TORONTO -- Brian Shaw was blunt. On Monday at the Air Canada Centre, the Denver Nuggets head coach said he had no idea what would happen that night. How could he? The Nuggets have lived through six straight losses and five straight wins already this season. Entering their matchup with the Toronto Raptors, they’d lost three in a row. While they possess the talent to compete for a playoff spot, they are the most unpredictable team in the NBA.
Shaw hadn’t gotten over what happened on Sunday. Against the Atlanta Hawks, the Nuggets fell behind by 11 points at the end of the first quarter and it got worse in the second. Before halftime, the Hawks only committed one whopping turnover -- Shaw’s words -- when guard Kent Bazemore stepped out of bounds. Denver made a spirited but insufficient second-half run, with reserve forward Alonzo Gee receiving the bulk of Shaw's praise for it.
Gee might be moved into the starting lineup soon, Shaw said. He also said the organization needed to think about adding another point guard in order to lessen the load on Ty Lawson. That stuff was the news; when he criticized his players’ level of energy, the media covering the Nuggets didn’t even blink.
“The effort is what has to be consistent and [the Raptors’] is,” Shaw said, adding that Atlanta and Washington, who’d also just beaten Denver on this road trip, bring the required intensity on a nightly basis. “They’re playing their roles. We do it inconsistently, and that’s the difference.”
In his playing career and as an Indiana Pacers assistant coach, Shaw was never around a team that struggled in this particular way. Part of it, he said, was that the Nuggets have constantly had guys going in and out of the lineup. He sounded disappointed, though, when discussing what ails this group. Shaw said that “it makes you feel like you’re not really coaching basketball sometimes” when you’re focusing on effort rather than Xs and Os.
“There are going to be nights where shots don’t fall, there’s going to be nights when you just don’t have it,” Shaw continued. “But our team is just hard to figure out … we’ll play great for five games -- which we had been doing -- then we turn around and it’s like we forgot what we were doing to [earn] those wins.”
The biggest thing he wanted was to build on the second-half performance in Atlanta. Instead, Denver gave up 35 points in the first quarter, forcing no turnovers and allowing Toronto shoot 68 percent from the field. The Raptors took a 17-point lead midway through the second period, and from there the Nuggets had a hell of a hill to climb.
They managed to get back into it, thanks to Lawson’s playmaking, Arron Afflalo’s shotmaking and a whole lot of missed Toronto 3-pointers. After taking a fourth-quarter lead, though, Denver failed to get a shot up on two crucial, late possessions, and allowed Raptors forward Patrick Patterson an open look on a 3-pointer to tie the game. Shaw generally liked what he saw defensively after halftime, but wasn’t at all pleased with the position in which the Nuggets put themselves.
“That’s been our problem not only on this trip, but the entire season,” he said. “We dig a hole for ourselves and we don’t start defending until the second half and get desperate.”
From game to game, quarter to quarter, even possession to possession, you can’t count on Denver right now. It’s not even mid-December yet, but this year has felt like a rollercoaster. In the losing locker room in Toronto, Afflalo, Lawson and Darrell Arthur spent a few frustrated minutes talking among themselves about what went wrong.
“It’s tough,” Lawson. “From emotions to even just winning and losing games, one day you’re feeling bad, you’re 1-6. And [then] you’re back even, what, 8-8? Was it 8-8?”
It was actually 9-8 just a week earlier, and now the Nuggets are 9-12. Lawson said they know the type of team they are at full strength, but it's different with players being hurt. Kenneth Faried, JaVale McGee, Nate Robinson, Randy Foye and Jusuf Nurkic were all unavailable against the Raptors. Danilo Gallinari, who missed all of last season because of an ACL tear, clearly isn’t himself yet. When Denver doesn’t have its depth, it’s harder to play to its strengths.
“I feel like we don’t know our identity right now because players playing right now don’t really know each other on the court,” Lawson said. “So it’s tough to naturally go through our plays, calling plays, for me, ‘cause I don’t know who’s going to know what position, where he wants to be at, things like that. That’s what we gotta deal with when we got injury bugs and stuff like that. I know a lot of teams are not dealing with this too much.”
The Nuggets, according to Afflalo, need to get back to the basics in terms of sharing the ball and playing solid defense. He added that their confidence will improve when they start seeing more positive results.
“We started out slow, then we picked up the pace and now we’re faltering a little bit again,” Afflalo said. “We just gotta try to turn it around as fast as possible.”
Are they capable of doing so? The way things are going, no one can answer that with any degree of certainty.
