Denver Nuggets NBA Power Rankings: Week 17

Each week, Nugg Love takes a look around the web to see where the Denver Nuggets fall in the latest version of the NBA Power Rankings

After weeks of build up to reach a season high in the last edition of the NBA Power Rankings, the Denver Nuggets go and blow all the momentum.

Winners of four out of six heading into the break, it seemed like the extra rest, health, and chemistry coming out of All-Star weekend was going to propel them to the next level. Instead, the time off let some rust set in and their recent success took a huge step back.

After nine days off, the Nuggets headed to Sacramento to take on the Kings, a team with as much dysfunction as there could be right now. After kind of but the not really firing their head coach, they decided to let go of the assistant coach that George Karl brought with him. Strategic.

Even though the Nuggets were able to nab 34 points off of 22 turnovers, they had no answer for Demarcus Cousins as he went off for 37 points and 20 rebounds. The Nuggets had some solid success on offense, but similarly to their struggles in January, their defense threw away the game.

On a major plus side, newly acquired D.J. Augustin played great in 19 minutes off the bench. He has the potential to be a real difference maker in a few wins this season.

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The defensive woes continued Sunday as they gave up 121 points to the Boston Celtics. The Nuggets got torched by All-Star Isaiah Thomas, Avery Bradley, and Evan Turner.

Nikola Jokic did continue his growth in prolific fashion as he went for 23 points and 13 rebounds. I expect to see a ton more of these types of games the rest of the season and hopefully that leads to plenty of wins.

The Nuggets did not come out of the break with a hot start, but that’s nothing new. They’ve been slow starters all year and it is not a direct indication of what’s to come. Let’s look to see if the experts recognize this trend or if the rough weekend knocked all the air out of the sails.

No dice for Mike Malone and the gang. A serious free fall was in effect as the Denver Nuggets had the biggest fall from any team this week.

After hitting 18^th on CBS Sports’ power rankings last week, the Nuggets moved into the middle class with some incredible momentum. This week they fell EIGHT spots to 26^th and all the way to 13^th in the west. That puts them in front of only the Suns and Lakers, two teams they would have to try really really really hard to fall behind at this point.

Matt Moore felt that the defensive woes continuing outweigh the success the young stars keep experiencing.

John Schuhmann has one consoling factor though. The Nuggets have had the third hardest schedule in the NBA to date. That means they get some “softer” games over the next couple of months. Unfortunately, that schedule doesn’t start this week.

They get a quick rematch against the Sacramento Kings Tuesday night. They can’t let Demarcus Cousins run wild again, but an overall team defense needs to show some improvement. This will be the first chance for JaKarr Sampson to show Coach Malone what he’s got.

The Nuggets have to head to L.A. to take on the Clippers for the back-to-back. It wouldn’t surprise me if Denver keeps it closer than expected. They have sort of played that game all year in unlikely scenarios like this one, on the road with zero rest. If only Blake Griffin would have been traded to Denver, this would have gotten much more attention.

The Nuggets head to Dallas for their second game against the Mavericks Friday. The Mavericks are losers of five of their last seven, but held Denver to 81 points in their first outing. However, a healthy and more experienced team will show up in the arena Friday night so it should be a much different story. I think there is a good chance that the Nuggets play a great game heading into their weekend off.

Coming off two losses after the All-Star break and matching up against teams they haven’t had much success against, the goodwill built since the beginning of January may be completely gone by the end of the week.

Next: Nuggets Rebuilding with 2nd Rounders

As dismal as it sounds, that’s sort of the way it should be. We will see if these guys actually have the fight that we have been crediting them with all season. A couple gutty wins this week would go a long ways.