The Denver Nuggets dropped another winnable game in their quest to make this the most difficult season to watch in Nuggets history.
If you’ve read any of my rantings over the last few months, you’d be curious at how I can be calling Nikola Jokic a novelty one day and the savior of the franchise the next. You might wonder how I can find the good in bad performances. Maybe it seems a little odd that I am so quick to defend coaches.
Here’s the thing; I’m not an impartial observer of Nuggets basketball. I’m not objective, I’m a fan. Writing about the ebbs and flows of a Nuggets season helps me process it. I tend to express what I am seeing through the lens of just an ordinary fan.
Sometimes I feel like I’m seeing magic on this Nuggets roster. Sometimes it is beautiful. When it’s like that, it’s easy to forgive the odd loss here or there. It’s no problem to overlook bad performances.
Sometimes, though, it’s ugly and it’s dysfunctional and it defies description. When we write about the team, we are usually writing from the heart. That ugly, dysfunctional team prompts us to speculate on what is wrong, what could be fixed. There are so many good writers covering the Nuggets, but there are just a few story lines. We like to write fantasy pieces about absurd trade scenarios or our ideas on who should be playing and where. It’s how we process what our team is doing, it’s what we’d do with a magic wand.
What we saw in Memphis last night and what we’ve seen lately from the Nuggets has no logic. The team’s performance and proposed solutions have been covered and then some the past two-weeks.
Did we learn anything specific last night?
Here are some takeaways: