Former coach George Karl recalls ‘chaos, misery, dysfunction’ in Kings organization
George Karl has had four years to reflect on what went wrong when his distinguished NBA coaching career imploded in Sacramento in the spring of 2016.
Karl and former Kings assistant coach Vance Walberg circled back to sort through the wreckage Thursday in a revealing episode of the “Truth + Basketball with George Karl” podcast. Karl, 69, unloaded on Kings owner Vivek Ranadive, general manager Vlade Divac and former star DeMarcus Cousins, saying the dysfunction he experienced over 14 months in Sacramento surpassed anything he had seen in 38 years of coaching.
“I’m sad that the end of my career ends in whatever you want to label it — chaos and misery,” said Karl, one of nine coaches to win 1,000 games in the NBA. “Don’t get me wrong. I can celebrate my career, but that’s not how I wanted to leave basketball.”
Co-host Brad Burns moderated a 73-minute discussion between Karl and Walberg, who spent parts of two seasons together in Sacramento. They talked about Karl’s stormy relationship with Cousins, a lack of support from ownership and the front office, and the day the Kings fired Walberg instead of Karl “to send a little message.” Near the end of the podcast, Burns asked if either coach had ever been in a more dysfunctional situation.
“Never,” Walberg said.
“Not even close,” Karl said.
The Kings did not respond Thursday when asked if they wished to respond to comments from Karl and Walberg.
‘Yelling and screaming’
Former Kings general manager Pete D’Alessandro hired Karl in February 2015 to replace Michael Malone, who was fired two months earlier despite sharing a bond with Cousins. D’Alessandro was soon replaced by Divac, who rejoined the organization in an advisory role in March 2015, just a month after Karl was hired.
“We were playing in San Antonio and I got a call from Vlade saying, ‘I’m going to be in San Antonio and I’d like to meet you,’” Karl said. “Vlade wasn’t the GM at the time. … I said, ‘No problem. I’ll have dinner with you,’ and then I hear he’s going to be with the organization, so I call Pete up.
“I yelled and screamed at Pete. I said, ‘Pete, we can’t work this way. … I have no problem with Vlade — I don’t know him very well — but you hire him without even talking to me? That scares the hell out of me. And so I’m yelling and screaming on the phone for like 15 minutes and I get done and Pete goes, ‘I didn’t know anything about it either.’ I said, ‘S---, that’s worse.’ So now all of a sudden you have a front office basically being run by your owner, and that happened within a month of being there.”
D’Alessandro was relieved of his duties that summer when Divac was promoted to vice president of basketball operations. Karl described Divac as a “good guy” who was in “over his head” in the early stages of his tenure as the team’s president and general manager.
“He’s the new guy on the block, and he was flooded, probably over his head a little bit, searching a little bit,” Karl said. “Good guy, trying to figure it out, but you throw an inexperienced guy into this chaos — it was very difficult to even see your way out, but as coaches our job is to try to figure it out every day, try to figure it out. We had our ideas, but unfortunately they never came to us and asked us our ideas.”
No input on personnel moves
The Kings went 11-19 under Karl to end the 2014-15 season, finishing 29-53 overall. They had not won 30 games since 2007-08, but Ranadive had high expectations for the 2015-16 season.
“I still remember when Vivek came in after the season and goes, ‘OK, I want to get 50 wins next year,” Walberg said. “… Now give me a plan on how to get to 50 wins.”
Karl and his staff sat down to discuss plans to overhaul the roster. Karl recalled how the Denver Nuggets transformed their roster when they traded Carmelo Anthony to the New York Knicks in February 2011, suggesting the Kings could do the same with Cousins. The Kings, after rejecting that idea during Karl’s tenure, ultimately traded Cousins 10 months after Karl was fired.
Karl and Walberg said their staff had no input on personnel moves.
“There has to be a unified mentality to the process, and we never got unified,” Karl said. “They’d pick players. They would make trades. We didn’t get our opinion heard. Don’t get me wrong, as a coach, I don’t expect to get everything I want. I know that’s impossible in the NBA, but to give a little bit to what our philosophies and fundamentals and desires are. We never even got considered. I mean scouts had more input than we did.”
Walberg said coaches were consulted more when he was an assistant under coach Brett Brown and general manager Sam Henke with the Philadelphia 76ers from 2013-15.
“When I was with Philly, as soon as the season was over, Sam Henke, every day I’d get to work when the season was over and there would be three to five boxes of film I had to watch for the draft,” Walberg said. “I was writing reports on these guys, meetings with scouts, assistant coaches. We’d have 20 people in that room. Sam would say, ‘What do you think about this guy? What do you think about that guy?’
“In Sacramento, they never asked us to watch one film on a guy. They never asked us for any of that stuff. And if you’re going to be a city like Sacramento, you better be able to develop people, you better have a heck of a culture and you better have a great scouting staff to where you can find some diamonds in the rough, and you cannot screw up on your draft picks.”
‘They always picked DeMarcus’
The Kings selected Cousins with the fifth pick in the 2010 NBA Draft. He would become a two-time All-NBA Second Team selection in those two seasons under Karl, but the two of them clashed from the start.
“DeMarcus is a hell of a talent, but he also has a negative energy,” Karl said.
Karl was known to have tumultuous relationships with some of his other star players, including former Seattle SuperSonics great Gary Payton. Karl said the dynamic with Cousins was different.
“Gary Payton and I fought over basketball, about schemes, about playing time, about who’s playing, why I did this,” Karl said. “And Gary’s a smart basketball guy, so you had to listen to him a little bit. DeMarcus seemed to be more about, ‘It’s not my fault. It’s gotta be the coach’s fault.’ He knew he could divide the organization from the coach and, unfortunately, if he knew that, the (other) players knew that.”
Cousins sent out his infamous “snake in the grass” tweet on June 22, 2015, amid rumors Karl wanted him traded after declaring no player was untradeable. Karl said he wasn’t referring to Cousins specifically.
“I didn’t make the comment about Boogie,” Karl said. “I made it about anybody. I would say that if I’m in Golden State. No one in my mind as a basketball coach is untradeable.”
Tensions mounted. Walberg said Cousins launched into a verbal assault on Karl when he entered the locker room following the eighth game of the 2015-16 season, a 106-88 loss to the San Antonio Spurs.
“Coach hasn’t even said a word yet and it’s just, ‘F--- you, coach. You think you’re a f------ Hall of Fame coach? All the hell you care about is your wins. You don’t give a s--- about us. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,’” Walberg said. “It went on for a good 35, 40, 45 seconds, maybe even a minute. Vlade’s in there. He hears it. He sees it. All the coaches are there. Corliss Williamson is trying to get DeMarcus to settle down a little bit but DeMarcus just went off.”
Walberg said “it was probably the saddest day in my 42 years of coaching basketball when I saw that.” Coaches wanted Cousins to be suspended.
“We met with the front office and they said we’re not going to do anything,” Walberg said. “I remember (assistant coach) John Welch saying … ‘The person you’re hurting the most is DeMarcus. DeMarcus needs this. He needs to know what his parameters are and so forth. You’re really letting DeMarcus down.’ At that point, (assistant coach) Chad (Iske) walked out that day and said, ‘We’re done. We have no chance of being here after this season.’”
Karl said every time the organization “had the opportunity to pick DeMarcus or me … they always picked DeMarcus.”
‘Vivek wants us to fire somebody’
Karl feared he would be fired during the 2016 All-Star break. He took his staff to lunch on an off day in Philadelphia to discuss that possibility.
“As we’re at the table, Vlade calls,” Karl said. “I look at my phone and I say, ‘F--- that. I’m not taking it.’ My coaches go, ‘No, no, take it, take it.’ So I pick it up.”
Karl said Divac told him he would be retained for the rest of the season. That turned out to be true, but when coaches returned from the All-Star break Walberg was summoned to a meeting with Divac, assistant general manager Peja Stojakovic and scouting director Mike Bratz.
“They go, ‘We’ve got to fire you,’” Walberg said. “I go, ‘You’ve got to fire me? What do you mean?’ They go, ‘Well, Vivek wants us to fire somebody to let coach know, to kind of send a little message to coach and so forth, so we picked you.’”
Walberg said he asked why Nancy Lieberman wasn’t being fired instead, saying she had “backstabbed” others in the organization. He did not elaborate.
Karl said he was upset when Walberg was fired, but in a way he envied him until his own firing two months later.
“It just tears you up inside and your heart and your stomach,” Karl said. “You don’t feel good about life, but after you think about it, Vance gets to go on vacation for two months and we had to go through 25 games of basketball purgatory.”
Karl was fired when the season ended in April. He was replaced by Dave Joerger, who was fired and replaced by Luke Walton in April 2019. The Kings have had five coaches in seven seasons since Ranadive purchased the team in 2013.
“I would think if Vivek has to look at himself, he has to say, ‘I’m the head of this. I’m the top man. I have to take some of the blame,’” Walberg said. “And I think he has a big part of the blame. If you’re going to hire people, you hire them and you let them do what they’re supposed to do.
“It’s going to take time. It’s going to take sweat equity. It’s going to take a lot of different things to get your organization where you want it to be and to be stable for years to come, and when you keep switching coaches and you don’t have what you need at the top, this is what happens.”
