Trophies are nice. But in America, it’s money that matters. Right? So when measured in dollars, what sounds absurd also happens to be true: The Nuggets have more valuable basketball stars than the San Antonio Spurs, the reigning NBA champions.
The Big Three for the Spurs are Tony Parker, Tim Duncan and Manu Ginobili.
While Nuggets Ty Lawson, Danilo Gallinari and JaVale McGee probably have no shot of beating San Antonio in the league standings, they can beat those mighty Spurs on payday.
The total cost of Parker, Duncan and Ginobili for San Antonio this season will be $30.1 million. That’s a pretty penny.
But it’s a bargain compared with the $34 million the Nuggets will shell out to keep Lawson, Gallinari and McGee on the payroll.
Yes, San Antonio pays its veteran superstars less than Denver pays players who have never won anything in the NBA.
Yes, this is madness.
And this madness helps illustrate how difficult a task winning an NBA championship will ever be for Denver, which doesn’t have the glitz of Los Angeles, the Ohio home-cooking favored by LeBron James or San Antonio’s rare combination of unsurpassed talent and unselfish attitude.
To make any noise in the playoffs, the Nuggets need a player bringing home more than $10 million per year to justify his salary by becoming a certifiable all-star. Although Lawson ranks among the quicker point guards in the league, it might be too late to count him as a star on the rise during his sixth NBA season, when he will turn 27 years old.
McGee might not be good enough to break Denver’s starting five.
Given health, Gallinari seems reliable for 16 points and five rebounds per game, which are the statistics of a solid performer rather than a true game-changer.
So the Nuggets must bank on the continued rise of a player who felt unwanted in Denver less than a year ago.
“You’ve got to go into everything in life believing you can do it,” Kenneth Faried told me recently, bristling at my suggestion he was lucky to make the U.S. national team that brought home a gold medal from the World Cup in Spain.
What’s most amazing about Faried isn’t the spring in his legs or 24/7 energy. It’s a relentless urge to shock the basketball world. He came into the NBA as a rookie in 2011 with one definable skill: rebounding. His defense on the floor was shaky. Other than a dunk, his offensive repertoire was nonexistent. At this time a year ago, rookie Nuggets coach Brian Shaw seem stumped as to how to utilize Faried as anything more than an energy guy off the bench.
But Faried averaged 18 points and 10 rebounds down the stretch last season, then found a roster spot on Team USA, where the most valuable thing he gained was not gold but the trust of Mike Krzyzewski, the most-respected basketball coach on the planet. The two most-powerful words in coaching are: good job.
Coach K told Faried: “Hey, you can do anything, Kenneth.”
For an athlete whose motivation has always been proving doubters wrong, Faried finally has a chance to blossom beyond his own wildest dreams, because a basketball icon as big as Coach K gave the Manimal the permission to be the best.
The Nuggets have agreed to extend the contract of Faried, pushing his salary into the stratosphere of $12.5 million per year. Can he be more than the Manimal? Could Faried, whose skills have grown since turning pro, become a scorer in clutch situations during the fourth quarter?
“I think Kenneth is an underrated offensive player. He’s a guy who is starting to get comfortable with getting his own shot on the block with a hook of his left shoulder, and not just being a player whose points come off transition,” Nuggets general manager Tim Connelly said.
During the upcoming season, the base salary for 38-year-old Tim Duncan, who has won five NBA championship rings, will be $10.36 million. The Nuggets will pay McGee, a big man who might be better on Twitter than he is on the court, a salary of $11.25 million.
You want to remind me again how brilliant Masai Ujiri was as a front-office executive before he bolted Denver for his own sweetheart deal in Toronto?
The Nuggets are now betting big-time on Faried.
Doubt the Manimal at your own risk.
Mark Kiszla: mkiszla@denverpost.com or
