The Denver Nuggets are one of the best teams in the Western Conference but right now they aren’t playing like they are the best. After winning their first 3 games, they’ve lost the last two games to the Mavericks and the Pelicans. After the loss to the Pelicans, Nuggets Head Coach Mike Malone said this, via Andrew Lopez of ESPN:
“I’m embarrassed,” Malone said at his postgame news conference. “That was an embarrassing effort defensively. Gave up 37 fast-break points. You can give all the transition defense rules that you want. To me, transition defense boils down to one thing — effort. Get back. You can tell them. You can lead a horse to water, whatever analogy you want to use. We did not get back.”…
“We’re a great talk team. We can talk before the season starts about all the things we want to accomplish, and we want to be a contending team,” Malone said. “It’s all bulls—. Don’t tell me about it, show me. And right now we’ve got a lot of guys that aren’t showing me much.”
It has been reported that Mike Malone was specifically calling out his starters (Jamal Murray, Gary Harris, Torrey Craig, Paul Millsap, and Nikola Jokic). Jamal Murray is underrated as a PG but he hasn’t played the best ball he can yet. While Nikola Jokic will be considered as one of the best international players ever, he hasn’t played like that either.
While I’m sure this is just a preemptive measure to make sure the Nuggets don’t continue to play bad, the Nuggets haven’t been playing ball as we remembered them doing last year. Granted, it is only 5 games into the season. Mike Malone is surely just putting a fire under their ass and making sure that they start playing ball like they did last year. While some may think this is an overreaction so early in the season, momentum in the NBA is a powerful thing. A great team in a funk can drop many games in a row. It’s important to nip losing momentum like this, even though it’s only two games, in the bud. Mike Malone called out his team, let’s see how they respond against the Magic.
