In a word: everything. The Nuggets sit at 1-6 on the season, and it really has seemed worse than that. They’ve suffered huge losses both at home and on the road, and coach Brian Shaw has benched his entire starting lineup more times already than most teams do in an entire season. Let’s break down exactly what has gone wrong for the Denver Nuggets.
Bad, Bad Defense
If you have watched any of the Nuggets’ games this season, you will have noticed a few recurring themes. One of them is the fact that Denver does not seem to know how to play defense. Currently they are 29th in the league in points allowed at 111.1, and most recently gave up 130 points to the Portland Trail Blazers (including 84 in the first half). That figure was a whopping one point below their previous season high for points allowed. Sacramento scored 130 against Denver last week in yet another embarrassing defensive “performance.”
There are consistent rotation breakdowns that lead to open threes, and it seems that any ball screen will wreak havoc on the defense. Combine that with their lack of turnover generation, and it all adds up to Denver being the second worst defensive team in the NBA.
Inconsistent Rotations
Perhaps this is a function of overall poor play by the starters and team in general, but the Nuggets do not have a set rotation. Out of 14 players on the active roster, 13 have averaged over 10 minutes per game, and the substitution patterns are inconsistent at best. Kenneth Faried was supposed to be a breakout star for the Nuggets, but Brian Shaw refuses to play him more than he did last year, or even the year before that. Timofey Mozgov, Jusuf Nurkic, and JaVale McGee have all rotated in and out of the frontcourt, and as a result none have been effective. There is no cohesion offensively or defensively, and that is a function of not establishing a rhythm among the players.
To this point, the starting lineup has not produced effectively or efficiently, and when they do not play well they get a quick hook. The second unit has not been much better, with Danilo Gallinari and Nate Robinson returning from injury slowly. Shaw’s best move might be setting a hard rotation and leaving some of the bench players on the outside unless they prove to be significantly better than the guy in front of them. Otherwise, this will remain a messy situation.
Poor Shooting
The Nuggets may be 14th in the league in scoring, but don’t let that statistic fool you. A significant amount of those points have been scored in garbage time, with the game’s outcome already decided and both teams simply playing out the remainder of the game. Denver is shooting 30% from three point range, good for 4th worst in the league, and 41.7% from the field overall, good for 2nd worst in the league. Yikes. The lack of outside shooting has clogged up the interior, and the offense has sputtered. At the same time, the ball simply is not moving. Denver is 28th in the league in assists per game, averaging only 19.9. It is hard to rack up assists when the team is not scoring, but better passing and ball movement usually leads to more made shots as well. This vicious cycle has left the Nuggets at the bottom of the league in offensive efficiency.
Combine all of these problems and you have a 1-6 team floundering in a loaded western conference. For a team that had serious ambitions and started out with an emphatic win over the Detroit Pistons, things certainly turned south quickly. Serious changes have to be made for Denver to even regain some edge of competitiveness. Otherwise, it seems unlikely that this team will look the same for the rest of the season.