Denver Nuggets: Team Regresses On 3-Game Trip
Denver Nuggets head coach Brian Shaw said that he wanted this team to go undefeated on the three-game road trip the Nuggets just finished in Tornoto. After getting outscored 15.6 points a game on average on the trip, the Nuggets fell short of their goal … by three games.
This certainly wasn’t the trip the coach or the team had in mind after a close loss to Portland one week ago.
After the three losses in Washington, Atlanta and Monday night in Toronto, the Nuggets are back to four games under .500, on a four-game losing streak, and looking a lot more like the team that started 1-7 than the team that rallied and went 8-2 to end the month of November.
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So, we’re here. Our Denver Nuggets are 9-12 through the first 21 games of the 2014-15 season. Considering how it started it could be much worse, but we’ve also seen a side of this team that says they should be at least better than .500.
The losing three-game road trip raised some serious concerns about this team, and it definitely was a sign of regression for the team, even though the Wizards, Hawks, and Raptors currently represent some of the Eastern Conference’s best.
Against the Raptors in Toronto Monday night, the Nuggets held their own. They were up 102-99 with less than a minute left and the team looked to be in great shape on the road.
Then the team failed to play defense on a Patrick Peterson three-pointer, and the Nuggets ran out of gas in overtime on the second leg of a back-to-back. The loss exposed a couple of concerns of the team.
First, that the team is struggling to close out close games down the stretch. After the Peterson three, the Nuggets failed to even get a shot up to try and win the game in the final seconds.
The game also taught us that Brian Shaw is still struggling with lineups as he played every starter except J.J. Hickson 44 minutes or more (Ty Lawson & Timofey Mozgov had 49, Chandler had 47, and Afflalo had 44) on a back-to-back. No wonder they ran out of gas in overtime.
The Nuggets never had the gas to run out of in the first two games, bringing us another reason to be nervous about the teams long term prospects. In the losses against Atlanta and Washington the team looked flat from the start.
The Nuggets were down by more than 20 points at halftime IN BOTH games, and coming out looking like game doesn’t matter too much can be a death sentence for a Western Conference team that can’t afford to take games off.
The three-game trip also showed us the Nuggets can’t afford to lose Wilson Chandler. The Nuggets single bright spot in the past three games was IllWill straight dominating, and looking like the starting forward the team will need to make a playoff push.
The small forward from DePaul put up 22.3 points and 7.0 rebounds a game in the road trip, all while shooting an efficient 43.9 percent shooting.
Now the Nuggets just need to find the team they appeared to leave in Denver last week to join Chandler. The playoffs are still doable if they can get back to .500 quickly (without regressing this time), but 21 games into the season, time is running shorter and shorter on the Nuggets.
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