After one small sample, the season opener, came one big narrative shift.
What happened to the Nuggets’ offense?
In years past, questions about the defense started to arise early in the season. Offense was expected to be a team strength this season. But after the Nuggets held Detroit to 37 percent shooting and just 79 points in a season-opening victory Wednesday night at the Pepsi Center, those have been at least temporarily pushed aside. The Nuggets have a bevy of issues to iron out on the offensive end, though.
In their victory, the Nuggets shot only 35.3 percent from the field. Point guard Ty Lawson — the team’s leading scorer last season — finished with three points and hit 1-of-7 shots. Danilo Gallinari, who was the team’s second-leading scorer the last time he played a full season, had seven points and hit 1-of-8 shots.
Part of the problem was a lack of chemistry, and that’s not going to smooth out anytime soon as long as players have playing time restrictions stemming from injuries.
But getting out of each other’s way can be addressed.
Post-ups from the Nuggets bigs — Kenneth Faried, Timofey Mozgov, Jusuf Nurkic and JaVale McGee — as well as perimeter guys such as Gallinari and Arron Afflalo were effective, but they also clogged things up.
“I think it frustrated Ty a bit because there were times when he wanted to hit the hole and get to the basket,” second-year Nuggets coach Brian Shaw said. “And there was a big sitting there.”
It’s a spacing issue, which the Nuggets started to address during the second half of Wednesday’s game. “In the first half, there were no lanes,” Lawson said. “It was all post-ups or people were in the lane.”
Lawson said the Nuggets “talked about it” at halftime and expects that the conversation “going forward is good for the team.” But Shaw wants Lawson to figure his way out of the predicament on the fly and get the offense humming at a high pace.
“That’s something that they are just going to have to work out,” Shaw said. “Obviously if they get deep post position and they have their man on their back, I want the ball to go inside. But we also had a couple of three-second (violations) because they were in there too long.”
Shaw made no bones about saying he wanted to play inside-out last season. Circumstances, however, dictated his team couldn’t fully get to that. But with a number of players effective from the low-post area in the opener, that may start to change this season.
“There’s teams that like layups, corner 3s and free throws,” Shaw said. “That’s the philosophy most teams have now. We still would prefer to have as many layups as we possibly can, but we have big guys that eat up space and we have a quick guard in Ty Lawson who can break people down and get in the paint. So, it’s going to change from night to night.”
Christopher Dempsey: cdempsey@denverpost.com or
