Before the start of the season, the Denver Nuggets were one of a handful of teams considered as a contender to make it out of the Western Conference. After all, they were coming off a 54-win season, which resulted in a first-round playoff win, and had a legitimate MVP candidate on their team in Nikola Jokic.
Then the season started, and while the Nuggets got off to a fast 3-0 start, two of those games were close contests to inferior teams. They needed overtime to put away the Phoenix Suns, and only beat the winless Sacramento Kings by seven points.
You can't complain much about a 3-0 start, but then they went on to lose their first game of the season to the Dallas Mavericks on the second night of a back-to-back, and gave the New Orleans Pelicans their first win of the season on Thursday. It's safe to say Denver coach Mike Malone is not thrilled about how things have gone for his team to start the season.
"We're a great talk team. We can talk before the season starts about all the things we want to accomplish, and we want to be a contending team," Malone said to reporters after the loss. "It's all bulls---. Don't tell me about it, show me. And right now we've got a lot of guys that aren't showing me much."
The best performance the Nuggets got was from Michael Porter Jr., who made his long-awaited NBA debut and finished the night with 15 points and four rebounds on 5 of 8 from the field. While it was a promising debut from the rookie, that's about the only positive from Denver's loss.
Not a single starter on the Nuggets posted a positive plus/minus value, and as a team, Denver gave up a whopping 37 fast-break points. They allowed the Pelicans to shoot 53.2 percent from the field, and 45.5 percent from beyond the arc, and at one point the Nuggets were down by 22 points to a Pelicans team that had three players score 20-plus points.
"I'm embarrassed," Malone said. "That was an embarrassing effort defensively. Gave up 37 fast-break points. You can give all the transition defense rules that you want. To me, transition defense boils down to one thing -- effort. Get back. You can tell them. You can lead a horse to water, whatever analogy you want to use. We did not get back."
The Nuggets played without Will Barton due to a left toe inflammation. While Barton might not have helped much on the defensive end of the floor, his scoring and energy would have boosted the Nuggets greatly. Through four games Barton is averaging 14 points on 42.9 percent from 3-point range, including a 19-point performance in Denver's loss to Dallas earlier in the week.
While the starters didn't show Malone much, he was impressed by the effort given by his bench unit, with four bench players scoring in double digits.
"I thought guys off the bench played hard, gave effort. We gotta find ways to get our starters to play the same way, because they're not playing like that right now. They're just not."
The Nuggets will a day to figure out what they need to do in order to pull out a road win against a 2-2 Orlando Magic team that they outmatch in nearly every way on paper. It's still early in the season, but a loss like the one Denver just endured against New Orleans is a major wake up call for a team that wants to be considered a real threat in the Western Conference.
