The Nuggets’ championship hopes seem to hinge on whether they’ll be able to score 140 every night in the playoffs.
No, that is not a healthy lifestyle.
Offense is gluttony in Denver. It’s easy to take for granted how effortlessly scoring comes to Nikola Jokic, Jamal Murray and everyone in their orbit. Even amid some recent floor-spacing turbulence, the Nuggets boast the best offensive rating in the Western Conference (second-best overall). They’re on track to finish this season as the third team in NBA history and the first in 40 years to average 31 assists.
But they’re consuming calories without burning them. Forty assists went to waste Saturday in a vexing 126-123 loss to the tanking Washington Wizards, because playing defense required an urgency and attentiveness that Denver has lacked through 68 games.
“We can’t keep saying the same thing after every game,” coach Michael Malone said following Jordan Poole’s game-winning 3-pointer. “We got lucky last night to beat the Lakers. We got lucky to beat a team that was severely limited in terms of their normal rotation. And tonight, we didn’t get lucky.”
“I’m not surprised,” Jokic said. “… Because this is what we do. Since I came here, probably. We win against the big teams and we lose against the teams with bad records.”
After a dizzying week that included a 13-point road win over the best team in the West and a home loss to worst team in the East, the Nuggets (43-25) have fallen to 22nd in defensive rating this season at 114.9. They rank 26th since the All-Star break with 120 points allowed per 100 possessions.
They’re slow to get back in transition. They’re apathetic at rotating out to shooters. They struggle to keep slippery guards from penetrating. They over-help, but the help isn’t resolute enough to be effective in many cases, just noncommital enough to leave an open man accessible. They get sliced up by back cuts. They leave their feet on shot fakes. They don’t force turnovers.
They don’t strike fear into opponents’ hearts.
“I feel like we’ve shown that we can guard, but it’s not consistent. It’s not for 48 minutes right now,” Michael Porter Jr. said. “We’ve gotta figure out how we can put more complete games together and take something away — either take away the paint and give up more 3s or take away the 3s and give up the paint. Guys are good. Teams have good play-makers, so in this day and age, I feel like you’ve gotta choose kind of how your defense is going to be, and choose what you’re gonna live with. And I feel like right now we’re giving up a lot of both.”
He’s correct. The Nuggets give up 50.8 points in the paint per game, which is eighth-worst in the league. They also allow 14.1 made 3s per game, ranking fifth-worst. Entering Saturday’s game, they had allowed a league-leading 248 shots inside the arc categorized as “wide open” by league data, meaning the closest defender was more than six feet away. They had also allowed 1,260 wide open 3-point attempts, cracking the bottom 10.
“I don’t care who you’re playing — the Thunder, the Wizards — you’ve gotta find a way to bring some defense,” a frustrated and repetitive Malone said. “We have not been doing so.”
Can they win the NBA Finals like this? Only two of the last 20 champions have ranked outside the top 10 in regular-season defensive rating. The 2023 Nuggets were the lowest-finishing of them all at 15th. Twelve of the last 20 champs have ranked in the top five. The Celtics were second last year.
“I think who you are in the regular season, that’s who you are in the playoffs,” Jokic said. “I think you cannot flip a switch. I think that doesn’t really exist.”
As Porter said, the Nuggets have shown flashes. They are conveniently, frustratingly, crucially the league’s ninth-best defense in both the third and fourth quarters.
But they are dead last in the first frame.
They thrive in spurts. They regress to a sobering mean as those spurts become full games, full weeks, full months. On Saturday, defense caught up with them, Poole’s 35-foot shot representing a sort of karmic destiny at the end of a dismal back-to-back.
The Nuggets stumbled into a three-way tie with Memphis and Houston. With a win, they would have remained alone in second place. With the deflating loss, they are only 1.5 games ahead of fifth.
“If we’re going to be a team that is serious about making the postseason and being a team that can win a round, win another round,” Malone said, “if we don’t start defending for four quarters, we’re never gonna get that opportunity.”