Denver Nuggets: Finally Playing Nuggets Basketball
The Denver Nuggets first winning streak of the season has arrived after the team beat the Oklahoma City Thunder on Wednesday night! Even though it’s only a two-game winning steak, and the first streak should have been 10 games ago, the last four games have been encouraging for this year’s Nuggets.
The Nuggets have won three of their last four games, and two of those wins came on the road.
They didn’t exactly beat the NBA’s elite with wins over the Indiana Pacers and Oklahoma City Thunder, but the team held their opponents to less than 100 points on average over the last four games and they look about a million times better than the Nuggets who lost to that same Thunder team just 18 days ago.
Denver got their first flagship win of the season against the Cleveland Cavaliers (106-97) to start the two-game winning streak on Monday, and the team finally looks like they are ready to play and win some games this season after maintaining the momentum to beat the Thunder by seven (their largest lead was 14 at the end of the third quarter).
Guards Arron Afflalo and Ty Lawson emerged as the teams go to offensive players, and now that Brian Shaw‘s rotation isn’t all over the place, the Nuggets have a real chance of stringing a real winning streak together.
The fuel to the transitions appears to have come from the fact that Ty Lawson got sick of the losing. In the best four game streak of the season this past week, the Nuggets best player is averaging 16.75 points and 11.5 assists a game.
He’s been dictating the whole offense though burning by defenders into the paint, using screen after screen, and finding the open shooter, and it’s been working. Brian Shaw’s realized it as well, as Lawson averaged only 33.75 minutes a game in the first four games this season, but is averaging 38 minutes a game in the last three.
The last three games would have all been wins behind Lawson’s increased minutes as well if it wasn’t for a bad second quarter against the New York Knicks on Sunday at Madison Square Garden. In that lousy second quarter, the Nuggets looked like the Nuggets from game four, and missed their first 15 shots.
It led to the Knicks getting easy buckets off the rebounds and the Nuggets lost the game that would have given them a four game winning streak 109-93.
Without that terrible quarter the Nuggets are averaging 27.1 points a quarter over their last four games, and that’s with Kenneth Faried only putting up 11 points a game.
To compliment the scoring barrage nicely, opponents are only averaging 42.8 percent from the floor in the last four games, a far cry from the 46 percent they’ve allowed opponents to shoot on the season.
The result of the difference in Ty Lawson, the rotation, and the better defenese means we’ve seen a more accurate picture of the Nuggets than the first seven games entailed. If the Nuggets can continue that combination the ugly beginning of this season will be a distant memory.
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