive trapping defense that dates back to his long run of success with Gary Payton in Seattle.

"I remember the next two or three days [after the playoffs]. We said, 'We've got to go back to the old way,' '' Karl said. "There's too much freedom and openness to coaching offense. The discipline and the toughness and the soul of the game come from the defensive end of the court most of the time."

Karl understands why people say he didn't appear to be plugged in over the last couple of years: He was thinking his way through the game instead of reacting to it.

"So much of coaching is the trust and passion that the team feels from you, and if you're faking that over a 100 games a year, they find that out," Karl said. "I'm not sure I was faking it, but the last couple of years I was confused. When a problem came up, I didn't know how to address it based on my experiences. Now I think I'm back to feeling much more comfortable on how to attack a weakness that we've developed or a situation that has arisen."

4. Embrace discipline. An era of financial restraint was ushered in when owner Stan Kroenke supported the controversial decision last summer to dump Marcus Camby's salary to the Clippers for no asset in return. Kroenke wanted to stop paying the luxury tax on a team that wasn't succeeding in the playoffs.

"It should be said that [when we heard about] Stan and his edict that we've got to get under the tax and that we're not going to sign anybody except minimum contracts -- it pissed us off," Karl said. "But it also unified the organization: This is what we are, babe. This is what we are, and we can bitch about it or we can make it happen. We've always had the problem of not being unified. In a strange way, when we got under the tax this year, everybody was kind of like, Hey, we did it, and we're still kicking ass. So there was a unification of a business philosophy that rallied the troops."

So often in the NBA the best teams are those with financial discipline. As the Spurs and Pistons have shown, tight payrolls often result in championships. The Nuggets have succeeded by relying on minimum-salary signees Chris Andersen, Dahntay Jones and Anthony Carter, as well as Renaldo Balkman, who is still playing on his rookie contract.

The demoralizing nature of the Camby trade forced Karl, Grgurich and the other coaches to reach out to the players.

"We were at Grg's camp [in Las Vegas] the first week in August and he said, 'Not only do we have to go back to the defense, but we've got to go back to touching our players and telling these guys that we can still win,' " Karl said. "Because the cloud in Denver was, We're done. No one thought we could win. Everybody predicted the doom."

Each of the assistant coaches reached out to players over the summer.

"I went to Nenê the second week in August, I had dinner with him and his fiancee," Karl said. "He said some hard things to me, I said some hard things to him. Nenê has never been a guy who went to the gym until he had to. I would say within a week [of that dinner], he was in the gym five days a week from August on.

"Grg went to Dallas -- I think twice in that time -- to talk with Kenyon [Martin], and he talked about how we can't have the nonsense that we've had. And Kenyon bought into that. In our first team meeting, Kenyon stood up and said, 'I have been a problem, but I'm not going to be a problem anymore.' "

Both Nenê and Martin have had resurgent seasons. Nenê is averaging career highs of 14.6 points and 7.8 rebounds while shooting 60.3 percent, and Martin is playing his most minutes since the 2004-05 season.

3. Call it like you see it. "In the NBA we do not coach enough," Karl said. "We manage. We attitude-adjust, we call the league office, we talk to agents.

"I tell Pop [Spurs coach Gregg Popovich] all the time, 'Pop, you coach different than we coach. You have a no-nonsense, low-maintenance superstar.' How many of them exist? When you have a disciplinary problem with Melo [Carmelo Anthony] and you have an injury here and you have a dysfunctional personality on your team, that's not coaching; that's managing. The more that we have to manage what I call the de-energizers of basketball -- selfishness, non-commitment, not playing hard, attitudes in the locker room -- you're not coaching."

Though he recently had to suspend Anthony for refusing to come out of a game, Karl says his relationship with his 24-year-old star is stronger than it has been in prior seasons.

"Melo and I are now at the stage where I can talk to him about everything," Karl said. "Sometimes I do it with [the help of] Chauncey [Billups], and there are still the sensitive areas of shot selection and selfishness and commitment to defense, where sometimes it's easier to be with an assistant or do it through a video. But I would say Melo and I are at the stage now that whatever the headache is, even when he's [angry] he can bring it to me, and when I'm [angry] I can bring it to him. Before we always kind of walked around, holding back."

Karl admits he isn't perfect, and that he needs as much help as his team can manage to give him.

"In my career I've won 60 percent of my games," he said. "In a game, if I'm coaching 70 percent right, I'm doing pretty good. But if you want to magnify the 30 percent that I'm doing wrong, you can make me out to be an awful coach -- if you want to. After a game I can sit down and tell you three or four [decisions] I would do differently, and then I watch the film and I'll get three or four more. But adjusting and still being able to win the game is the thing, and no one gives respect when you push the right buttons with momentum: 'Well, you're supposed to do that.'

"I try to tell the team, 'You've lost six or seven road games in the fourth quarter. Some of that's my fault.' And then that's where I blame them because of their ego problems, and I say, 'You piss me off because you take my time where I think I could be really good and you [mess] it up, and now I've got to worry about who likes who. This is madness. You think I'm happy about not coming up with a trick play or a cute substitution or a rotation that will help you win one of those games? Instead I've got to worry about Melo, you're not coming out of the game. You think that keeps my focus on being really good at the end of the game? It doesn't.

"I went to Chauncey and Melo in a couple of instances [this season] and said, 'You've got to take this off my plate. You've got to police this team. You've got to take responsibility.

"People don't comprehend, it's like having a family of 12 people. Your 5-year old might not be talking to your 8-year old, and your 9-year-old threw a punch at your 12-year-old. That's what you have in NBA basketball. And then you've got to talk about confidence. OK, L.K. [Linas Kleiza] right now is in a [shooting] slump. How do you get him out of that slump? What's the touch? Is it playing him more? Is it taking him out of the lineup, starting him, ignoring him, showing him more video? You don't know which one it is, and it's a psychological analysis [based on] your experiences. Well, you know, I remember when Sam Perkins was in a slump, this is what I would do. L.K.'s a little bit like Sam, so maybe it will work.

"It has nothing to do with genius. It is experience, and sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't."