Denver Nuggets: Where Did It Go Wrong For Brian Shaw?
By Phil Watson
Brian Shaw was considered one of the brightest lights in the coaching ranks, a slam-dunk to be a successful head coach after six years as an assistant with the Los Angeles Lakers, where he won three rings as a player, and two seasons with the Indiana Pacers.
That came crashing down on Tuesday as he was fired as head coach of the the Denver Nuggets after less than two full seasons on the job.
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Two years ago, the Denver Nuggets were one of the feel-good stories of the NBA season.
Behind a balanced offensive attack that led the NBA at 106.1 points per game and a defense that held up well enough with wing defender extraordinaire Andre Iguodala and had solid rim protection with big men Kosta Koufos and JaVale McGee, the Nuggets won an NBA-franchise high 57 games. (Denver had seasons of 65 and 60 victories in their final two ABA campaigns in 1974-75 and 1975-76, respectively.)
The defense surrendered 105.1 points per 100 possessions, 11th-best in the NBA, while playing at the second-fastest pace in the league. They turned the Pepsi Center into a house of horrors for the opposition, racking up an NBA best 38-3 home record and earning the third seed in the Western Conference.
But the Nuggets were bounced in the first round for the ninth time in 10 seasons by the playoff-neophyte Golden State Warriors and the whole thing started to unravel.
Masai Ujiri, the general manager who engineered the Carmelo Anthony trade with the New York Knicks, bolted for the Toronto Raptors almost before the engraving was done on his NBA Executive of the Year trophy.
Less than a week later, George Karl could have used his new NBA Coach of the Year award to prop the door to his office open as he carried the boxes out after being fired.
That … escalated quickly.
Just like that, the Nuggets were rebuilding, at least in the front office and on the bench.
Tim Connelly was hired as Ujiri’s replacement and a little more than a week later, Shaw—long-rumored as the next big thing in coaching—was the Nuggets’ new head coach.
And everything that could go wrong, did.
Iguodala opted to sign with the Warriors, of all teams, and the Nuggets were part of a three-team sign-and-trade that left them nothing but Randy Foye, a pile of future draft picks and a gaping hole where their small forward used to be.
Then came the injuries.
Timofey Mozgov was the only Nugget to play in all 82 games last season. Point guard Ty Lawson missed 20 games with assorted ailments.
So did Wilson Chandler, the swingman looked upon to take up the slack for the departure of Iguodala and the absence of Danilo Gallinari, the smooth-shooting Italian forward who had torn up an ACL the year before and didn’t play at all in 2013-14.
If it ended there, that would have been bad enough.
But as they say on those horrible as-seen-on-TV commercials, but wait, there’s more!
McGee sustained a stress fracture to his leg and his season was done after five games and 79 minutes. Koufos had been traded to the Memphis Grizzlies for career backup Darrell Arthur and French prospect Joffrey Lauvergne, who wouldn’t arrive on the NBA scene until late last month.
That left the raw Mozgov and the undersized J.J. Hickson, signed as a free agent from the Portland Trail Blazers, to man the middle. At least until Hickson blew an ACL late in the season and missed the final 13 games.
Nate Robinson, who had been so instrumental in keeping the Chicago Bulls afloat without Derrick Rose available in 2012-13, blew his ACL and missed the final 38 games of the season.
Veteran backup point guard Andre Miller, beloved by Karl, found himself in Shaw’s doghouse and was eventually dealt to the Washington Wizards at the trade deadline.
Miller, incidentally, has been reunited with Karl in Sacramento.
The Nuggets went long stretches with Foye running the point. That didn’t end well. In fairness, even when more seasoned point guards such as Lawson, Miller, Robinson or Aaron Brooks were available, the Denver offense was more stop than start.
To say the team was slow to adjust to the system would be to say that New England has had a little bit of snow this winter—massive understatement.
The Nuggets still played at a fast pace—third-fastest in the league. But their offensive rating plummeted to 16th, the defense collapsed to 21st and the Nuggets lost more than six times as many games at home—19—as they had the previous season.
Shaw’s first entry was a 36-46 finish, approximately three light years out of the final playoff spot in the West.
But this season would be better, it was reasoned.
Lawson would be healthy. Gallinari and McGee would be back. Kenneth Faried would grow from the late-season push that earned him a spot on the gold-medal winning USA Basketball squad at the FIBA World Cup in Spain.
The return of Arron Afflalo, acquired in a trade from the Orlando Magic, would provide scoring punch and veteran leadership.
And then … wow.
The wheels came off quickly.
Denver got off to a 1-6 start, but recovered to get back to 9-8 after a win at Utah on Dec. 1.
As it turns out, that was the high-water mark for Shaw’s Nuggets this season.
A 5-11 December left the Nuggets at 13-19 as the New Year dawned. They opened 2015 with five wins in six games to get back to 18-20 … and then lost 13 of 14 and 19 of 21.
In between, Connelly started selling. He shipped Mozgov to the Cleveland Cavaliers for two first-round picks and later dumped McGee and his contract on the Philadelphia 76ers for a the equivalent of a year’s supply of naval lint (OK, the rights to Cenk Akyol and cash) and it cost a protected first-round pick for the privilege.
And there were reports that Shaw and Lawson were feuding … repeatedly, with Lawson skipping a practice after the All-Star break just to bring things to more of a head.
That leads us to Tuesday’s announcement that Shaw had been fired.
The end likely came when his players broke a huddle during a loss Friday night to the Utah Jazz—at home—by chanting “1-2-3 … six weeks!”
There are about six weeks left in the season.
Shaw tried to defend it, telling the press that it referred to their last home court win, which had come six weeks earlier.
“The comment that the players made when they got together and said ‘1, 2, 3, six weeks!’ was the players saying, ‘This is the end of the six weeks, we’re going to get a win tonight on our home court and break the six-week losing spell on our home court.’” Shaw said.
“Not six weeks that it’s the end of the season. Now, coincidentally it does happen to be a little over six weeks from then, that it’s the end of the season. But I think our players and the Denver Nuggets as a whole were misrepresented in how that was reported.”
The Nuggets are 20-39 this season and were 56-85 during Shaw’s tenure—one fewer win than they had in Karl’s final season.
The surprise was that the 48-year-old Shaw had so much trouble relating to players. He was one himself, at Saint Mary’s and UC Santa Barbara in college and in the NBA with seven teams over 15 years, with one year spent in Italy.
It was so bad that on a TNT broadcast of Denver’s 106-96 win over the Los Angeles Lakers on Feb. 10, sideline reporter Rachel Nichols said Shaw was looking for help in the library.
“Head coach Brian Shaw has acknowledged that he’s had some trouble communicating with his players and it’s gotten so bad that he told us he started reading some books on how to relate to millennials or Generation Y players, as he put it,” Nichols said, per Pro Basketball Talk. “Shaw said he’s been frustrated that these players seem to need more praise than in his day; that they’re easily distracted.
“He even tried taking their cell phones away from them an hour before game time, putting them in a box so they’ll concentrate on the film.”
OK, if you’re reading “How to connect to young whipper-snappers” books, the battle is already over and you lost.
Maybe what these players needed was an old, experienced hand to teach them how to be professionals, rather than some guy coming in and assuming they already did.
If the players weren’t paying attention in the film room, that speaks more to a culture that didn’t make the players understand why it was important. Some of that is on the players, sure, but it also speaks to a lack of leadership from the top.
Maybe what we’ve learned from the last season-plus is why so many teams passed on Brian Shaw when they had the opportunity to hire him.
Statistics via basketball-reference.com.
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