Former NBA player J.R. Smith recently took a shot at his former head coach for dropping a 2009 playoff series to the eventual champion Los Angeles Lakers, but George Karl isn’t going down without a fight.
The Denver Nuggets lost to the Lakers in the Western Conference finals that year in six games, and Smith placed some of the blame on Karl.
Smith said a key reason for the loss was Karl’s inability to draw up out-of-bounds plays.
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“We didn’t have one out-of-bounds play my whole time playing for this man. If you go back to that Lakers series [in 2009], we lose on three out-of-bounds plays. Trevor Ariza steals all of them, and we lose,” Smith said on the “Old Man & the Three” podcast.
Karl took notice of Smith’s comments, and despite saying Smith was the “second-best athlete I coached,” he disagreed with Smith’s notion. In fact, the 72-year-old showed he can Twitter-spar with the best of them.
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“I’m sure JR was smoking weed when we practiced them but it’s 15 years ago so let’s just celebrate and move forward!” he tweeted Wednesday.
Smith was in his fifth NBA season and averaged 15.2 points, then a career-high, on 44.6% from the floor. In that series, he averaged 12.7 points on a 38.7% shooting despite scoring 24 in both Games 4 and 6.
The Lakers went on to defeat the Orlando Magic in five games to win their first title since 2002, and they went back-to-back by defeating the Boston Celtics in the NBA Finals the next year.
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