Denver Nuggets: It All Starts With Defense
It’s clear the Denver Nuggets are a complete mess and struggling daily following another loss to the New York Knicks on Sunday. The team has only won two of their first nine games, and the seven losses have been plain out uglyyyy.
After the 16-point loss to the also struggling Knicks, the Nuggets have to make some changes. In the second quarter they missed 15 straight field goals (so it’s somewhat shocking they only lost by 16), and they gave up 109 points to a Knicks team that is only averaging 93.9 points a game on the season. So, the offense and the defense look terrible, and that’s an unfortunate theme the Nuggets have shown this season.
Luckily, only nine games have been played and the Nuggets still have a shot to turn things around this season. It doesn’t look promising at the moment, because Denver is losing by an average of 13.7 points a game so far, but if they can find a way to get it together and improve, especially on the defensive end, they still have a chance to turn it around.
The Nuggets need to improve on their overall team defense the most. At least once in every game there has been a quarter where the opposing team looks unstoppable, and the Nuggets don’t have the star power to recover from those defensive breakdowns, even though they typically get close. If the team wants to fight their way back to .500 in the West, it starts by fixing the fact that they’re giving up 108.2 points a game on average.
Only two teams allow more points per game than the Denver Nuggets so far this season, but giving up 108.2 points a night is especially detrimental to this Nuggets team. When other teams are scoring that many, it means they’re shooting a high percentage, and when teams are making that many shots the Nuggets are failing to run the break.
When the Nuggets fail to run the break, they struggle offensively and lose games. For example, in the Nuggets’ 21 point win against the Indiana Pacers last Friday, the Nuggets held the Pacers to 40.5 percent shooting and only 87 points. In the Knicks game, those numbers skyrocketed to 53.9 percent and 109 points. No wonder they won the Indiana game.
Overall, the Nuggets are allowing teams to shoot 46.3 percent from the floor, and it’s killing them. That accounts for the eighth worst opponent shooting percentage in the league. The issue comes to light when comparing the wins against the losses. The Nuggets allowed their opponents to shoot only 38.7 percent in their two wins. In the losses? That percentage shoots up by a whopping 1o PERCENT, and opposing teams shoot 48.7 percent.
Allowing opposing NBA teams to shoot so efficiently is a sure fire way to lose a lot of games in this league. Now that the Nuggets are starting to figure things out offensively, with Ty Lawson averaging eight assists a game (fifth best in the league) and Arron Afflalo hitting 57 percent of his three-point attempts in the last two games, the burden lies on Brian Shaw and the team to get their defensive act together.
If they can do it, we’ll see more games like the Pacers game, and if they can’t…. I hate to say it… But get ready for a long season of losing, Nuggets fans.