Standing on the sideline alone, arms folded late in his team’s loss to Portland on Sunday night, Nuggets coach Michael Malone was in the moment, watching Jamal Murray knock down 3-pointers. But he also appeared deep in thought about the state of his team that now stands 3-7 and has lost four in a row.
The Nuggets have lost their early shine. Moreover, as crazy as this sounds, they might have to hit the reset button on what it is they are doing.
No player is more emblematic of all the Nuggets had hoped to be this season but aren’t than Nikola Jokic.
“I go back to last season,” Malone said. “He had an unbelievable rookie year.”
In comparison to last year, when he finished third in Rookie of the Year voting, Jokic’s points, field-goal percentage, 3-point percentage and rebounding are all down, some significantly. And he’s playing about two minutes more per game than a season ago.
“I think I need to have more fun out there,” Jokic said. “I think I just need to relax more. And then everything will be a little better.”
If Jokic – so laid back and funny that he’s nicknamed Joker – isn’t having fun, there are some real issues.
The Nuggets need a productive Jokic. They were 7-5 last year when he scored 17 or more points. They were 20-7 when his plus/minus total was five or higher. Thatap bearing itself out again this season as the Nuggets are 3-2 when his plus/minus is at least five. He’s only scored more than 17 points once, and the Nuggets lost that game in overtime to Portland when they blew an eight-point lead in the final 48 seconds of regulation.
Adjusting to playing power forward has been difficult for Jokic, but adjusting on the fly to a new lineup and several different rotations has been a problem for the whole team.
“It is surprising because you would think we’d have a better start because of how we got closer in training camp,” point guard Emmanuel Mudiay said. “We’re closer as a team this year than we were last year off the court. But on the court we have to keep working. We have to stay together.”
The Nuggets opening day starting five – Mudiay, Will Barton, Danilo Gallinari, Jokic and Jusuf Nurkic – was not the one they’d envisioned during the off-season. This has little to do with Barton, who was the starting two guard while Gary Harris was on the shelf due to an injured groin.
Nurkic’s solid play led to the change the Nuggets weren’t fully ready for. He was too good to ignore during the preseason and has performed well during the regular season. Based on how he’s played, he has to be the starting center. But that meant a reshuffling of the deck. The Nuggets wanted to retain Jokic as a starter so Malone moved forward Kenneth Faried to the bench.
Nurkic is a high-usage player, a center that looks to score the ball. Jokic never had to contend with that last season when he played center because Faried gets the bulk of his points without having many plays run for him.
Yes, the Nuggets experimented with a Nurkic-Jokic frontcourt pairing last season, but that was for a grand total of 92 minutes near the end of the season.
Malone had reservations about how effective the pairing would be, and his initial gut reaction was probably right.
The moves put Jokic in a position on the court where he was unfamiliar and has struggled to adjust to.
Nurkic, meanwhile, has been good, with averages of 10.7 points, 8.0 rebounds and 1.4 blocks per game. The ideal situation for the Nuggets is to get production from both players but it appears the only way that can happen is if they are split up. So Jokic has agreed to come off the bench. Still, that wasn’t the original plan, and it could only be a matter of time before Jokic is starting again, especially if he flourishes as a reserve.
“He had an unbelievable rookie year, and he had an unbelievable rookie year playing the five,” Malone said. “I told him I feel bad, I feel like I’ve done him a disservice almost, exploring playing big. There were some good things with that, but I took a kid who had a great year last year and changed his position on him. And it hasn’t been easy on him.”
Under-discussed is the effect a constantly changing rotation in the preseason has had. Due to injuries and resting players, the Nuggets never had one game in which they had their projected starting five plus the reserves all available for Malone to rotate the game how he really wanted. Itap been mix-and-match ever since Gary Harris went down in the first preseason game, and it hasn’t helped with a team that hasn’t shown a ton of chemistry out of the gate.
Turnovers haven’t helped. They’ve ballooned from 14.7 per game in 2015-16 to a league-leading 18.1 in this season’s first 10 games. But more than just the turnovers the Nuggets have committed is how often opponents are turning them into points. The Nuggets are allowing 20.2 points off of turnovers this season, almost four points more than they did last season. And while the Nuggets weren’t big on forcing turnovers themselves and getting points off of them last season, even that number is down from 15.7 to 14.6 this season. So they can’t cover up their own mistakes by creating points from turnovers themselves, and they’re staring at a near six-point deficit there.
The simple solution is slashing the turnover rate, but that requires a level of disciplined play the Nuggets have not been able to consistently reach in the first 10 games. Cut the turnovers, especially some of the truly untimely ones at the end of a couple of games, and the Nuggets would be at least 5-5 and perhaps viewing things through a different lens.
But thatap not the case. And itap leading to tough questions to be asked and, unless wins start arriving soon, tough playing time decisions to be made. Mudiay is accounting for 25 percent of the team’s turnovers. Meanwhile, Jamal Murray has suddenly become one of the team’s most consistent shooters, hitting 44 percent from 3-point range in his last five games including five 3-pointers at Portland on Sunday. The move has already been made to re-insert Faried, who is averaging a double-double of 10 points and 11 rebounds in the last five and is the team’s highest-rated player in efficiency according to NBA stats, in the starting five. The Nuggets also miss Barton, who was flat filling it up with an average of 18 points on 50 percent from the field, 57 percent from three and 94 percent from the free throw line. Not to mention his 5.0 rebounds and 2.7 assists per game.
There is a lot to think about. And for Malone, on the sideline as their fourth straight loss was unfolding before him, was as good a place as any to do it.
