Why Are the Nuggets Resting Players?
By Eric Meyer
The Denver Nuggets played the Playoff bound Grizzlies in Memphis last night and the decision was made to rest their three best players (Kenneth Faried, Ty Lawson and Danilo Gallinari) for the game after the team had reeled of six wins in eight games since the firing of Brian Shaw, and promotion of Melvin Hunt to interim coach.
There has been a small firestorm of reaction about this situation across the NBA Mediasphere and I thought I would drop my own opinion on this great forum we like to call Nugg Love.
As many of you who follow Nugg Love know, I have been a Nuggets fan since 1975. There have been other occasions where the Nuggets did things similar to this, but not in the way this particular incident was executed.
I did a real quick run through the first five picks of the draft since 2011 and I found that only two players drafted with those picks (Damian Lillard was the 6th pick for the Portland Blazers) are making “star-like” contributions to their team. That would be the Cleveland Cavaliers Kyrie Irving and the New Orleans Pelicans Anthony Davis.
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Some names that were drafted in the first five spots from 2011-2014 are: Derrick Williams, Thomas Robinson, Anthony Bennett, Otto Porter, Cody Zeller and Alex Len — not exactly household names just yet.
My point is that tanking games is a crap shoot. Bad decisions are made in the draft every year. The Nuggets (other than Carmelo Anthony and a couple of others) do not have a great history of choosing future stars in the draft.
If the Nuggets had wanted to tank and that was the reason they fired Shaw in the first place, they should have passed this along to Melvin Hunt. He may not have taken the interim job had he known that the team was not going to give him the best chance to keep the job on a permanent basis because they wanted to tank the balance of the season.
Melvin Hunt wants to be an NBA Head Coach and the only audition he may ever get is right now as the Nuggets interim coach. He will not show well to other NBA teams looking for coaches if he ends up 6-17 in the 23 games he gets to coach for this year. The team was fun to watch again and some fans were heading back to Pepsi Center to see the team execute the up-tempo offense and get back to what makes teams at altitude successful.
It has been well documented that none of the players wanted, or needed, the rest. The effort that has been shown since Hunt took over has been nothing less than stellar. Whether the Nuggets grab the third pick or the eigth pick this year, they are not going to find that superstar in this year’s draft. There are no players that are considered can’t miss NBA stars and only two to three players that even rate as being potentially really good NBA players.
Win out the season, see what you have in your young players but give full effort and don’t rest players to get more friggin ping-pong balls in the lottery. It doesn’t make any sense to all of a sudden start resting your best players after a 6-2 run that made the NBA game fun in Denver again.
This shows once again that the front office of this team has no idea what their plan is and they are changing it day-to-day based on ridiculous decisions that make absolutely no sense. I don’t know if it’s Tim Connelly that needs to be criticized for this or if these decisions are coming from a higher power, but whomever is calling the shots in the penthouse at Pepsi Center is not showing the ability to make a plan and stick to it. It really appears that there is no plan.
Are we going to wait for the offseason and then they decide to hire Hunt full time? Are we just waiting on the return of Make D’Antoni to whip up his own type of magical high altitude offense? This season has been one of the weirdest I have witnessed in my 40 years as a Nuggets fan. The Denver brass has got to get together and establish a plan going forward or we are going to be watching a disjointed, dysfunctional team for the foreseeable future here in the Mile High City.
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