Tag Archives: George Karl

May 11, 2012

Lakers play the blame game

By Dave Krieger

It’s in the nature of athletes to cover for one another. From the earliest age, they are taught it’s one of the obligations that comes with being a member of a team.

But after consecutive losses to the Nuggets turned a comfortable series lead in the first round of the NBA playoffs into a loser-go-home Game 7 on Saturday, the Lakers decided playing nice isn’t working. Their two leading spokesmen, coach Mike Brown and star Kobe Bryant, laid the blame squarely at the feet of Andrew Bynum and Pau Gasol.

Exhausted after a day spent fighting both gastroenteritis and the Nuggets, Bryant said the Lakers’ big men would need a new “mind state” for the club to advance.

“Kobe, being dehydrated and all that, and sick as a dog, coming out and trying to will us to a win, it’s disappointing to watch him give that type of effort, trying on both ends of the floor, getting on the floor after loose balls, and we don’t get it from everybody,” Brown said late Thursday night, after the Nuggets blew out the Lakers in Game 6, 113-96.

“Our second- and third-best players are Drew and Pau, and the reality of it is both those guys have got to play better in order for us to win. We’re going to have a tough time winning if we get the same type of production, not just offensively, but on the defensive end of the floor, too. For the first time, we were really, really bad with our pick-and-roll coverage. (The Nuggets) got what they wanted.

“Especially in the third quarter, we maybe did the pick-and-roll coverage correctly eight percent of the time, if that. We’ve got to do a better job. It has to matter for us. We’re going to have to work harder. And we’re going to have to want to get the job done to protect your teammates. If we get the same type of effort, it’s going to be a long night for us on Saturday.”

Asked if he agreed with Brown’s assessment of the Lakers’ big men, Bryant didn’t mince words.

“Of course I agree with that,” he said. “I talked with Pau a little bit after the game. I’ll speak with Andrew as well. It’s one of those things where psychologically you have to put yourself in a predicament, in a position, where you have no other option but to perform. You have to emotionally put yourself with your back against the wall and kind of trick yourself, so to speak, to feel that there’s no other option but to perform and to battle.

“When you put yourself in that mindset, your performance shines through and your talent shines through. It doesn’t matter what the defense does, it doesn’t matter if you get fouled; it doesn’t matter because you’re emotionally at a level that is above that. That’s the mind state that they have to put themselves in.”

This may be the best articulation I’ve heard of Bryant’s competitive mindset, and why he is generally so dismissive of questions about the defensive effort against him, as he was when I asked him about Danilo Gallinari’s length after Game 3.

Bynum’s statistics in Game 6 weren’t awful — eleven points, sixteen rebounds, four blocked shots, three assists, no turnovers. Gasol’s were — three points on one-for-ten shooting, three rebounds, one block, one assist and one steal in twenty-nine minutes. But Brown emphasized he was talking mostly about aspects of the game that are not measured by the stats.

“Their bigs in transition are just beating our bigs down the floor, and our bigs aren’t running hard enough to stay with them,” the Lakers coach said. “In the beginning of the series, they were. They were running with them and you could see there was a sense of urgency to get back.

“They’ve been getting beat down the floor and so our guards are helping out with their bigs at the rim. And then, while our guards are helping out with their bigs at the rim, their guards are trailing and getting open threes and our bigs aren’t helping our guards. So it’s like a snowball effect.

“We showed two clips at halftime where Pau stayed in the paint not guarding anybody and somebody was guarding his man because he was one of the last guys down the floor, and Andre Miller hits a wide-open three. Same with Drew, he’s supposed to be guarding Gallinari because Steve Blake picked up his guy at the rim, and Gallinari hits a wide-open three. That’s just one of the things that we’re not getting from our bigs. So our bigs are going to have to step up. They’re going to have to produce, and not just points-wise; on both ends of the floor.”

Bryant, who said his hotel room “resembled a scene from The Exorcist” after a day of doing battle with his digestive system, agreed Bynum and Gasol let down their teammates, but also pointed out such playoff stumbles aren’t unprecedented.

“We let each other down, for sure,” he said. “We didn’t step up and meet their energy. (Bynum and Gasol) know that and I expect them to come out in Game 7 and play with a sense of urgency and a sense of desperation that wasn’t there the last two games.

“I can speak from experience that I’ve been in series in our first championship run, 2000, where we wind up going to five games, at the time the first round was five games, against a Sacramento team. We got pushed to the brink against Houston in our championship runs. So these sorts of things do happen. In 2008, we met a Boston team in the Finals that got pushed to a Game 7 against an up-and-coming, young Atlanta team. So these sorts of things do happen. And you just have to respond.”

Bryant also said he’s looking forward to getting back teammate Ron Artest — a.k.a. Metta World Peace — in Game 7. Artest’s suspension for elbowing Oklahoma City’s James Harden ended with Game 6.

“I expect him to come out and play with the tenacity that he’s known for,” Bryant said. “He’s the one guy that I can rely on, night in and night out, to compete and play hard and play with that sense of urgency and play with no fear. So I look forward to having that by my side again.”

Nuggets coach George Karl expects all these fighting words to have a predictable effect in L.A.

“The Lakers, I have no doubt they’re going to come out with the best game they’ve played all series,” he said. “We’ve just got to be better.”

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May 7, 2012

The Nuggets’ playoff paradox

By Dave Krieger

Danilo Gallinari was lying on the floor when the Lakers took the lead for good in Game 4 of their first-round playoff series with the Nuggets.

Depending on whom you believe, he had either just been stunned by a blow to his throat delivered by Pau Gasol’s shoulder — “I felt, like, a click, and, I don’t know, I just touched it a little bit and I felt it click back,” Gallo said afterward, waving two fingers over his Adam’s apple — or he was trying to buy a foul call by overreacting to a hard but legal screen.

The referees apparently thought it was the latter because no foul was called, which left the Nuggets in a tough spot — four players defending five in the final minute of a tie game. Normally, when one of your own goes down on a basketball court and there’s no call, you’re supposed to foul to stop the action. The Nuggets didn’t. Moments later, Lakers guard Ramon Sessions hit an open three-pointer to give them an 89-86 lead with forty-eight seconds remaining.

The Nuggets never got closer. The play may end up the turning point in the series. With the game tied at 86, the Nuggets had a chance to even the series at two games apiece. When they lost, it gave the Lakers a prohibitive lead of three games to one. The Nuggets have trailed a playoff series by that margin ten previous times and never come back to win it.

“He’s a big guy, man,” Lakers guard Kobe Bryant said of the six foot, ten-inch Gallinari. “He can’t flop like that on the screen-and-roll. Pau is not necessarily the strongest guy in the world.”

On the game telecast, analyst Steve Kerr suggested Gallinari did not get the benefit of the call from the referees because European players have a reputation for acting.

“It was just a tough pick,” Gallinari said. “You’ve got to expect that in the playoffs. So myself, I’ve got to be more ready in those situations to get those hits and still be able to play defense. Unfortunately, they had a big shot out of that play. So it was a tough one. We’ve got to rest now and think about Game 5.”

The temptation to blame Gallinari for the outcome should be resisted, however, for two reasons.

First, without him the Nuggets wouldn’t even have been in the game. He was Denver’s best player in Game 4, leading them with twenty points despite being the only player on either side to get into foul trouble.

Second, in the last sixteen playoff games in which they’ve scored fewer than ninety-nine points, the Nuggets’ record is 0-16. Sunday night they finished with eighty-eight, sixteen below their league-leading season average.

This is the Nuggets’ postseason paradox. The team that led the NBA in scoring doesn’t have enough offensive weapons.

For much of the regular season, their speed and athleticism were enough. When you’re outrunning your opponents, anybody who can dunk or make a layup is an offensive weapon, and that’s the whole roster. The Nuggets led the NBA in fast break points, assists and points in the paint.

But in the postseason, when the games slow down and transition buckets are hard to come by, you need players with the offensive skills to score into the teeth of a half-court defensive set with intimidating big men guarding the basket. This is where the Nuggets struggle.

The Lakers have three players — Bryant, Gasol and Andrew Bynum — the Nuggets must assign two defenders, at least some of the time. This creates open shots for role players like the daggers from Sessions and Steve Blake on Sunday night.

Post-Carmelo, the Nuggets have no one like that. The Lakers switch defensive assignments on the Nuggets’ pick-and-roll to try to contain guard Ty Lawson’s quickness, but there’s no one player they feel they have to double-team.

That’s why the Nuggets finished with only eighty-eight points. They got some open looks down the stretch. They just couldn’t knock them down. They don’t have great shooters. And they couldn’t get out and run often enough to get the easy baskets to which they grew accustomed during the regular season.

“Probably there were a couple of stretches during the game where we didn’t run as much as we did in Game 3, and our intensity went down for a couple of stretches,” Gallinari said. “We know that against them we cannot allow ourselves to do that.”

Following their Game 3 victory, coach George Karl said energy, which is reflected in pace and aggressiveness, is the key to the Nuggets’ success. Lawson had twenty-five points and seven assists in Game 3. He had eleven and six in Game 4. I asked Karl if Lawson was as aggressive Sunday as he’d been two nights before.

“I probably never feel Ty is aggressive enough,” Karl said. “I think he should be more aggressive almost every night. I don’t know how crowded it was in there on his decisions on not attacking a little bit more to the rim. The film will show that. My thing is I like to see Ty drive the ball in the paint thirty to forty times a game. I think he’s that good and I think he’s that important to us.”

The Lakers made more of an effort to get back on defense and foil Lawson’s penetration in Game 4. They also made more of an effort to rebound the ball. After losing the battle of the glass by ten Friday night, they won it by ten Sunday. Nuggets center JaVale McGee went from sixteen points and fifteen rebounds to eight and four. Power forward Kenneth Faried went from twelve and fifteen to six and seven.

“Us guards had to get in there and rebound,” said the Lakers’ Bryant, who had more boards (eight) than any Nuggets player. “A lot of times our bigs are out of position because of the rotations in the pick-and-roll coverages. McGee and Faried have been doing a great job coming in on top of them and crashing the glass. So we had to get in there with the big guys and mix it up, put some bodies on them and try to control the glass ourselves.”

“Basically, JaVale and Kenneth outworked their big guys in Game 3 and they outworked us in Game 4,” Karl said. “Sometimes the luck of the flow of the game comes your way and I think it came their way in Game 3. (Sunday) we didn’t have the extra effort, energy, luck that sometimes comes by playing hard. I think we gave some things back a little bit and I think we were maybe surprised by their pushing and shoving and powering the game.”

Karl was clearly frustrated by the referees, who called nineteen fouls on the Nuggets and thirteen on the Lakers, even though the Nuggets had more points in the paint and more fast break points, generally the measuring sticks of aggressiveness. Still, both teams struggled to make free throws, so the scoring difference at the line ended up being just two points.

“We shoot twelve free throws, six of them by McGee and none by our guards,” Karl said. Actually, he meant starting guards. Reserve guard Andre Miller shot two. Bryant was not called for a single personal foul all night while Gallinari was called for five, forcing him to the bench for a time in the fourth quarter.

“There were some tough calls, but the referees are there to do their best job and I’m on the court doing the best job I can, so I’m not thinking about the calls,” said Gallo. He did kick a door on his way to the locker room after the game, but that might have been general frustration. “We have to think as a team about the mistakes and the things that we didn’t do as well as we did in Game 3 and try to do those things even better in Game 5 because I think especially in L.A. it’s going to be even more intense.”

Bryant, who reacted sarcastically to my question about Gallo’s defense on him following the Lakers’ Game 3 loss, was more gracious in victory.

“Gallo plays hard, man,” he said. “I gave him some (grief) the other night, but he plays really hard, man. He competes and he steps up to the plate and doesn’t back down, so I appreciate that.”

With one day to travel and prepare for Game 5 on Tuesday, the Nuggets have two choices: They can rediscover their energy and extend the series or they can end their season in L.A.

“Losing’s no fun,” Karl said. “I’m not unhappy with my team. I’m not unhappy with where we’re at. I wish it was 2-2, but I still think we’ve got a series to play and it’s going to be fun on Tuesday night. I think it’s a powerful challenge to us. And I don’t think it’s an impossible challenge. I think it’s a great challenge for this young team.”

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May 5, 2012

How to irritate Kobe Bryant (It’s not that hard)

By Dave Krieger

You take your thrills where they come in this business, and one of them is annoying Kobe Bryant. It’s easy to do. You just have to suggest someone shut him down on a basketball court. That does the trick every time.

This is because Kobe considers himself unguardable. Or, at least, he has yet to meet the human capable of doing it. So if he has a bad game — as he did Friday night, missing sixteen of twenty-three shots as the Nuggets beat the Lakers for the first time in their playoff series — there is always some reason other than whoever was guarding him. He was off, his teammates didn’t do enough, he was unaccountably shooting from the wrong spots. Something.

So I took my turn in Kobe’s wheelhouse when he showed up in the Pepsi Center interview room as Friday prepared to give way to Saturday.

First, I asked if JaVale McGee’s offense had surprised him. McGee was the Nuggets’ second-leading scorer in Game 3, behind Ty Lawson, after not being much of an offensive factor in the first two games in Los Angeles. McGee’s teammates credited his big night — sixteen points, fifteen rebounds, three blocks, two steals, two assists and just one turnover — with a major role in the Nuggets’ victory.

“No,” said Bryant, who admits to being surprised only slightly more often than he admits to being well defended. “He did what I know he can do — running hooks, big spin moves, scoop shots with his left hand. Those are things he’s capable of.”

Thus encouraged, I trod deeper into the unthinkable, asking if Danilo Gallinari’s length had bothered him. Nuggets coach George Karl deployed the 23-year-old, 6-foot-10-inch forward on Bryant for much of the second half, during which Kobe took eleven shots and made two.

Bryant smirked. Was I serious? Yes, I said. That’s a real question.

“Sure,” Bryant said, still smirking, sounding at least as sincere as Dr. House. “Somewhat real answer.”

Just in case his opinion of the question, and perhaps of Gallinari, wasn’t clear enough, he added a sardonic postscript to his final response of the night, in which he attributed the Lakers’ first defeat of the postseason to a single statistic:

“We shot six for twenty-five from the three-point line. We can’t do that,” he said. And then, in his best deadpan:

“And Gallo’s defense was exceptional.”

It should come as no surprise that Bryant would never admit being bothered, certainly not by a player with as brief an NBA resume as Gallinari, whether or not he was. In response to a similar question earlier, Karl suggested Gallo had been the Nuggets’ best defensive matchup on Bryant, owing chiefly to his length. Bryant can shoot over anyone, Karl said, but it’s a little harder over Gallinari.

The Italian forward is likely to continue to get the most minutes checking Bryant, Karl said, although Arron Afflalo and Corey Brewer will share the duty.

“I don’t think you want to go one way on Kobe Bryant,” Karl said.

Kobe’s explanation for his offensive struggles credited the Nuggets’ scheme, but no individual defenders.

“I wasn’t on my sweet spots,” he said. “They tried to do some things defensively. They tried to keep me more on the perimeter. I wasn’t in the post a lot. I lived at the elbow the first two games and we got away from that a little bit in the second half. Pau (Gasol) as well, we saw him on the perimeter way too much. We can’t do that. We have to stick to our ground and pound game.”

Bryant has described this season’s Lakers as a championship-caliber squad, and he seemed to view their first playoff loss as a minor bump in the road, calling it “a good learning experience” for the team’s younger players.

For the Nuggets, the formula for success was the usual — outhustling their opponent.

“The game for us is all about our energy and our enthusiasm to play,” Karl said. “It’s not complicated for us. When we play poorly, it’s because we don’t play with enough energy, we don’t push the pace and we shoot too many jump shots.”

He credited the “intensity and guts of JaVale and Kenneth (Faried) and all our bigs” as well as Lawson’s thirteen-point first quarter, which helped the Nuggets build a 30-14 lead after one. The Lakers fought their way back, but by the time they got within striking distance, they were out of gas. The Nuggets took the fourth quarter 27-19 to win going away, 99-84, before a raucous full house.

Like everything else the Nuggets did well, Karl attributed McGee’s big night to aggressiveness. “I think he was working underneath the defense,” he said. “With all the penetration we put in the game, their big guys are always helping uphill and helping out of position a bit.”

Lakers coach Mike Brown also credited the Nuggets’ energy:

“Denver played a great game,” he said. “I thought Ty Lawson came out being very aggressive. We’ve been talking to our guys about him coming out and being aggressive the last couple of days. I thought he was very impactful to start the game to help them get out by however many they got out. I thought that Denver’s two bigs, Faried and McGee, brought a lot of energy to the table for their team. The twelve offensive rebounds for the two, the thirty overall, plus the double-double in points with them also bringing twenty-eight points to the table between the two was a very, very good game for those guys.”

Karl tweaked his starting lineup for Game 3, replacing Kosta Koufos with Timofey Mozgov as the starting center. Mozgov played fourteen minutes and failed to score, but he did establish a more physical tone than Koufos had, banging willingly with Lakers center Andrew Bynum, who was shut out in the first half before putting up eighteen points after intermission. Still, McGee came off the bench to play most of the minutes at center.

Can the Nuggets repeat the feat Sunday to even the series at two games apiece and turn it into a best-of-three, or was this their token win in the usual five-game first-round elimination?

“Every game we’ve played we’ve been down to the Lakers,” Lawson said. “We’ve been down big and always trying to fight back. We wanted to make it a point to come out early and see how they did with a deficit, and they reacted well to it, but we held on.

“We dealt with having a big lead. We dealt with them coming back and making it a game. Nobody got nervous, so we learned a lot today and it’s probably going to help us out throughout the series.”

If Kobe responds to his poor shooting night with a big game Sunday, as he often does, I wouldn’t be surprised if he revisits the question of Gallinari’s defense, just to pound home how stupid he considered the question. Bryant enjoys few things more than the “I told you so” moment.

In Kobe’s world, the only one who can stop Kobe is Kobe. The great ones generally feel that way. The difference with Kobe is he makes no attempt to disguise it with false modesty or humility. He oozes arrogance. The only way to wipe the smirk off his face is to end his season prematurely, which remains a decidedly uphill battle for the Nuggets.

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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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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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