How the Nuggets Will be Defeated, Most Likely Quickly, in the Playoffs This Year

Discussion in 'Denver Nuggets' started by tremaine, Jan 14, 2009.

  1. tremaine

    tremaine To Win, Be Like Fitz

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    The Nuggets will very, very likely be defeated in their first playoff series this year, regardless of how many regular season games they win and regardless of whether they have the home court advantage or not. The theme of this article has become sort of an annual tradition, because the Nuggets have been very quickly defeated in the playoffs for five straight years and this will most likely be the sixth straight year. Every year I explain what the Nuggets would have to do to win a playoff series, and/or why what they are doing will not work in the playoffs and, sure enough, every year, they don't change anything and every year they go up in flames.

    The Nuggets are the big surprise of the NBA so far this year in terms of number of wins. Up and coming sportscasters at ESPN and so forth all forecast that the Nuggets would win a lot fewer than 50 games this year after the Marcus Camby giveaway and the failure to figure out Allen Iverson. They were all wrong, as was yours truly. The Nuggets are on track to win 48-55 regular season games.

    While defeating the Nuggets may not be quite as easy this year as it has been in the most recent five years, it should not be all that difficult either. I would say that, at the most, it will be a moderately difficult thing to in 4-6 games defeat the Nuggets in the playoffs this year, which, however, for any quality coach or experienced playoff team translates into easy. While coaches such as Rick Adelman (Rockets), Byron Scott (Hornets), Greg Popovich (Spurs), Phil Jackson (Lakers) and Jerry Sloan (Jazz) will most likely have no difficulty at all defeating George Karl and the Nuggets this year, it is plausible that Nate McMillan (Trailblazers) or Terry Porter (Suns) will have a more difficult task in front of them.

    Unlike a regular season game where defensive aggressiveness, enthusiasm, and just plain luck can win you some games, you can not, perhaps unfortunately, win a best of seven series with those elements, particularly when there is a large mismatch in the skill levels between the coaches and/or a large mismatch in the playoff experience levels of the players involved. The Nuggets may be playoff bound, but they are that with the worst playoff coaches and with very playoff-inexperienced players.

    The team that defeats them will use some combination of the following methods, techniques, and approaches to sending the Nuggets home for the 2009 off season.

    SPECIFICALLY HOW THE NUGGETS WILL BE DEFEATED QUICKLY IN THE PLAYOFFS
    1. The Nuggets’ opponent will finally realize that this is not really Carmelo Anthony’s team anymore, if it ever was, and that Carmelo Anthony is not the player who can or will beat you in more than one or two games in a 4-6 games playoff series. Carmelo Anthony has rebounding duties now and, although in a surprise development he has a three point shot for a change, his garden variety jump shooting is nothing much to worry about anymore as a result of his agreeing to being downsized in the offense.

    Yes it's true, George Karl and the Nuggets have shot themselves in the foot by telling Carmelo Anthony to "not worry about scoring" anymore. They decided that they can do without having available to them a player who can dominate scoring to one extent to another. Karl believes in what you might call the Indirect Scoring Theory of basketball, which states that a good offense in general and good scoring in particular emerges indirectly from other factors, which are thought of in this theory as more fundamental, things such as, you guessed it, aggressive man to man defending and hustling for loose balls. However, unfortunately, there isn't in real life an automatic connection between those kinds of things and the number of points scored, at least not to the extent needed to win playoff games against quality offensive teams.

    The opponent will realize that Chauncey Billups and to a lesser extent Nene are the only players on the Nuggets who can possibly endanger their winning the playoff series. With the downsizing of Carmelo Anthony having made the shortage worse, the Nuggets do not have any where near enough experienced playoff warriors to pose a real threat to win a playoff series against any reasonably well managed or reasonably playoff-experienced team.

    2. Billups, for all practical purposes, is the offensive Coach of the Nuggets, and arguably the Coach of the team as a whole. As such, he deserves to get a whole lot of defensive extra attention. All other Nuggets are afraid of the wrath of George Karl were they to show any real initiative with respect to being a playmaker. So once again, the opponent must and will double and hassle Billups all game every game.

    3. With Nene you want to get him into foul trouble, pure and simple. What you do is simple: go at him early and often offensively. Don’t try to foul him as much as you try to get him to foul you. The Nuggets are still a high turnover team, and that includes Nene. Do not be overly concerned that Nene has such a high field goal percentage. He hardly tries any midrange jumpers, and he will turn it over often enough to keep the damage from all his point blank layups and dunks within reason.

    4. The four best offensive players on the Nuggets are all relatively high turnover rate players: Carmelo Anthony, Nene, and J.R. Smith. A good opponent will make sure it goes after these players and forces as many turnovers by them as possible. Offensive fouls are a particular kind of turnover, and all three of these Nuggets have “style problems” with the refs and are therefore vulnerable to being called for offensive fouls at a higher than typical rate. In recent years, Carmelo Anthony has been hammered in the playoffs with a large number of offensive foul calls against him.

    5. Generally, the coaches of the Nuggets’ opponent will most of the time correctly choose the defensive matchups that are best for them, and make the correct decision between zone and man to man defending. Meanwhile, the Nuggets’ coaching staff will be over relying on man to man defending. The Nuggets in at least two or three playoff games will have to reduce the minutes of two or more of their aggressive man to man defenders as a result of foul trouble, particularly if the Nuggets play teams such as the Spurs and the Jazz who are highly trained at drawing fouls and who are experts at “playing the referees” in general, whereas the Nuggets, being newcomers to the game of milking the referees, are mere amateurs.

    6. J.R. Smith is extremely dangerous, but much more in theory than in reality, and only in the regular season most likely. In practice the Nuggets have made Smith much less dangerous than he could be. But the Nuggets’ opponent will, at the first sign that J.R. Smith may go on a tear of hitting a bunch of threes and of impressive drives to the hoop, do whatever is necessary to force him to lose his confidence, including hard fouling, double covering, going for steals and getting a couple of them off of him, and running a much larger number of offensive plays than otherwise through whoever he is covering. Good coaches know that to cool down a streaky offensive player, you can make him work harder and attempt to break down his overall confidence by beating him when he is on defense.

    Good playoff coaches will be aware that as a result of Smith being considered the “black sheep” by the Nuggets personality police, that he is vulnerable to losing his confidence, and is also vulnerable to having his minutes cut way back in the playoffs by Personality Police Chief George Karl. Smith’s personality problem is not that he has a bad personality as the Nuggets falsely believe, but that he has an immature personality. But George Karl and those who blindly support him have created the impression in J.R.’s mind that there is something wrong with his personality, that he is lacking something mentally that other players have, that he should and must have.

    So Mr. Karl has made the impact of Smith’s immature personality as bad as possible for the Nuggets, by refusing to start him regardless of how well he plays, by recklessly and publicly criticizing him for minor things, by leaving him in toss up games late in the 4th quarter, which is the one context that J.R.’s immature personality can harm your team, and by, amazingly, refusing to even talk off court to the young shooting guard were he to want to discuss something.

    As a result of being immature to begin with, and as a result of George Karl recklessly and severely making J.R. much more vulnerable to losing his confidence in high pressure games than he already was, J.R. Smith has been largely or completely a non-factor so far in almost all playoff games. Smith’s turnover rate has continued to be high even as his offensive and defensive game has become more mature and polished overall. There is no reason to believe that Smith’s big confidence vulnerability will not continue for most playoff games this year. However, if somehow Smith is showing signs that he might break out of the box that the Nuggets have put him in, it should be easy to put him back in that box by aggressively defending, fouling, and running plays at the extremely talented but immature shooting guard.

    7. More broadly, Karl is well known for having a total breakdown of communication and relations with at least one of his players, usually tactlessly and publicly, during every playoff series he has ever been in. If the player who Karl has the falling out with is not Smith, it will be someone else. So the opponent will be doing everything possible to make any developing rift between Karl and one of the Nuggets worse, so as to literally and perhaps completely remove that Nugget from the playoffs.

    8. The Nuggets’ opponent will have patience on offense and will not try to run into a brick wall by trying to pick up the pace against a team that relies heavily on very aggressive and energetic defending in general, and especially on aggressive and energetic man to man defending in the paint in particular. The opponent will keep the pace measured and use plenty of the 24 second clock. This will wear out the Nuggets extremely energetic defenders as the game wears on. Stunts and shortcuts on offense will not work well against a team that uses stunts on defense.

    9. Stay calm, cool, and collected; do not allow the Nuggets, anyone on the Nuggets, or the referees to get under your skin. Tune them and their crowd out completely and don’t worry about them and their rose colored glasses. Go about your business with laser like focus. Certain teams have lost a game to the Nuggets in the regular season so far due simply to losing their cool.
    .
    10. The opponent will make sure that their best and hottest jump shooters have plenty of playing time and that, unlike J.R. Smith and Linas Kleiza, they have plenty of confidence. The one automatic, easy way to beat the Nuggets is to simply make your jump shots, or make the free throws if the Nuggets insist on fouling you as they often do now days. The Nuggets are saying to you: "Ok, we are going to run around all over and try to confuse your offense, we are going to run at you all night, we are going to goal tend from time to time, we are going to foul over and over and over, and we are especially going to man to man defend you aggressively and well." To which your response is simply: "Fine, have fun; we'll make our passes, our assists, and our shots, and all of your extra effort and aggressiveness will not amount to a whole lot of benefit for you." I repeat for emphasis that you must not forget to make your free throws, because the Nuggets have actually won at least a couple of regular season games simply because their opponent could not make enough free throws.

    11. The opponent will overweight three point shooting even more so than is ordinarily the case in the playoffs. Do not expect you can beat the Nuggets without bothering with a three point game anymore. You can’t do that anymore both because the Nuggets are more aggressively defending the paint than in recent years and because the Nuggets themselves now have a three point game for the first time in many years, although it is too early to say whether they will still have a good three point game in the playoffs.

    12. The opponent will pass, pass, and pass some more, and get as many assists as they possibly can. The opponent will maintain its playmaking identity, meaning that the top two playmaking guards will be responsible for making at least 11-12 assists per game. Beating the Nuggets’ style of defending with effective playmaking is the easiest and most sure way of defeating them. The Nuggets amazing defensive enthusiasm and aggressiveness will melt in proportion to how well you beat them with effective passing and assisting.

    13. The opponent will try like heck to pass especially to anyone who can slip in behind the defense baseline and get the easy layup or dunk. This will cause the Nuggets to lose some of their aggressiveness even more quickly than will passing in general. Make sure your fastest, most elusive offensive players get plenty of playing time. The Nuggets can not foul or aggressively defend who they can not keep up with.

    14. The opponent will not allow the Nuggets to rack up a huge advantage in free throw shooting. The Nuggets have been winning regular season games in part by becoming one of the best teams in the League at drawing fouls. Players on the opponent will be told to defend as well as possible, but to be careful about fouling, especially in the 1st half. The only exceptions to the try to go light on the fouling rule will be Chauncey Billups, Nene, and perhaps J.R. Smith, as previously discussed. Otherwise, see if previously unknown players such as Chris Andersen and Dahntay Jones can actually put the ball in the bucket instead of being bailed out by the refs all the time.

    15. The opponent will not make the mistake of losing track of players that no one ever heard of before such as Chris Andersen and Renaldo Balkman, who have been far, far better than anyone would have expected in the regular season so far. Players such as these can not defeat you as long as you don’t ignore them and lose track of them half the time. Just respect them, put decent defenders on them, and go at them offensively repeatedly, and they will be generally out of the way as a potential playoff series problem.
     
    Last edited: Jan 14, 2009
  2. tremaine

    tremaine To Win, Be Like Fitz

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    16. The opponent will win one or more playoff games due to good offensive rebounding. Following the loss of Marcus Camby, the Nuggets have become vulnerable to extra aggressive offensive rebounding.
     
  3. ¹²³

    ¹²³ ¼½¾

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    If the Nuggets can find a way to win in the first round, would you be satisfied or only a championship would make you happy?
     
  4. tremaine

    tremaine To Win, Be Like Fitz

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    I'll tell you exactly what the number 1 reason I don't like the Nuggets anymore is, and it has nothing to do with me not having any faith in George Karl. The fact that the Nuggets are satisfied with Karl's inability to coach in a way that creates the possibility of winning in the playoffs is the number 2 reason now. The number 1 is that this organization is engaging in big fool the public schemes, year after year.

    The owner, who is the richest NBA owner of all, a man who has several billion dollars, fools the public over several years into thinking that he is in it to win it, by acquiring a fairly large number of expensive players, but then he panics and slashes payroll when the economics emergency hits, even though someone like him is always going to be extremely rich no matter what happens with the economy, and even though the Colorado economy is nowhere near as bad as that of most other states.

    Iverson to the Nuggets was nothing more than a fool the public scheme. The public was fooled into thinking that the Nuggets were really serious about contending in the playoffs. I was fooled. Iverson was fooled. Everyone was fooled. But it is now clear that the objective was to increase revenues from ticket sales and merchandise, and not to win a lot of playoff games. The fact that they did nothing as Iverson was mismanaged and wasted indicates that Nuggets' management simply does not strongly support the concept of doing everything possible to drive as far as possible in the playoffs. I don't like that viewpoint.

    For this season, the management, realizing that the Nuggets could go back to 20-62 if they weren't careful, devised a particularly clever package of fool the public schemes. First, the Nuggets flip from being an offensive to a defensive team, which fools the public into thinking that the Nuggets are engaged in truly sophisticated management, since supposedly the Nuggets were so bad defensively in recent years (but in reality they were not as bad as people think). Second, to go with new defensive specialists, they bring home town favorites on to the Nuggets, which makes a lot of fans very content. Third, they now play basketball with not only the traditional Denver fast pace, but now also with a hyper aggressive, hard charging and, in some games, a dangerous and self-defeating aggressive style. Team management knows that this style produces an artificial number of regular season wins, which in turn fools the public into thinking that the Nuggets are a good team and might win a playoff series.

    It's just way too much fooling of the public for me.
     
  5. Denny Crane

    Denny Crane It's not even loaded! Staff Member Administrator

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    tremaine,

    I don't see how rich an owner is makes any difference at all. The CBA hamstrings GMs and dictates the salary ranges players can be signed for or what salary range of player can be traded for. Given the way the CBA is, the Nuggets sure seemed to spend money within the CBA. They arranged for a sign and trade deal for Kenyon Martin. They traded for Iverson. They signed Melo to a huge contract. They signed Nene to a huge contract to keep him.

    They effectively put together a team with two of the top 5 scorers in the league and guys like Camby and Martin and Smith to complement them. Yet they didn't win.

    Maybe the faith in the coach is misplaced, but as you point out, without Camby and with Melo in a diminished role, they're likely to have one of their better records in recent years, if not just outright exceed expectations.

    At some point, the richest guy in the world is going to come to grips with his team not winning or making it deep in the playoffs and come to the conclusion, "we can lose with these guys or we can lose without them" and go about rebuilding.

    The good news is that the Nuggets seem to be rebuilding on the fly and winning at the same time.

    The bad news is that only one team wins the championship.
     
  6. tremaine

    tremaine To Win, Be Like Fitz

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    Hello there Denny, sorry to see your show is no longer being produced.

    The NBA is a soft cap League, which means that owners, if they are really gung ho and want to pay a luxury tax, can go over the cap and pay a luxury tax. For most of the differences between (American) football and basketball, I prefer the basketball, but in this case I prefer the football. The NFL is a hard cap League: no owner can go over the payroll limit. If in the NBA you have an owner who goes over the salary cap and pays the luxury tax, what are the possible rationales for doing that:

    (a) To get a player or two or three that could not otherwise be afforded who will enable the team to win playoff games that would not otherwise be won.
    (b) To have so many "big name" players on the team that ticket and merchandise sales are driven up. If the increase in revenues is big enough, then the extra expensive players could end up more than paying for themselves.
    (c) (a) and (b) combined.

    We now know for an absolute fact that with the Nuggets it was (b). The Pistons have already in just two months and change tried at least half a dozen ways to think of how Iverson can fit into their team, whereas the Nuggets never did one damn thing in this regard in 22 months. So either the Nuggets are total fools and totally incompetent or they were not concerned as the Pistons are with trying to get the Iverson thing correct, which means they were not concerned about maximizing playoff wins. Even I am not willing to claim that the Nuggets are managed by total and complete idiots, so the only reasonable theory is that the Nuggets wanted Iverson due to (b) above.

    Unfortunately, not only did they fail as a franchise to be obsessed with winning in the playoffs, and you have to be obsessed or you will never win in the playoffs, the fact is that they failed in what their objective actually was, which was in turn the main reason they traded Iverson when they did. They totally miscalculated the reaction of Colorado residents to Iverson. Colorado on average was only luke warm to Iverson, so the anticipated ticket and merchandise sales never materialized. Although Colorado people are relatively tight lipped and conservative with what they say in public, it eventually became clear that there was a substantial portion of the Colorado fan base that flat out hated Iverson and his history and were from day one dead set against the Nuggets bringing Iverson to Colorado. There was practically dancing in the Colorado streets when Iverson was traded.

    Denny, they did win: 50 games. Any team that wins 50 games should have at least a theoretical possibility of winning a playoff game against any other playoff team. But the Nuggets had no theoretical chance of winning a single game against the Lakers. As Melo correctly pointed out, they didn't just lose, they got the you know what kicked out of them. It was one of the most and arguably the very most lopsided playoff series in the history of the NBA. Lakers sportswriters complained that the Nuggets were wasting everyone's time with their playoff appearance. And Melo reported that the Nuggets quit during the series (game 3 to be exact), as well. Well, they didn't really have to quit during the game itself, because really they had effectively quit before they ever started, long before that playoff series began. This organization never had any intention of winning a bunch of playoff games, either because of preference or because they decided in advance that some basketball franchises are not cut out to win playoff games.

    The Nuggets decided that instead of Plan A, which is tackling all the complicated and difficult tasks needed to win playoff games, that they were going to tackle the less complicated and difficult tasks needed to win regular season games: they went for Plan B. If Plan B works, the team wins in the regular season, but can not win in a playoff series unless they get very, very lucky. This season, Plan B has so far worked literally perfectly for the Nuggets.

    A very convincing case can be made that Plan B is better than Plan A for a franchise in a smaller market like Denver. If you go with Plan A and you fail, and then have to blow up the team, you are staring 20-62 type seasons in the face. The New York Knicks, who could not be caught dead following Plan B, come to mind. Whereas, if you go with Plan B and succeed, there is a nice floor on how many regular season games you will win; you won't win fewer than about 35 regular season games. If you have the best possible details in your Plan B, which the Nuggets appear to have, then you can win as many as 55 regular season games. Yet you still have little or no chance of winning a playoff series.

    A good analogy is investments. Plan B is like an high as possible interest rate bank account, whereas Plan A is like investing in the stock market. For some people, Plan B is going to be the preferred way to go, even when the stock market is going up.

    Along with big market franchises such as the Lakers, the Knicks, and the Bulls, the Pistons are obviously a Plan A franchise. The Pistons could not have a more different "franchise philosophy" than the Nuggets do. Pistons General Manager Joe Dumars does not try to fool the public. He tells the public what he is doing to try to get the Pistons to win playoff games. The public may not understand. The public may disagree. But the nice thing is that Dumars is really and truly trying to get the Pistons able to win playoff games, and he is not engaging in fool the public schemes.

    In sports I want Plan A to be followed, not Plan B.

    Denny, you and god only knows how many others have been fooled if you think that Camby was given away for ordinary basketball reasons. First of all, how can you think that a team that wins 50 games out of 82 should say "Oh, excuse us, we didn't win, so now we are going to dismantle the team." No, they did win a lot of games, so no one can say that they gave Camby away because they were not able to win games with Camby and everyone else they had.

    This is not just speculation, or one of my theories that I have proved yet people don't understand or believe the proof. It was leaked out of Nuggets HQ, and it appeared in at least a few high traffic website articles, that the Nuggets' management was ordered by the owner to give away Marcus Camby. It may not have been put that bluntly, but anyone with a brain could figure it out. And you just had Doug Collins the other day on national TV flat out reporting to viewers that Camby was given away due to the Nuggets not wanting to pay the luxury tax any more. Nuggets management was ordered to get under the cap immediately, with no basketball rationale or management involved. It’s that simple, and it has been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt.

    Now how much intelligence does it take to realize that if you suddenly make a big reduction in your sports team investment, that your returns are going to go down the drain? You don't do something like that unless you are an idiot and you don't understand investing, or unless there is something very, very unusual going on forcing you to do something you would not ordinarily do. As we know, there has been something very, very unusual going on with the economy for some time now.

    The Nuggets had Plan B working last year, just as they have been able to get it working this year, with a much lower payroll. But the Nuggets obviously did not know at the time the owner ordered the payroll to be cut that they would be able to have Plan B working very well even with a much lower payroll. So it makes no sense to say: "They gave away Camby, almost gave away Najera, blew off the 2008 draft, and acquired a bunch of inexpensive players because they knew that they could run Plan B on the cheap." Either Plan A or Plan B is much more likely to work with a bigger payroll than a smaller payroll.

    So once again, you have an (a) and a (b)

    (a) The owner panicked when the economics emergency hit and ordered the Nuggets' managers to immediately make a big cut in payroll and thus to partially dismantle the team.
    (b) The owner is not financially responsible in general, or else he is not psychologically stable, and simply changed his mind about wanting to pay the luxury tax.

    I mean (b) is more or less a joke, so there really is only (a). But anyone who thinks there is a (c) that the owner ordered the payroll to be slashed because the Nuggets "did not win" has been fooled and is flat out wrong, as explained above. 50-32 is not losing, and either it means that you have the theoretical possibility of winning some playoff games, or it means that you have one hell of a Plan B going.

    In America, most politicians and most businesspeople are continually trying to fool the public in as many ways as possible. If they didn't, they would not get elected, and they would not make money. You would hope that sports would be different. But sports, besides being sports, are also a business. So it should be no surprise that I have discovered that a sports franchise has been out to fool the public over and over again.

    But heck, anyone and everyone is invited to come back to this topic in May after the Nuggets have imploded in the playoffs again, despite winning god only knows how many regular season games.
     
  7. JFizzleRaider

    JFizzleRaider Sad Panda Global Moderator

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    "The owner, who is the richest NBA owner of all, a man who has several billion dollars"

    That quote alone makes you lose credibility to me.
     
  8. tremaine

    tremaine To Win, Be Like Fitz

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    Whether or not but especially if you think I might be a little overboard, check this out, live from Los Angeles. I hardly ever save bookmarks to individual articles, but I saved this one:

    LA Times sportswriter tells it like it is regarding the Nuggets

    How often have you or do you expect to ever see an article such as this? Old sportswriters at major publications don't write an article like this unless there are very good reasons to, and it is rare that there would be. I'm telling you, the Nuggets really and truly have been and are continuing to, for all practical purposes, commit fraud against the public. This LA writer is another guy who discovered it, but unlike some others who might know, he was not afraid or too shy to say what he knows.
     
  9. tremaine

    tremaine To Win, Be Like Fitz

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    My two favorite quotes:

    That's part of Plan B: you intentionally don't offer a fair fight in the playoffs.

    And:

    Notice that he said "the pride and competitiveness of playoff basketball," not just basketball in general. There is a difference, which LA sports people know about.

    As reported in the article, the Colorado fans were cheering Kobe Bryant and more or less ignoring their own team!
     
    Last edited: Jan 21, 2009
  10. Denny Crane

    Denny Crane It's not even loaded! Staff Member Administrator

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    tremaine,

    I am going to miss my own TV show for sure.

    The NBA salary cap is also a hard one, because if you are near it or over it, you cannot sign free agents, and your ability to trade for other players is severely restricted.
     
  11. Tempo

    Tempo New Member

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    The Nuggets aren't going to bow out in the first round once again this season, I guarantee you. The Nuggets now have a great leader, one of the best in the NBA, in Chauncey, and we are winning games against the better teams in the NBA without arguably our best player. That is a great sign for this Nuggets team, and it has been great to see the reserves are stepping up their game quite a bit in the absence of Melo. Kleiza has stepped up his game a lot, after a slow start, so hopefully it can only continue when Melo returns. Nene is in career best form, and Kenyon's defense is amazing, nearly enough to put him in the All-NBA First Defensive team. When the playoffs arrive, Chauncey is going to be the one who leads this team, and motivates this team. He has gone all the way before, and he knows what it's like. With home court advantage most likely going to go our way, I see us going to the second round easily, beating a team like Dallas in the first round.
     
  12. tremaine

    tremaine To Win, Be Like Fitz

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    Yes I realize that the great majority of people who realized last Spring and Summer that they were being taken on numerous "rides down the river to nowhere" by the Nuggets organization will never see this topic, since obviously very few people are going to return to a forum section that they have no interest in anymore. It's a hazard of being a sports follower: if your team is "exposed," you lose many of your reasons for your following activities, and you lose much of your audience if you had one. The people who would agree 100% with my reporting are mostly long gone from here. In fact, those folks may have instinctively realized they were being played without needing anyone to tell them that. The Nuggets have cost SportsTwo some traffic!

    But I always follow the principle of better late than never, so I am posting something that I should have posted 8 1/2 months ago, just after the Nuggets-Lakers series. This addresses the Denver Nuggets fans who saw the light, the ones who knew they had been played for fools, the ones who are now former Nuggets fans, following the total and complete annihilation of the Nuggets by the Lakers in the April-May '08 playoff series. It might as well have been teams from different planets playing. Or it might as well have been a D-League team against an NBA team. Despite winning 50 out of 82 games in the regular season, there was no theoretical possibility that the Nuggets were going to win a single game in that series! Because the organization intentionally followed policies whose end result was that.

    To current Nuggets fans, at least the ones who are optimistic: I am afraid that I will most likely be posting this again in May.

    More broadly, this addresses all sports fans everywhere, most of whom are always playing the fool to one extent or another. Unlike in some other areas, in following sports you can play the fool and no damage is done. Who is hurt if you play the fool as a fan? No one, not even you. So it's no big deal obviously. I guess it's fun to play the fool sometimes, although not for me personally. You need to and you have to be aware that you will play the fool sometimes if you follow any team in any sport. Or you will be playing a fool fior not knowing you are playing a fool, laugh out loud.

    So with no sarcasm or ill will intended, I present to you the musical stylings of The Main Ingredient, who give you a lesson that you should never forget, for sports and for life in general:

    <object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/_dvHogknHyI&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/_dvHogknHyI&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>
     
    Last edited: Jan 22, 2009
  13. Tempo

    Tempo New Member

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    I knew that facing the Lakers last year was not going to be a pretty site. They have a lot more talent than we do, it was obvious. But our frontcourt, with Marcus Camby leading the way, was a soft one. Kenyon did a pretty reasonable job on the best SG in the league in that series, considering he is a PF. Bynum and Gasol, doing their stuff on Camby was just pathetic to watch. Camby is as soft as a cake on the interior. That's why we were dominated as bad as we were, because Camby wasn't strong enough to keep Gasol and Bynum from scoring in the paint. But this year we have Nene, who is having a career best season, Kenyon is playing with a very high intensity, we have arguably the best leader in the game, Chauncey Billups, our bench is starting to produce some pretty solid numbers, and Carmelo will be back, hopefully in good form.

    On top of that, we look like to have home court advantage in the first round this year, which we haven't had before. We will be finishing around 3rd or 4th spot hopefully, which at this stage means we will be versing either the Rockets or the unexperienced Blazer team. We have improved on last season, trading Iverson to get Billups was the best move we have made in a few years. The only thing that is restricting this Nuggets team from becoming the best we can possibly be is George Karl. He is too offensive minded, and spends little time, with his little knowledge, on the defensive side of the game. That's why it was great to add Chauncey because he knows what it's like to go all the way, so he has helped this team so much. If we were to verse the Blazers, we would easily have the better of them in my opinion. Only time will tell whether the Nuggets are the better team or not, and I would bet $100 that we are going to make the 2nd round.
     
  14. tremaine

    tremaine To Win, Be Like Fitz

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    Another thing I don't understand about those who try to blame just about everything defensively on Marcus Camby is why is it that no coach and no teammate ever said anything about how bad Camby's defense supposedly was? Or do you have proof that they did criticize him and try to get him to change what he was doing?

    Also, assuming that Camby was a lousy defender (I feel funny writing that) then he was not the leader on defense. It would have been Kenyon Martin, and if so, he didn't make a very good leader, considering that the Nuggets were destroyed defensively in several of the playoff games, and considering that he would be one of the ones who didn't try to get Camby to change what he was doing. You can't have it both ways. If the way the center plays defense is no good, then the next defensive guy had better do everything possible to get the center to do better, or to convince the coach to do that, or to behind the scenes convince the coach to reduce the center's minutes. Something. But Kenyon Martin never did any of those things. Kenyon Martin was happy with the way Camby plays defense.

    Among other things, the Nuggets in general were happy, and rightly so, with never having to worry about rebounding, which means that they never had to worry about the other team getting more possessions than them.

    Seriously, don't you think that if no player and no coach tries to get someone to change, that they are satisfied with what that player is doing? Or is it that Nuggets don't know how to talk?
     
    Last edited: Jan 23, 2009
  15. tremaine

    tremaine To Win, Be Like Fitz

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    It's like the Nuggets believe, or at least they want to fool the public into believing, that what players are doing on the court can not be changed in the slightest. According to the Nuggets, players just do whatever they want and there is nothing you can do to change anything. I mean, laugh out loud at that.

    Neither the scapegoat on defense, Marcus Camby, nor the scapegoat on offense, Allen Iverson, were ever asked by anyone on the Nuggets to change anything. So what's up with that? I think they should have modified Camby's offensive decisions a little, not the defensive, but in any event, they never to my knowledge asked him to change anything. And if they did ask Camby and/or Iverson to change anything, they refused, because Camby and Iverson always played exactly the same. Meanwhile, players on other teams, or at least players on the other teams that want to win playoff games, do not normally refuse to make adjustments that are within reason. Iverson has practically become a totally different player on the Pistons, not for the hell of it, but because he was asked to by the Pistons. So one way or another, I think all of this is more evidence that the Nuggets are not really serious about winning playoff games.
     
    Last edited: Jan 23, 2009
  16. ¹²³

    ¹²³ ¼½¾

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    Where is tremaine?
     
  17. esperanzafleet6969

    esperanzafleet6969 Member

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    2. Billups, for all practical purposes, is the offensive Coach of the Nuggets, and arguably the Coach of the team as a whole. As such, he deserves to get a whole lot of defensive extra attention. All other Nuggets are afraid of the wrath of George Karl were they to show any real initiative with respect to being a playmaker. So once again, the opponent must and will double and hassle Billups all game every game.


    amazing statement... since that is true and george karl has gone full retard... i think the nugs WILL win their first TWO playoff series... eventually losin to those god forsaken lakers...
     

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