$260M worth Carmelo Anthony and Ray Allen are two of George Karl‘s biggest failures

Ray Allen and Carmelo Anthony are two of the game’s best players who could have achieved much more than they actually did.

They came into the league 7-years apart in two of the NBA’s all-time great Drafts of 1996 and 2003 respectively. Apart from that, they have just two other things in common – both of them are NBA’s greatest 75 players of all time, and they played under Head Coach George Karl, but on separate occasions.

Their legacy in the game is entirely different as well. While Ray helped his teams to several postseasons, winning two championships and getting knocked out in the first round just twice in his career, Melo’s teams got past the first round just twice in his 13 postseasons.

Despite one of them being arguably the second-best shooter in basketball’s history and the other, of the most prolific scorers of all time, their former coach believes both the legends are his biggest failures.

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George Karl considers $100M Ray Allen and $160M Carmelo Anthony his biggest failures

Karl is one of basketball’s greatest ever coaches who never won a championship. NBA’s youngest ever coach was the Seattle Supersonics’ sole proprietor when the Milwaukee Bucks drafted Ray as the 5th overall pick in 1996.

The 1995-96 season had ended with the Gary Payton-led Sonics losing to Michael Jordan’s Bulls in the NBA Finals. So, George must have had his eyes set to make Seattle champions within the next few seasons.

But, they wouldn’t even make it to the Playoffs in the next two years, leading to Karl’s firing from the HC role in 1998. That sent him to Allen’s Bucks where the shooting guard had already become a 20 PPG player in his second season in the league.

He failed to capitalise on his potential, despite making it to three straight post-seasons from 1999 to 2001. Two of those were first-round exits, leading Allen to join Karl’s previous team, the Supersonics.

A similar thing happened when he got another young superstar in the next job at Denver. The man just couldn’t make much of Anthony’s six seasons under him while the 10x All-Star was averaging over 26 PPG. And yet, his teams failed to make it past the first round in all (6) but one season.

The soon-to-be Hall of Famer accepted his regret recently.

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Seeing the similarity in both cases, it was indeed Karl’s failure to get the best out of those teams.