Is This It?
Denver's arduous season reaches a potential breaking point
I don’t have faith.
I don’t mean about Denver, but also about Denver. I mean, in anything. It has never been a strength of mine. I have conviction. I have passion. I have a strong desire to find the accurate truth. I have trust in those I choose to put close to me and unwavering dedication and loyalty. I have my strengths (and many more weaknesses), but faith is not one of them, I simply cannot find it within myself.
The most difficult thing about faith is that it, by definition, has to ignore and at times reject evidence. It is about the world unseen.
I will give fans a hard time for their desire to have arguments that spring from that faith, presented as evidence, and to mold the facts to fit the narrative they desire.
But the truth is that I think faith is incredible, be it in a divine being, the will of the universe, the underlying energy of the cosmos, or Nikola Jokic’s ability to make big basketball plays in the biggest moments. It’s such a powerful human element to find a reserve of belief that speaks to whatever we consider the soul.
This is a time for faith in this Nuggets’ team and this season.
All year long, I have tried to maintain an air of calm, to reassure that this is a really great team just going through a very long and complicated series of bad stretches.
I have urged Nuggets fans to keep the faith because teams this good don’t come around that often, and the payoff is worth it. There was so much evidence to justify and validate that faith, that this was truly a special team that just needed to get itself together again.
What has beaten that out of me is the cruelty of the season.
December was not a hard stretch. The games weren’t that dense, and the opponents weren’t that strong. And they did handle it, going 9-5, but the defense fell off a cliff, and then onto the rocks below, before being washed out to shore as a lifeless corpse.
January was brutal. Before the season, I identified December 1 through this week as the toughest part of the schedule. It was road-heavy and schedule-dense. The absolute worst time for the Nuggets to be short-handed was January. They missed four starters for pretty much the entirety of it.
And they conquered it! They went 10-6 without Jok in January. But the cost has been apparent. It took a toll on this team mentally and physically.
Now combine that with the initial Jokic rust for the first three weeks from his return1, cross-matched against a set of games where they played the Pistons, Knicks, Celtics, Thunder, and Wolves, and you have this, the nadir of the season.
All of this has led to the feeling that this just “isn’t the Nuggets’ year.”
Cam Johnson has not been the fit he should have been. I have more thoughts on that later.
Jonas Valanciunas has been pretty much what I expected, but his bad games stand out as very bad.
They’ve lost what has honestly been a baffling number of home games for the team with the best implicit homecourt advantage in the league.
But even more than these factors is the fact that it’s “always something.”
The defense was terrible in December. The defense has been great since the All-Star break, but the offense has struggled as if they can’t balance both ends appropriately.
They lead OKC to the end but have another clutch meltdown.
More often than not, if they start fast (like on Sunday), they fade quickly. If the bench plays well, the Jokic minutes are a minus, which almost always spells doom.
There are 50 different things which, if they were different, would completely change the look of the season, but all of them have happened in constant, concentric circles.
The injuries reduce their options, exacerbating bad lineups and creating mismatches they can’t account for, forcing rotations that exacerbate bad tendencies. The turnovers compromise the defense, which leads to going into set defenses offensively. The injuries took their toll on the role players, who now don’t have the energy to support Jokic when he’s swarmed.
It’s a big chain reaction of suck.
Denver is .500 since January 1st and below .500 since mid-December.
For as much hope — or faith— remains in this team, there is a real risk that this will go down as one of the most disappointing seasons in Nuggets history, and that’s saying something.
NO SAVIORS
Denver is 17-6 when Aaron Gordon plays. They are 20-18 when he does not.
AG and Watson are expected back by week’s end. It will lift the team’s spirits and their play. There are so many things AG helps with that will make a difference from the small rotations and defensive call-outs to the dunker spot play and playmaking out of split action.
However, the Nuggets should not fool themselves into believing Gordon (or Gordon and Watson) is a fix-all. It’s not fair to him, coming off multiple hamstring injuries, and it won’t result in anything but dragging his minutes down to where they’ve been.
The Nuggets have to play better and get the shoring up that Gordon provides along with the ceiling potential that Watson provides.
Gordon and Watson will help in so many ways, chief among them, in my mind, just having another player to lift you up. Cam has two horrible games in OKC? Maybe Watson hits three corner threes. Jamal struggles vs. the Wolves (until late)? Maybe Gordon helps win the minutes.
But Denver cannot rely on a savior. It wasn’t Jokic when he returned, and it can’t be AG when he does.
