Category Archives: Nuggets/NBA

April 30, 2012

Against the Lakers, Nuggets need a Plan B

By Dave Krieger

On the bright side, the Nuggets were the only professional basketball team — in fact, the only professional sports team — to be mentioned at Saturday night’s White House Correspondents’ dinner in Washington.

Jimmy Kimmel, the evening’s entertainment, noted the one-year anniversary of the secret mission to get Osama bin Laden, then speculated who might be next:

“Right now, Navy SEAL Team six is outside the Kardashian compound in Beverly Hills disguised as the Denver Nuggets so they can sneak in undetected,” he said. It was not his biggest laugh line of the night.

Anonymous as they may be to fashionable Angelinos such as Kimmel, the Nuggets, alas, were detected all too readily when they arrived at the Staples Center, just down the road from Beverly Hills, on Sunday afternoon to begin their first-round playoff series. The Lakers were ready and waiting. They blocked an astonishing fifteen of Denver’s ninety shots, including a playoff record-tying ten by center Andrew Bynum. Even the final score, 103-88, understated the Lakers’ dominance. Bynum finished with a triple double (ten points, ten blocks, thirteen rebounds) and his fellow seven-footer, forward Pau Gasol, was two rebounds and two assists short of matching the feat.

The Nuggets do two things extremely well, and the Lakers were ready for both of them. They run and they get to the rim. On Sunday, when they ran they found the Lakers waiting for them. And when they got to the rim, their shot attempts were swatted away with annoying regularity.

“We’ve got to adjust a little bit for the second game,” said Nuggets forward Danilo Gallinari, who led the visitors with nineteen points. “We’ve got to change something.”

If this sounds familiar, it should. The Nuggets are now facing approximately the same problem they face almost every year at this time: The tactics that work so well for them during the regular season, outrunning and outscoring opponents, suddenly stop working. Given time to prepare, their playoff opponents emphasize getting back on defense and limiting the Nuggets’ opportunities to play in the open court. After leading the league in scoring at 104.1 points per game this season, the Nuggets were held to sixteen points below their average in Game 1.

They also permitted the Lakers to make half their shots, meaning they were taking the ball out of the basket half the time, which is not a good way to start the fast break. Point guard Ty Lawson, their leading scorer during the regular season with an average of 16.4 points per game, had just seven.

A week ago, when coach George Karl appeared on the Dave Logan Show, I asked him about the Lakers as a potential playoff opponent.

“The Lakers give everybody in the West a different matchup than every other team,” Karl said then. “They’re big. They play a power game, they play an inside game, which is so unusual in our game today, with Bynum and Gasol and Kobe (Bryant) on the perimeter. That would be a fun challenge. It would make us probably a better basketball team if we played the Lakers and figured out how to beat them because our big guys have come a long way this year, but giving them the test to beat the Lakers in the playoffs would be a tremendous final exam.”

It’s a good thing Game 1 didn’t determine the final grade.

The Nuggets are one of the few teams in the NBA capable of matching up with the Lakers’ size. They have three seven-footers of their own in Kosta Koufos, JaVale McGee and Timofey Mozgov. The problem is the Nuggets’ big men are not anywhere near as skilled as Bynum and Gasol. Sunday, Karl didn’t even try to match the Lakers’ size. The three Nuggets seven-footers played a combined thirty-seven minutes. Bynum and Gasol played seventy.

Rookie Kenneth Faried, listed generously at 6-8, got the lion’s share of Denver’s minutes at power forward, meaning the Nuggets looked very small against L.A.’s twin towers. Lakers coach Mike Brown deployed basically a zone defense down low, with Bynum retreating to the paint whether the player he was nominally guarding was there or not. Karl claimed he should have been called for about thirty illegal defenses. In theory, defensive three seconds should be called when a defender is in the paint at least that long without actually guarding anyone. In practice, it’s seldom called more than once or twice a game.

Informed afterward that Karl had made the complaint, Bryant smirked. “Of course he did,” he said.

“We’ve got to find a way to score the ball before (Bynum) gets to the paint because once he gets to the paint, he’s a big presence inside,” Gallinari said.

There is a tendency after the first game of a playoff series to believe that absent major changes in strategy, every game will go the way that one did, which is seldom the case. Lawson is bound to play better than he did Sunday, and the Lakers’ role players — Jordan Hill, Steve Blake, Devin Ebanks and Ramon Sessions — are unlikely to play as well.

Still, the Nuggets would do well not to serve up their shots to Bynum on a silver tray the way they did Sunday. If the Lakers’ center continues to frustrate their efforts to get to the rim, they’ll need a Plan B. Their shooters are not good enough to win the series from long distance. Generally, the best way to neutralize a shot-blocker is to go right at his chest, getting him into foul trouble, or drive toward him and and kick the ball to open teammates.

“I’m not going to criticize my team, but the start was disappointing,” said Karl, whose squad was outscored by thirteen points in the first quarter and by only two the rest of the way. “The start was too NBA regular season-oriented and not NBA playoff-oriented. We were kind of in cruise control trying to pick and choose, figure out what we’re going to do instead of just going at people. I thought we gave them seven, eight minutes of basketball where we weren’t aggressive and assertive. But there’s a lot of guys that haven’t been out there before, haven’t played a lot of playoff games.”

The second-youngest team in the postseason tournament, maybe the Nuggets will grow into the series. Maybe their young big men will give the Lakers’ bigs more competition. Maybe Lawson will rediscover the elusiveness that frustrated NBA defenses for much of the regular season.

This much we learned from Game 1: If the Nuggets hope to make the series competitive, they will have to do a better job of avoiding the Lakers’ goaltender.

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April 8, 2012

Will this be the year both of Denver’s winter teams miss the playoffs?

By Dave Krieger

In the sixteen winter sports seasons since the Avalanche arrived in Colorado from Quebec, Denver has never been shut out of the playoffs in both of its major league winter sports.

In five of those seasons, both the Nuggets and Avs made it. In eight others, from 1996 through 2003, the Avs made the playoffs and the Nuggets did not. In the other three — 2007, 2009 and 2011 — the Nuggets made it and the Avs did not.

In short, with the Avalanche having missed the NHL playoffs this season for the fourth time in six years and the Nuggets facing a daunting final ten games in their battle to make the NBA postseason, there’s a chance Denver could see no spring playoffs for the first time since it acquired teams in all four major league sports.

Even after Saturday night’s flat performance at Golden State, where they lost by fifteen, the Nuggets remain in the eight-team Western Conference playoff bracket, seeded eighth going into today’s games with a record of 30-26. Houston and Dallas, in sixth and seventh, are a half game ahead of them. Phoenix and Utah, seeded ninth and tenth, are one game behind them.

The Nuggets are 7-10 this season against the teams remaining on their schedule. Chris Sheridan, who covered the NBA for years with the Associated Press and now runs his own website, ranked them eighteenth in his weekly power rankings today, tenth in the West, and had this to say about their playoff hopes:

“Went a decent 4-5 in stretch of playing eight of nine on road, but the “5” included losses to Raptors, Hornets and Warriors. Last 10 are half on the road, half at home. Pair of “must-wins” to start week, home against Golden State and Minnesota. If they lose one of those two, I think they’re missing the playoffs. Rest of schedule is too tough.”

Asked about his team’s prospects, coach George Karl had this to say: “If we put 37 or 38 wins on the board and someone beats us out, I think we can at least look in the mirror and say we’ve done our job. It is crazy, and I’m not going to predict what’s going to happen.”

The Nuggets would have to go 7-3 or 8-2 over the final ten to put 37 or 38 wins on the board. Considering they are 5-5 over their last ten and 11-9 over the last twenty, that would be a significant improvement down the stretch.

Danilo Gallinari, considered their best player by many of their fans, has missed 23 of the past 31 games with injuries, the most recent a broken left thumb that kept him out of the past ten. He’s expected back for the final stretch. The team is 11-12 without him this season, 19-14 with him.

Here’s the remaining schedule, with the Nuggets’ record against the opponent this season in parenthesis:

April 9: v. Golden State (0-2)

April 11: v. Minnesota (1-1)

April 13: at L.A. Lakers (1-2)

April 15: v. Houston (1-1)

April 16: at Houston (1-1)

April 18: v. L.A. Clippers (1-2)

April 21: at Phoenix (2-0)

April 22: v. Orlando (1-0)

April 25: at Oklahoma City (0-2)

April 26: at Minnesota (1-1)

If the Nuggets come up short, it will be the first time during the Kroenke ownership era that both of the family’s Denver major league teams miss the playoffs. It’s also likely to increase the criticism that E. Stanley Kroenke now cares more about his St. Louis football team and English soccer team than his Denver holdings.

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March 2, 2012

Fifty years ago today, Wilt dropped 100 on a different world

By Dave Krieger

“Imagine,” Sports Illustrated mused, “Wilt Chamberlain scoring his NBA record 100 points today, in the Twitter age.”

It doesn’t take much imagination to visualize the breathless, contemporaneous tweets from Philadelphia Warriors beat writers as the total mounts. Instant photos from their iPhones. Trending hashtags like #bigdipper and #thestilt. Appearances later in the week on Letterman and Jimmy Kimmel.

But on March 2, 1962, there was no television coverage of the Knicks-Warriors game in Hershey, Pa., and hence, no sepia-toned video footage to replay today. Just 4,124 fans were in attendance. Legendary Philadelphia public relations man Harvey Pollack scrawled “100” on a piece of paper and had Chamberlain hold it up for the still photographer who made the iconic image that survives.

When Jeremy Lin put up 38 against the Lakers last month, he became the talk of the nation. His image graced consecutive SI covers. Wilt’s 100-point game, an individual scoring record that still stands half a century later, got four sentences in the magazine’s “For the Record” column.

Lin was the talk of ESPN. There was no such thing as a 24-hour sports television network in Wilt’s day.

“When you take on history, nothing is more important than context,” explained Gary Pomerantz, author of WILT, 1962. “So when we consider the NBA in 1962, we have to put away our notions of today’s game, with the glamor and the glitz and the exploding lights, and see it for what it was.

“At that time, it was hardly even a national basketball association. There were only nine teams, only one west of St. Louis, and that was the Los Angeles Lakers, who had moved out there a year earlier. So it was a league in search of itself. The old joke was that NBA crowds were so small that before the game, the P.A. announcers would announce the players in the starting lineup and then they would introduce each fan: ‘There’s Paul from Hershey and Sam from Harrisburg!'”

Wilt today would be a phenomenon celebrated in a never-ending stream of video highlights the way Shaquille O’Neal was years later — as Gulliver among the Lilliputians.

“He is aesthetically and athletically just superior to everyone else out there,” Pomerantz said. “He’s 25 years old and he’s 7-foot-1 and 260 pounds and he’s lean. He’s got a massive back that slopes down to a 31-inch waist and he’s running the floor like a train. I interviewed a lot of guys who played against him in that early stage in his career and they spoke of him with this hushed reverence. It was almost as if, I would imagine, you were to interview the native Americans out on the plains about the first sighting of the locomotive. He was that unprecedented.”

Chamberlain had as many haters as admirers in those days. “Nobody roots for Goliath,” he often said. Critics pointed out that for all the scoring, his two NBA championships rings paled in comparison to rival Bill Russell’s eleven.

“I think some of it is a discrimination, and by that I don’t refer entirely to race,” Pomerantz said. “I’m referring to his height. If you go back and read what the leading lights of the sports media were writing at that time, they were calling him a pituitary goon and a circus freak. He enters a feet-on-the-floor game and transforms it. He takes it vertical above the rim and makes it his.

“In that 100-point game, there’s one foot dragging in the old days, and that’s with the set shooters and so forth who are still in the game, and one foot lunging into the modern day. That’s a more athletically luminous type of game, faster and higher, and that foot was Wilt’s.

“He was always the favorite. You don’t look at him and think underdog. He was bigger, stronger and faster than everyone. It’s kind of like those Rocky movies. Not many people are rooting for Apollo Creed. So this was Wilt’s cross to bear. He and Russell had some fantastic battles. In fact, this season ended for Wilt all too typically — in Game 7 of the NBA conference finals losing to Russell on a controversial shot that Sam Jones made with just a few seconds to play.

“In this year when Wilt averages 50 points a game and throws down the 100-point thunderbolt in Hershey, Russell was named the MVP. Think about that.”

Chamberlain’s numbers from that 1961-62 season are inconceivable today. He averaged 48.5 minutes a game. NBA games are 48 minutes long. The Warriors played ten overtime contests that year. In addition to his 50.4 points per game on 50.6 percent shooting, he averaged 25.7 rebounds a game. Of the top ten single-game scoring totals in NBA history, Chamberlain authored six.

The box score from Hershey shows he made 36 of 63 shots from the floor in the Warriors’ 169-147 victory. For a 51 percent career free-throw shooter, his most amazing accomplishment was hitting 28 of 32 foul shots.

“That’s the real miracle of Hershey, of course,” Pomerantz said. “Wilt was a terrible free throw shooter. He was kind of the pre-modern day Shaq. And years later, when there was talk that he was going to fight Muhammad Ali, Wilt’s father pulled him aside and said, ‘Wilt, don’t you think you might be a little better served practicing free throws?’

“But this was the year he shot them underhanded. So it’s his least athletic-looking move on the court, where he’s putting the ball between his legs, he’s dipping down low, his knees flare out wide. He kind of looks like an adult trying to sit in a kindergartner’s chair. But it worked. Eighty-seven percent, and he never replicated that, unless it was in his dreams.”

Today’s sports world would have reverberated for weeks. Fifty years ago, basketball fans got a couple of lines in the paper the next morning, maybe a box score if they were lucky. Chamberlain, who died in 1999 at age 63, drove Knicks forward Willie Naulls back to New York after the game and celebrated in his Harlem nightclub, Big Wilt’s Smalls Paradise.

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February 29, 2012

A modest proposal to save the slam-dunk contest

By Dave Krieger

“America,” Charles Barkley intoned Saturday night, just before the NBA slam dunk contest began, “got a better chance of knowing who Dwyane Wade’s kid is.”

He was referring to this year’s slam dunk contestants, the most anonymous ever assembled for an event that . . . how to put this kindly . . . is well past its prime.

We know something about this. The slam dunk contest was invented in Denver, by former Nuggets general manager Carl Scheer. It was inaugurated in Denver at halftime of the final all-star game of the old American Basketball Association, in 1976.

Julius Erving, then playing for the New York Nets, edged David “Skywalker” Thompson of the Nuggets. Watching high-flying dunks was still novel back then. The dunk had just become a legal play in college basketball. When the ABA merged with the NBA later that year, Scheer’s innovation was lost in the tradition-bound older league.

Eight years later, in search of a little buzz for its own mid-season exhibition, the NBA brought its all-star weekend to Denver for the first time and added a dunk contest to spice it up. Dr. J reprised his soaring throw-down from the free-throw line, but Larry Nance won.

In the early years of the NBA version, many of the game’s biggest stars took part. Dominique Wilkins, The Human Highlight Film, won twice, in 1985 and 1990. Michael Jordan took back-to-back dunk titles in 1987 and ’88.

Spud Webb, at 5-foot-7, beat Dominique, his Atlanta teammate, in Dallas in 1986, providing both the appeal of the underdog and the thrill of the upset. Alas, the contest has rarely had either since.

Props were rare in those days. Gerald Wilkins, Dominique’s brother, jumped over a folding chair. That was about it.

By the late ’90s, the thrill was gone. Pretty much every way to dunk a basketball had been tried. Star players quit taking part. The league finally shut it down. There was no slam-dunk contest in 1998 or ’99. They brought it back in 2000 and got a brief bump from Vinsanity, named for Vince Carter, which preceded this year’s Linsanity, named for Jeremy Lin. Pretty much everything comes back around if you wait long enough.

Last year, there was at least one report that the contest was rigged for rookie-of-the-year Blake Griffin, who jumped over the hood of a car he endorses on the side. The contest was veering dangerously toward a cheap imitation of Cirque du Soleil.

This year it sank lower still. The contestants were Chase Budinger of Houston, Jeremy Evans of Utah, Paul George of Indiana and Derrick Williams of Minnesota. If you could pick any of these people out of a lineup, have a Cheez Doodle.

None has been in the league more than three years. Three of the four average fewer than 10 points per game. Evans, declared the winner in a fan vote (this year’s innovation), averages 1.7 points a game for the Jazz.

Introducing one of them, announcer Kevin Harlan began, “Not a lot of people know about him . . . “

Replied Barkley: “You can say that again.”

Having run out of new dunks, they jumped over players, motorcycles and, in one case, a short comedian. They are not only out of compelling contestants, they are out of ideas.

LeBron James suggests a $1 million prize to encourage marquee stars to participate again, a tacit admission that only bribery can breathe life back into this thing.

I have another idea. Some of the most compelling contests have been won by the shortest dunkers. There’s no thrill in watching tall guys dunk. Of course they can. Webb’s win was mesmerizing and 5-foot-9 Nate Robinson proved that short human trick could be duplicated, triplicated and quadruplicated when he won in 2006, 2009 and 2010, becoming the first three-time dunk champion.

Watching little guys dunk is fun. Watching tall guys dunk is boring. So make it a 6-foot and under contest. Because the NBA measures players with their shoes on, adjust it to a 6-2 and under contest, which would still leave it a 6-foot and under contest in real life.

Fifty-one players on current NBA rosters would have been eligible this year, including Rajon Rondo of the Celtics, Kemba Walker of the Bobcats, Jason Terry of the Mavericks, Ty Lawson of the Nuggets, Nate Robinson of the Warriors, Chris Paul and Mo Williams of the Clippers, Brandon Jennings of the Bucks, Jimmer Fredette of the Kings and Tony Parker of the Spurs. Here’s the full list:

Avery Bradley, 6-2, Boston

Rajon Rondo, 6-1, Boston

Jannero Pargo, 6-1, Atlanta

Jeff Teague, 6-2, Atlanta

D.J. Augustin, 6-0, Charlotte

Kemba Walker, 6-1, Charlotte

John Lucas, 5-11, Chicago

C.J. Watson, 6-2, Chicago

Daniel Gibson, 6-2, Cleveland

Rodrigue Beaubois, 6-2, Dallas

Jason Terry, 6-2, Dallas

Ty Lawson, 5-11, Denver

Andre Miller, 6-2, Denver

Will Bynum, 6-0, Detroit

Walker Russell Jr., 6-0, Detroit

Nate Robinson, 5-9, Golden State

Jonny Flynn, 6-0, Houston

Kyle Lowry, 6-0, Houston

Darren Collison, 6-0, Indiana

George Hill, 6-2, Indiana

A.J. Price, 6-2, Indiana

Eric Bledsoe, 6-1, L.A. Clippers

Chris Paul, 6-0, L.A. Clippers

Mo Williams, 6-1, L.A. Clippers

Derek Fisher, 6-1, L.A. Lakers

Mike Conley, 6-1, Memphis

Jeremy Pargo, 6-2, Memphis

Josh Selby, 6-2, Memphis

Mario Chalmers, 6-2, Miami

Norris Cole, 6-2, Miami

Brandon Jennings, 6-1, Milwaukee

J.J. Barea, 6-0, Minnesota

Luke Ridnour, 6-2, Minnesota

Jordan Farmar, 6-2, New Jersey

Sundiata Gaines, 6-1, New Jersey

Mike Bibby, 6-2, New York

Toney Douglas, 6-2, New York

Chris Duhon, 6-1, Orlando

Jameer Nelson, 6-0, Orlando

Ishmael Smith, 6-0, Orlando

Louis Williams, 6-1, Philadelphia

Ronnie Price, 6-2, Phoenix

Sebastian Telfair, 6-0, Phoenix

Raymond Felton, 6-1, Portland

Nolan Smith, 6-2, Portland

Jimmer Fredette, 6-2, Sacramento

Isaiah Thomas, 5-9, Sacramento

T.J. Ford, 6-0, San Antonio

Tony Parker, 6-2, San Antonio

Anthony Carter, 6-1, Toronto

Earl Watson, 6-1, Utah

That’s a lot of potential contestants. And if enough of these guys aren’t willing, embarrass them by showing this video of Webb dunking at age 47. Now, that’s entertainment.

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February 18, 2012

Nuggets in survival mode

By Dave Krieger

If you watched the Nuggets during the first 19 games of their lockout-compressed NBA schedule, you saw a deep, relentless, energetic team perpetually in attack mode. They went 14-5, were among the top seeds in the West and led the association in scoring.

If you’ve watched them since, you’ve seen a lethargic version of that team, lately trying to compensate for the loss of leading scorer Danilo Gallinari to a high ankle sprain that could keep him out a month (he was injured Feb. 6 in a home loss to Houston). They are 3-9 since Jan. 29 and have fallen to the bottom of the Western Conference playoff bracket.

Although they remain one of three NBA teams averaging at least 100 points a game, they are also one of only five surrendering at least 100. The other four teams in the latter category — Sacramento, Golden State, Charlotte and Washington — have a combined record of 32-86.

“I hate excuses,” coach George Karl said on the Dave Logan Show. “You don’t coach excuses. You coach how your team is playing and you work hard through it. But when you communicate with your players, you’ve got to be realistic. There are some things out there that are having an effect, not only on our team but every team in the NBA.”

In particular, Karl said he saw a change in his team earlier this month after it played three games in three cities in three nights, normally a scheduling no-no but permitted this season because of the compressed schedule that followed a long labor dispute.

“I’ve seen our team since those three games in three days, there’s been a reciprocal kind of backlash,” Karl said of the games in Los Angeles on Feb. 2, Denver on Feb. 3 and Portland on Feb. 4.

“Some nights we have it and some nights we don’t have it. The injuries have shrunk our skill set so the running game and the attack game, we’re still leading the league in attacking teams’ defenses, but we’re not having that talent of power that wears teams out. We’re not wearing teams out as much as we did earlier in the season, and I’m hoping it’s just because of injuries. I mean, we’re missing almost 85, 90 minutes of the game from our starting lineups and we’re trying to fill that in with guys that are playing hard and trying.”

Gallinari, the starting small forward, has missed the past six games. Starting center Timofey Mozgov missed seven in a row before returning for a one-point loss in Memphis on Friday night. Starting power forward Nene has missed the last three.

Karl’s trio of veteran bench players — Andre Miller, Al Harrington and Rudy Fernandez — has played well together, so he has looked farther down his bench for injury replacements to his starting lineup. The result has sometimes been a starting group that is not competitive early in games. Starting shooting guard Arron Afflalo carries a team-worst plus/minus rating of minus 68. Three of the team’s top four plus/minus ratings come from the bench — Miller (plus 144), Harrington (plus 88) and Fernandez (plus 83). The fourth is Gallo at plus 107.

This presents a couple of dilemmas for Karl. One is whether he should continue bringing Miller off the bench. The Nuggets’ top eight five-man groups in plus/minus include the veteran point guard. In part that’s because the Nuggets’ bench is better than most of its counterparts, but the stats also show that five of the team’s top eight groupings include both Miller and starting point guard Ty Lawson.

The second, related dilemma is whether Karl should break up the bench crew to help the starting lineup. For the time being, he is compromising, leaving Miller with the second group but moving one of his three key bench scorers into the starting lineup.

“What we talked about is maybe we’ve got to put Al in the game with Ty a little bit more often and let Andre have the second unit and try to find some shots and scoring without Al,” Karl said.

In Memphis on Friday night, he moved Harrington into the starting lineup in Nene’s place. Harrington didn’t get much done, but another bench player, Corey Brewer, scored a game-high 26, all of them in the second half, starting for Gallo.

Another option is to increase the minutes of the team’s rookies, who haven’t played enough to have the tired legs some of their veteran teammates are showing. First-round draft pick Kenneth Faried came off the bench for 25 minutes in Memphis and responded with 18 points and 10 rebounds.

“I don’t deny that I’ve had the thought of trying to expand maybe one or two guys going into a game after three games in four nights or something like that,” Karl said. “Maybe instead of going with nine guys, try to maybe go with 10 or 11 guys. But you know what’s kind of funny about it is two guys that don’t look energized are two guys that from a standpoint of performance I think have done a great job with us, and that’s Andre and Al. They’re our oldest guys, and now Bird (Chris Andersen) has come back and played very well and he’s one of our older guys, too.

“It’s kind of trying to balance that out because we’re still in a good place from the standpoint of record and schedule. I think we’ve got to stay positive on trying to get a good seed in the playoffs, that our goal is to win as many games as possible and not maybe experiment too much to where you lose a game because of your experimentation.”

One option that has pretty much disappeared is practice. You remember practice. It used to be how teams solved problems and tightened up — particularly on defense — during the season.

“Practice is becoming an obsolete piece of the league right now,” Karl said. “There’s just no way, with the energy . . . . Practice has now become kind of drill stations and maintenance stations for your younger players.”

So Karl is left to hope the injury bug will pass and the Nuggets will be able to bring their aggression in waves again before they fall too far behind in the standings.

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February 1, 2012

Do the Nuggets need a closer?

By Dave Krieger

Last weekend, on the heels of a six-game winning streak, the Nuggets were riding high. Their record of 14-5 was second-best in the NBA’s Western Conference. So it seemed like a good time to ask coach George Karl if his team was really as good as it looked.

“I reminded the players of the six-game winning streak, which was great, because five of them were on the road, it’s fantastic, but there was only one winning team in there,” Karl pointed out. “And 16 of our next 18 are against winning teams. So we will know a lot more come March 1st than we know right now.”

Since then, Karl’s team is 0-2, having lost close games to pretty good teams — the L.A. Clippers and Memphis Grizzlies (the Clippers were 10-6 when they met the Nuggets; the Grizzlies 10-10). In both cases, the Nuggets had a chance to win at the end. In both cases, they couldn’t find anyone to make a big shot when they needed it.

This, of course, is the flip side to the Nuggets’ depth. As many of their opponents have pointed out, their second team is nearly as good as their first. Sometimes, it’s better. But spreading the scoring around the way they do, it’s not at all clear who they want to take the last shot in a close game.

Already, Karl has been asked the question often enough that he finds it annoying. Unfortunately, that doesn’t make it any less legitimate: Do the Nuggets need a closer?

“I think it’s a process that you just have to develop,” Karl said when I asked him about it after the loss to the Clippers, in which the leading scorer was Chauncey Billups, also known as Mr. Big Shot, whom the Nuggets traded away a year ago.

“I think we’re going to rely a great deal upon how we play, and how we play is we make stops, try to run, play before (the defense) sets up. Then, as the game goes on, figure out the matchup that you like. In Philadelphia, it was Andre (Miller). In Washington, the pick and roll game gave Al (Harrington) a lot of good looks. Hopefully, Nene and Ty (Lawson) will jump into some of that responsibility along the way.

“I’m not as fearful of that as people are making out to be because I think you win games with other things as much as you do going to a closer or a go-to guy. But if they want to put that on our heads right now, most close games this year, we’ve won. Tonight we didn’t.”

Tuesday night, after the overtime loss in Memphis, Karl was even less tolerant of the question, pointing out all the things the Nuggets could have done earlier in the game to prevent it from coming down to those final shots.

But this begs the question. Lots of NBA games, particularly between good teams, do come down to the end. As the Nuggets learned when they had Carmelo Anthony, a star scorer can slow down your offense by constantly playing one-on-one. He can render it predictable and easy to defend. But as Melo demonstrated at the end of regulation against the Nuggets in New York two weeks ago, that go-to guy can also step up and make a big shot when you have to have it.

“You just don’t pinpoint somebody,” said Billups, who might be the Nuggets’ closer now if he hadn’t been traded to New York with Melo. “Somebody’s got to do it time and time again and earn that right. It’s tough not to have that. Playing late and playing good teams, it’s always going to come down to end-of-game situations. So somebody may emerge as that, but you’ve just got to kind of let it play out.”

The Nuggets have numerous candidates:

Danilo Gallinari is their leading scorer at 17.4 points per game, but he’s only 23 and prone to inconsistency. He’s shooting just under 30 percent from long distance this year and just under 45 percent overall.

Ty Lawson is their second-leading scorer at 15.5 per, but he’s only 24 and also the starting point guard, where he sometimes finds himself caught between being a scorer and being a playmaker.

Al Harrington is a veteran scorer off the bench who has had an excellent start to the season, but he’s more accustomed to being a complementary player than a leading man.

Ditto for Rudy Fernandez, the Spanish sharpshooter and playmaker the Nuggets obtained from Dallas before the season began.

Arron Afflalo got a big new contract to be the Nuggets’ starting shooting guard, but he’s shooting less than 43 percent from the floor.

Nene, their highest-paid player, is a versatile inside scorer, but getting the ball inside in crunch time can be a challenge, as the Nuggets demonstrated against the Clippers.

Andre Miller is a reliable veteran and capable scorer, but he’s generally a pass-first playmaker.

Statistically, their best three-point shooter so far has been Corey Brewer, an athletic swingman known more for his defense, but it’s a small sample size: 12 for 26.

At the end against the Clippers, Nene was tricked into committing an alleged offensive foul and Fernandez and Harrington missed shots. Against the Grizzlies, Miller missed at the end of regulation with a chance to win and Fernandez missed at the end of overtime with a chance to tie.

As much as Karl dislikes the question, chances are he’s going to keep hearing it until the Nuggets win a few games against good teams by making big shots down the stretch. Coming off two close losses, they’re looking at consecutive games against the Clippers, Lakers and Blazers to close out the week.

Having a deep bench is a valuable luxury in the NBA, particularly this season, with games packed closer together because of the lockout. But however you get there, lots of games come down to the final minutes.

Early in games, the Nuggets share the ball beautifully in a fast-paced offense that produces open looks for many different players. Late in games, when defenses and offenses alike tend to tighten up, the Nuggets have struggled lately to replicate that free-flowing style.

Sooner or later, they will have to find somebody willing to take and able to make the big shot if they intend to be serious contenders.

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January 30, 2012

For Chauncey Billups, it’s all good again

By Dave Krieger

Chauncey Billups’ return home was everything he hoped — and maybe one veteran move more.

When he was introduced as a member of the visiting Los Angeles Clippers’ starting lineup Sunday night, the full house at the Pepsi Center gave him a standing ovation. Even Tim Tebow showed up to watch, sitting courtside.

(During a timeout, Rocky, the Nuggets’ mascot, got Tebow to sign a football. Then he punted it into the stands. Rocky, not Tebow. Let’s just say Britton Colquitt has nothing to worry about.)

Billups is no longer bitter about the trade that uprooted him from his family and home town 11 months ago, but he did have a little something to say about it, pouring in a game-high 32 points, flushing six of 12 three-pointers and drawing a foul in the final 18 seconds that would have been funny if it hadn’t been so damaging to the Nuggets.

The result — a victory for his new team over his old one and happy goodbyes to the 30 family and friends he estimated were on hand.

“Everybody knows how I feel about Denver and these fans and the people here,” he said in the visitors’ locker room afterward. “It feels good to get that reciprocated and know that they feel the same way about you.”

Billups has come to terms with once again being a pawn in the NBA’s byzantine player movement rules, but he wasn’t so sanguine when he got thrown into the Nuggets’ Melodrama and shipped to New York with Carmelo Anthony even though, unlike Melo, he had no interest in leaving.

“I was just frustrated having to be caught up in that,” he said. “It really wasn’t my fight, although I had to go down. So that was frustrating, knowing that it’s going to be what it’s going to be but not because of anything I did. I’ve accomplished a lot in my career and I’ve done a lot. Being thrown into deals is for some people that haven’t accomplished what I’ve accomplished. So that was the frustration that I had from it, but it is what it is.”

I asked if it occurred to him it was the second time his hometown team threw him into a trade for salary cap purposes, a previous Nuggets regime having thrown him into the Ron Mercer trade to Orlando 12 years ago.

“Did it occur to me?” he asked incredulously. “Of course, man! Of course. It sucks, you know what I’m saying? But it’s kind of how this business goes. But everybody’s all good now. The Nuggets are good, I’m good. Everything happens how it’s supposed to.”

That wasn’t the last indignity of 2011. When the lockout ended, the Knicks released Billups under an amnesty provision that allowed them to wipe his $14 million salary off their payroll, leaving enough room under the salary cap to acquire center Tyson Chandler.

In a particularly demeaning feature of the amnesty provision, teams putting in waiver claims had to bid the salary they were willing to pay — that is, the part of the guaranteed $14 million they would take off the Knicks’ hands. The Clippers won the auction with a bid reportedly just over $2 million.

Billups lobbied publicly for teams not to claim him so he could become a free agent and choose a destination himself.

“If I get claimed by a team I don’t want to play for, I would absolutely consider retirement,” he told ESPN in early December. “The game’s been really good to me and I don’t want anyone to feel bad for me. I’ve made a lot of money and I’ve saved most of it. I don’t need the money now. I want to be able to play for something, a championship, and I want to be able to have my own destiny in my hands. If I don’t, then retiring might be a decision I make.”

Undaunted, the Clippers claimed him off waivers. Their second-year coach, Vinny Del Negro, went about trying to sell Billups on joining an improving young team that had last season’s rookie of the year, Blake Griffin, and was in the process of trading for four-time all-star Chris Paul.

“I talked to Chauncey a lot about it,” Del Negro said. “I just told him how I work and how we do things and the outside perception of the organization is not the actual thing that goes on inside our practice facility and inside our organization. I told him, ‘Once you get a feel for it, I think you’ll respect that.’

“I just told him honestly what I thought he could bring and I think it just took him a little bit of time to kind of realize that those weren’t just words, it was actually the fact. He’s such a pro and he knows how valuable he is to our team. After he got acclimated to everything going on, I think he’s in a good place now and we need him to play well and he knows that. And he’s going to be a big part of our continued growth and hopefully our success this year.”

He certainly was Sunday.

“I think we saw Chauncey do a similar thing to Detroit when we went back to Detroit,” Nuggets coach George Karl said afterward, referring to Billups’ way of reminding former employers that he remembers their letting him go. “When he gets in that zone . . . .”

So the conversations with Del Negro helped change Billups’ mind about retirement.

“He empathized with me a little bit and felt bad about the position that I was in because guys like myself don’t deserve to be in those positions,” Billups said. “He just told me how it really was. Like, how he coaches, what’s expected, what it’s going to be, how he thinks myself and Chris can play together and be effective. And it’s been good.”

At 35, Billups is no longer thinking about retirement. He’s back to wanting to play as long as he’s able to have nights like Sunday, his 42nd career game of 30 or more points.

“I feel like I’ve got some good years left in me,” he said. “As long as I can stay healthy and can be effective out there, I’ll keep going, man. I’ll keep going.”

With 18 seconds left in Sunday night’s game and the Clippers clinging to a two-point lead, the Nuggets fed the ball to Nene near the paint. Because of a defensive switch, the 6-foot-3-inch Billups found himself guarding the 6-11 Brazilian power forward. He tried to front Nene to prevent him from getting the ball. There was a little contact. Billups went flying, as if he’d been shot. A referee dutifully called Nene for an offensive foul. Karl went ballistic.

“We knew we was switching and I figured at some point I’d probably be on him,” Billups explained. “They wanted to exploit the mismatch, which they went to, Nene versus me. I was just kind of fronting him and as soon as he grabbed me and pushed me, I’m gone.”

“He must have hit you really hard,” I said.

“Yeah,” Billups said, not quite able to suppress a smile. “I mean, my back is hurting, everything. I need a chiropractor, man.”

The Clippers are Billups’ eighth NBA team if you count the Nuggets only once but also count the Magic, for which he never played a game. Thursday, when the Clippers and Nuggets play a rematch in L.A., will be his 1,000th career game. He and the Nuggets’ Andre Miller, who will hit the milestone in the same game assuming both play the intervening games this week, will become the 107th and 108th players in NBA history to do so.

“It’s crazy,” Billups said. “When I was growing up, I just wished that I played one NBA game and had that jersey and take a picture of it so I could just tell people I played in the NBA. That’s the blessing that I’ve had. One thousand. Hopefully, I make it there. One thousand. Unbelievable. It’s humbling, man.”

Both times they traded him, the Nuggets had their reasons. Mostly financial, both times. But whenever people start railing about the lack of loyalty in the modern pro athlete, think about Chauncey Billups. Denver has not produced a better basketball player. He wanted to be here. The hometown team sent him away not once, but twice. It was just business.

The Clippers are now 11-6, in first place in the NBA’s Pacific Division. The king of Park Hill may get the last laugh yet.

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