What is more important?
A. Another 7th-10th pick in the draft? (Keep in mind our success rate is hanging right around the Mendoza line)
B. New Coach to immediately get started in righting the ship for next season.
I vote for the latter, we really can't afford to burn another year of DMCs contract.
Just to give a viewpoint from the (would be clearly unpopular) side A...
This season is almost certainly already lost, even with Karl coming in tonight. It is true that Karl has turned around two franchises midseason, but the '91-'92 Sonics were .500 at the time and only 40 games into the season. They got to .573, but would have made the playoffs at .524. Karl took over the 17-25 Nuggets in '04-'05 42 games into the season, and led them to a ridiculous .800 mark the rest of the way to get them into the playoff at .598 (would have been in at .549).
We're even deeper into the season (47 games) and even deeper in the hole (17-30) than the Nuggets were. And if we were to go on an .800 tear for the rest of the season - a miracle even for George Karl - we would end up at .549 but currently we'd need to get to .560 to get in (and the Thunder are making their expected charge which could raise the bar). The point being that even George Karl with his penchant for turning teams around would seem very, very unlikely to save this season now.
But what George Karl would do, almost certainly, is he would cost us our draft pick (as has been assumed above in Scenario B). We would be looking at only a 1-2% chance of keeping our pick (by jumping into the top three). Right now, we're looking at something more like a 4-15% chance of jumping into the top three, and if not, still keeping the pick. The top three in this draft (figure Okafor, Russell, Mudiay) would turn this franchise around, especially with a coach like Karl coming in during the offseason - and we'd have a fighting chance for that to happen at 4-15%. Even if not, it looks like a player like Willie Cauley-Stein (our dream defensive player) might be right in our wheelhouse about 7-8. And there are other interesting names in a draft that's very, very deep.
This season is already lost. Cousins is stuck here for three years. If we hire Karl (who has the history of turning around a team immediately) in the offseason, we start next year already good, we have three years to soothe Cousins, and we can do it with one additional (potential star) player on the cheap for four years. If we hire Karl now Cousins will be happier sooner, but Karl will have less to work with to get our roster into shape for a championship run.
It's a tough call. It's the difference between getting a head start (with a coach who is known to not need one) or picking up an asset that might be really huge. I have a hard time arguing against the asset. It's a long-term view. And no, I don't buy the idea that waiting until the offseason to hire Karl would permanently burn our bridges with Cousins. If I did, I'd toss that draft pick away. But I don't.