State of the Denver Nuggets

As I've mentioned numerous times before in this blog, I still consider Denver to be my hometown even though I currently reside in Houston. Therefore my "home" teams are still the Denver sports franchises (Rockies, Broncos, Nuggets, Avs). So when news breaks (no pun intended) that a Nuggets player has a broken hand and will miss 3-4 weeks, this stands out to me. When that player happens to be their best player, Carmelo Anthony, this is a big deal.

The Nuggets (24-12, #2 in the Western Conference) have been a completely different team this season since the acquisition of Chauncey Billups for "me-first" star Allen Iverson. Don't get me wrong, Allen Iverson is likely a Hall of Famer and in his prime he was a franchise-defining player that could carry a team single-handed. But now, Iverson still has the score-first mindset but without the remaining gas in the tank to be a game-changing player. The Nuggets knew this, and I have to believe the Pistons knew this, too, when they agreed to the trade. The decision for the trade from the Detroit perspective seems pretty clear: they knew their window was almost closed, with The Big Three in Boston and LeBron dominating in Cleveland, in the Eastern Conference Detroit, with its roster at the start of the year, was a second-round playoff team at best.

The choice to move Billups makes perfect sense in the salary cap era. Billups was an aging (while still very effective) guard with 3 years left on his contract, while Iverson was the same aging (yet much less effective) guard with 1 year left on his huge contract. In other words, the Pistons had to decide whether to be above average this year before potentially losing Rasheed Wallace in free agency, or be average this year with the chance to clear Wallace and Iverson off the cap next year and buy some new, younger talent. They chose the latter. We'll never know if they could have made a push this year, one more (last?) time, but we will know in a year or two if the path they chose was correct.

As for the Nuggets, Billups is the perfect player for them right now. It's been an interesting road that has led to this point for Denver. The first incarnation of the Nuggets with Anthony was their most effective run-and-gun style, with Andre Miller manning the point and Marcus Camby, a great defender with enough "hops" to be an effective alley-oop target, playing center. The addition of Kenyon Martin was questionable at this point, as his defense was good but his offense didn't seem particularly suited to the up-and-down the court style. When Melo was suspended for 15 games for an ill-advised cheap shot on a player in a fight against the Knicks, the Nuggets decided that they needed more scoring to replace him, and that a second scorer would give the team more offensive versatility in the long run. This led to the trade of Miller for Iverson.

At first, Iverson's time in Denver was a big success, but as had been the case throughout Anthony's young career, the team simply wasn't good enough defensively or consistent enough offensively to compete in the slow-it-down, every possession counts postseason. Again, Denver was one-and-done in the playoffs. So the Nuggets finally decided that a new direction was needed. When Denver traded Camby for effectively nothing this offseason (officially the rights to swap second-round picks with the Clips in 2010... aka NOTHING), it looked like a clear cost-cutting move as Camby was a highly-paid player at a position where they already had another highly-paid, yet younger, player in Nene. What accidentally happened was the Nuggets put themselves in a position to completely shift gears as a team.

While losing Camby significantly hurt the team's defense and rebounding, the Nuggets have been finding over the last two years or so that both Nene and K-Mart are becoming competent defenders and managing to stay healthy, a huge issue with both. Both are also showing to be plenty competent offensive players in a half-court set, meaning that the missing ingredient was no longer a scorer, but instead a point guard that could actually make plays for his teammates. Allen Iverson, this was not. So when the Pistons decided it was time to make a change (rumors are this trade was discussed in the offseason, although it wasn't consummated until a couple games into the regular season), the Nuggets jumped at it and George Karl, a solid coach that has always liked solid point guards that could defend, got the player he'd been seeking since coming to Denver.

So if Chauncey is so important to the Nuggets' success, why am I so worried about the injury to Carmelo? Simply put, Carmelo is still the heart of this team. One thing I have definitely seen over the first 2 months of the season is that every member of the U.S. Olympic basketball team, particularly the starters, from Melo to D-Wade to LeBron to Chris Paul to Dwight Howard, has shown a dramatic increase in both confidence and leadership ability. Each of these guys bought fully into the team concept and it was refreshing to see the way they functioned in Beijing. Now, this has spilled over into the NBA season as these players are all leading top teams in the NBA.

What's my point in all of this? Maybe I'm just trying to justify this being more than just another Nuggets team that wins in the regular season only. Or maybe there's more here than that. Maybe, just maybe, the Nuggets have finally found the combination that they've been needing all these years. The next few weeks will be very telling, because the Nuggets have to at least maintain a .500 record while Melo is out to avoid losing serious ground in the brutal Western Conference. But if ever there was a Nuggets team that could survive time without Melo, this just might be it.

If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions for the blog, please post below or I can be reached at chrisf884@gmail.com. Thanks for reading.