Denver Nuggets: Winning Recipe Can’t Be Found
At the beginning of this season the Denver Nuggets and their fans looked at the roster with the hope fueled by an old and fond memory and thought – “Hey, we could make the playoffs.”
The roster looked healthy, deep, talented, and smart — all traits we fondly remember from the 2012-13 Nuggets that finished the season with 57 wins, threatened the 60-win Oklahoma City Thunder team for the division title, and looked poised to contend in the West for years to come.
More from Hoops Habit
- The 5 most dominant NBA players who never won a championship
- 7 Players the Miami Heat might replace Herro with by the trade deadline
- Meet Cooper Flagg: The best American prospect since LeBron James
- Are the Miami Heat laying the groundwork for their next super team?
- Sophomore Jump: 5 second-year NBA players bound to breakout
Well, the roster hasn’t lived up to its looks, and the 2014-15 Denver Nuggets aren’t going to finish with a winning record, threaten anybody for anything, and they look like a team poised to get dominated by the NBA’s Western Conference for the foreseeable future.
Following a two-point overtime loss to the Washington Wizards on Sunday, the team has now lost six straight games. They’re failing to beat the bad teams like the Boston Celtics (losing on Friday), they’re failing to beat good teams like the Wizards, they’re failing to win at home, they’re failing to win on the road.
They’re failing to find any combination for a winning formula, and look like cooks at McDonalds instead of chefs at a five-star restaurant.
Sure, the Nuggets roster doesn’t look like much compared against the Golden State Warriors, for example. However, they still have a stud point guard in Ty Lawson who’s averaging 10 assists a game; great two-way wings in Arron Afflalo and Wilson Chandler; size in Jusuf Nukic, Darrell Arthur and J.J. Hickson; and a talented bench with Randy Foye, Danilo Gallinari, and Jameer Nelson.
So, the roster certainly isn’t 43 points worse than the Golden State team that beat them by that amount on MLK day.
The Nuggets’ roster isn’t perfect, but it’s still talented, and that’s a sure sign the problems stem far more from chemistry and style of play than personnel.
Now that off the court issues like Ty Lawson’s DUI are an additional ingredient to the pot of problems like late turnovers, stagnate offense over whole quarters, and a failure to play help defense, the team currently looks gross.
That 2012-13 team we remember so fondly – now they had the winning formula down. They had no losing streaks of five games. That Nuggets team won 38 out of 41 home games, and won 38 of 52 games against Western Conference teams.
This year’s team? They already have two losing streaks of five games or more, they’ve already lost FOUR times as many home games as the 2012-13 team, and they’re just 11-15 against the West so far.
The funny thing is, however, neither team had a single player named to the All-Star team, proving once again, that it’s not the talent on this roster that is the problem.
Are Arron Afflalo, Alonzo Gee and Jameer Nelson that much of a downgrade from Andre Iguodala, Corey Brewer, and Andre Miller that the team went from a 60-win team to a 33-win team? No way. In fact, there’s a case that those three players are an upgrade!
No matter. In the transition to those players, the winning formula had to be changed, and the Nuggets’ window to find that formula has closed for this season. Denver now needs to focus on finding it for the upcoming seasons rather than trying to win continuously the rest of the season.
Yes, Brian Shaw, I know you’re worried about your job, but it’s in far more jeopardy if you have another season like this next year than if you continue to lose this season. It’s time to find how well the talented vets of Lawson and Kenneth Faried mix with the promising rookies of Nurkic, Erick Green and Gary Harris.
Only through experimentation will that secret recipe come to fruition, and only through experimentation can this roster get its ingredients in line to start six-game streaks that have a winning recipe rather than a losing one.