The Denver Nuggets suffered a tough loss Friday night to the Brooklyn Nets, and coach Michael Malone believes his team needs to take a hard look at themselves.
“Our defense was awful,” Coach Malone told the media following the team’s loss. “It was a joke how badly we defended.”
The Nuggets gave up 63 points to the Brooklyn Nets in the first half of the game, and it didn’t get much better in the final two quarters. Poor perimeter defense and a simple lack of effort doomed the Nuggets from the start.
“When are we going to learn our lesson?” Malone said. “You cannot pick and choose when your going to defend, and when you do that, I don’t care who your playing, you’ll get beat.”
Defense has been the deciding factor in not just Friday’s game, but every loss the team has suffered since the All-Star break.
The Nuggets are allowing an average of 110 points per game since the NBA returned from Toronto and have held just one opponent under triple digits in their eight games played.
That, as Malone astutely stated, is not a winning formula. Unless your averaging 110-plus points per game yourself, that’s an automatic loss. And given that Danilo Gallinari, the Nuggets’ leading scorer, is now out for the foreseeable future, it’s hard to imagine that’s the path the Nuggets want to go down.
Not to mention, it doesn’t help when you’re bench is getting outscored by nearly 20 points.
While both Joffrey Lauvergne and D.J. Augustin had solid performances, the rest of the bench did not. Darrell Aurthur had zero points in 25 minutes, and Will Barton only managed to put up nine, shooting 4 of 17 from the field.
As a whole, the Nuggets put up a fight. They grabbed more boards, made more free throws, stole more balls, blocked more shots, scored more in the paint and dominated on the fast break. But it was the little things, the things that drive a coach mad, that lead to Denver’s seventh loss in their last 10 games.
It was the Nets who kept calm and delivered in big spots, while the Nuggets were erratic; their performance was filled with peaks and valleys.
Denver had more than one opportunity to close out the game, and each time they floundered. When you shoot 23 percent from beyond the arc, foul a three-point shooter with under 10 seconds remaining, and turn the ball over 15 times, you’ve basically dug your own grave.
Like coach Malone said, the team has not learned their lesson; to play in this league, you need to play hard for 48 minutes, not four to eight minute stretches.
Until they do that, expect to see a mirror image of what went down on Friday night for the rest of the season.
