Former NBA and Duke basketball player Dahntay Jones played for coach George Karl on the Denver Nuggets and says the former North Carolina basketball star didn’t trust Blue Devils to play in crunch time.
“George Karl, he’d play me the first six minutes of the first, the first six minutes of the third, and it could get tricky for me, I’m not going to play no fourth quarters because George wouldn’t play a Duke guy in the fourth quarter,” Jones said on Podcast P with Paul George Presented by Wave Sports + Entertainment. “He told me that to my face. Like you went to Duke, I’m UNC, I don’t really mess with y'all but you're my favorite, but you’re not going to play no fourth for me.”
Karl was an All-ACC point guard for the North Carolina basketball team under Dean Smith in the early 1970s. While his pro playing career was short-lived, the former Tar Heel became a Hall of Fame head coach, with 1,175 NBA wins under his belt, the sixth-most in NBA history.
The Dahntay Jones story about George Karl not liking Duke basketball players isn’t the first time this has come up.
In 2016, former Dukie Seth Curry told Adrian Wojnarowski that when he played for Karl on the Sacramento Kings in the 2015-16 season, the coach would take shots at the Blue Devils “every single day,” which made for a “tough time” for Curry.
Despite the rocky relationship between Karl and Jones, the former Duke player had one of the better seasons of his career with under the North Carolina-loving coach. He played 79 games and started 71 — by far the most in a single season of his career — while playing his third-most total minutes.
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