The Denver Nuggets: A Champion’s Hangover

The champion doesn’t look anything like the champion right now. His luck is that we are still in December, so there is still a long way to go before the playoffs for the title arrive and for the defeats to be dramatic. But now, at this point in the season, there is nothing in the Denver Nuggets of the team that marveled last season and that remains, if it puts all the pieces back in order, the great favorite to win the West and return to the Finals . From an initial 8-1, it has slipped to its current 14-9, 6-8 in fourteen games that includes three straight losses, the last against the Houston Rockets (106-114).

It was not a normal loss: the Nuggets had not lost at home (9-0 until this game) and the Rockets (0-8) had not won on the road. From that starting point, it was an improbable result, even more so if you add that there was a moment in which it seemed that the score could end up being scandalous: the Rockets led 78-103 already in the last quarter and just before a furious reaction, a fit of anger from some Nuggets who remembered for a moment who they are. They scored 18 points in a row (96-103) and forced the Rockets to save themselves from the personal line, thus scoring their final eleven points because they spent more than eight minutes without baskets in play (0/11 to close the game). That final rush of personnel ended up unsettling the Nuggets, including the expulsion of Jamal Murray.

In the same way that Nikola Jokic defines everything that his team is in victories, it is also being the great symptom of these defeats. He finished with 23 points, 16 rebounds and 5 assists but 9/26 shooting. Something unlike him, especially if it is linked to his 9/32 in the previous game, against the Clippers. In total, 18/58 in two nights (barely 31%) for a player who is currently heavy and out of tune, as strange as it may seem: “I’m not doing anything strange or throwing crazy shots. I’m doing what I always do, but they don’t come in,” he said after facing Alperen Sengun, the Turk in whom some see a center with enough talent and style to end up looking a lot like him.

Sengun finished with 17 points, 10 rebounds and 7 assists. A perfect complement for the points of Fred VanVleet (26) and Jalen Green, who finished with 25 and, above all, added 10 in a third quarter that ended up being decisive (26-40). That quarter, curiously, saw Jokic’s best minutes, who had gone into the break with a pyrrhic 1/10 in shots. Jamal Murray was less (21 points) and Michael Porter Jr was better than in other games (20 and 8 rebounds) but it was nothing to write home about either.

“It is my duty now to keep this group together, to make it move forward,” said Michael Malone after the game, who also ended up very angry with the referees. The Nuggets are nervous, unfocused, slow and clueless. With a champion’s hangover and bad physical sensations, without the synchronicity that makes it a delicious team, almost invincible in its best version. Right now a blurry shadow of what we know it can be but, going back to the beginning, we are in December. There is a lot left for everyone, including the champion.

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2023-12-09 08:09:17
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