What began with an injury to defensive lynchpin Kenyon Martin has devolved into a potentially season-killing downturn for the Denver Nuggets. Follow me as we trace the Nuggets’ path from 1-seed contender in the West to potential losers in their own division.
- Image by Getty Images via Daylife
At first, the Nuggets took a Feburary 3rd injury to Kenyon Martin’s left knee in stride.
Denver rattled off six straight wins, including an impressive 119-90 blowout of Oklahoma City the night Martin went down. A series of stand-out offensive performances had the Nuggets mowing down lesser opposition versus Indiana, Portland, Minnesota, New Orleans & Memphis. Denver scored 110+ points in each of those games, with the exception of a 102-95 thrashing of the Hornets that wasn’t actually that close.
Then the Nuggets ran into a major roadblock in Houston, where referees took over a good game and made it a free-throw shooting contest in which Denver took half as many shots from the charity stripe.
That narrow 123-125 loss ended a great road trip on a sour note, and even as the Nuggets dispatched the Wizards and Hornets at home you could tell that something was amiss. Washington, crippled by the loss of Gilbert Arenas to a weapons charge and subsequent season-ending suspension, and New Orleans, missing their offensive catalyst in Chris Paul, both worked the Nuggets deep into the 4th Quarters of games that should have been decided at the half.
Enter the Milwaukee Bucs, who came into Denver on a hot streak and looking to continue their ascent up the playoff ladder in the East.
The Bucs got to their Denver hotel at 3am the day of the game after a grueling double-overtime win in Sacramento the night before.  After a quick nap, some lunch and a light practice, Milwaukee proceeded to take the Nuggets to task, outworking a rested Denver team in its own house. Chauncey Billups and Carmelo Anthony both scored 29 points, but when the Nuggets found themselves down late in the 4th Quarter and in need of defensive stops they came up well short.
Three nights later the Nuggets entered Madison Square Gardens heavy favorites to dispatch the New York Knicks who traded away half their team in a series of salary dumps in the latter half of the season. Instead, the plodding Knicks caught the Nuggets consistently asleep on defense, running routine back-door screens for scores with the regularity of a Swiss watch. (The remaining Knicks are auditioning for Lebron James’ services next season, and the Nuggets clearly underestimated them.)
Freeze the recap… here’s where the Kenyon Martin injury finally caught up to Denver.
Ever since Martin switched from a jersey to a pinstripe suit, the Nuggets have been forced to get creative with their frontcourt defense. Forwards Joey Graham and Malik Allen equal approximately one half of one competent NBA PF on a good day, and Johan Petro gets lost on defense so easily that the 7-footer might as well be a 5’5†geriatric for all the good he does guarding the paint.
Petro was actually very effective at first… until opposing offenses got past his size and realized that he could be fooled into stepping out of position with a single pass.
A nifty trick that worked for a while was rotating Petro out to the free throw line on defense and bringing Chauncey Billups down deep into the paint. Chauncey’s quick hands were far more useful that Johan’s thick skull.  Petro worked well as a glorified road-block for a while, but the experiment also resulted in more fouls for Billups and a drop-off in defensive rebounding. Plus, these NBA coaches are pretty smart, and New York was the first team to really take advantage of the guard-in-the-paint defense.
Now, the Nuggets could have beaten both Milwaukee and New York if their offense had showed up like it did in the seven games after Martin’s injury. The Bucs only netted 102 points, and the Knicks dropped 109. Maintaining that 110-point pace would have turned two ugly losses into two ugly wins. Keep in mind, these teams did not out-talent the Nuggets, they outworked them. JR Smith led the Nuggets’ bench in awfulness and dumb fouls in an awful game full of dumb fouls.
One night and a couple states later, the Nuggets found themselves in Boston to face the Celtics. Boston has struggled late in the season, but they entered the game one win away from clinching an Eastern Conference playoff birth.
This game looked bad for the Nuggets from the get-go.
Denver played tired, under-motivated, and just plain lazy for much of the game. After a terrible first 10 minutes of the 3rd Quarter, the Nuggets actually scraped their way back within 7 points of Boston going into the final frame. But the Celtics, clearly having watched the middling Knicks eviscerate Denver’s low post the night before, simply took the ball in along the baseline for a series of easy scores to begin the 4th… game over.
In the end, Denver was tormented by a team that averages 99 points per game. The Celtics notched 113 in the contest for an easy win. In a reversal of roles and fortunes, Boston held the Nuggets to 99 points.
Now the Nuggets are knee-deep in a five-game road trip with nothing to show for it except hurt pride on national television. Next they’ll face a scrappy Toronto team, a Magic squad that may be the best all-around club in the East, and the same Dallas Mavericks that just leap-frogged Denver for the 2-seed in the West.
Just to revisit how bad it is:
The Mavs are going to keep winning through the remainder of their much easier schedule, so unless the Nuggets pull out a win at Dallas they’ve probably just lost the West’s 2-seed and home-court advantage throughout the road to LA.
Utah tied the Nuggets at 47-25 with a win Wednesday night. That means the Jazz, who are healthy and playing very well, are the new favorites to win the Northwest Division.
Even the Suns are within striking distance with just one more loss than Denver.  An inauspicious omen of what may come: the Nuggets’ last game of the season is in Phoenix.
And it actually gets worse…
Kenyon Martin is almost definitely out for the remainder of the regular season, and there’s no guarantee that he’ll be back for the playoffs. Head Coach George Karl is having surgery to remove blood clots in his legs that resulted from chemotherapy on the cancerous growths in his neck and throat. There’s a good chance that the inexperience Adrian Dantley will run the Nuggets’ bench right up to the playoffs.
At least Carmelo Anthony continues to play outstanding basketball at both ends of the court.
So what does it all mean? The Nuggets are slumping, every other contender is healthy and pressing forward, and there’s no help on the horizon. Gut-check time in Denver.
