Pack your bags. We’re going to Vegas!
According to the Westgate Las Vegas SuperBook, the Denver Nuggets’ 2015 win total has been set at 26.5 wins, tied for third lowest in the league, and if there’s even a dollar in your savings account, you need to be betting it on the over.
In fact, I’ve spent the last few weeks trying to come up with one reason why I shouldn’t be investing my entire future into this Nuggets season, and I’ve yet to come up with jack squat. The Nuggets winning at least 27 games is just about as sure of a bet as you’ll find in sports.
And here are three reasons why:
They CANNOT be worse than last year:
The second Brian Shaw started reading books on how to communicate with millennials, it was clear that the Denver Nuggets had reached a whole new level of dysfunction.
Does that look like a guy capable of leading an NBA team?
For a solid two months, the Nuggets were in a tailspin of epic embarrassment, both on and off the court. Whether it was Shaw rapping the scouting report, the team chanting “six weeks!,” the decision to rest healthy starters for no reason at all or losing 19 out of 21 games, the Nuggets may have been better off just not showing up for games.
And yet, after all that, they still won 30 games!
If Mike Malone and this revitalized roster can’t top that mark this season, it’ll be because a meteor landed on the Pepsi center, erasing the Nuggets franchise entirely.
This is a talented team:
Three years ago the Denver Nuggets won 57 games, earned the three-seed in the brutal Western Conference and lost to the Golden State Warriors, a team we now recognize to have been a budding super power.
The next season the Nuggets won 36 games and missed the playoffs for the first time in a decade.
What changed? Well, head coach George Karl was jettisoned out of town, Andre Iguodala spurned the Nuggets in favor of Warriors and Danilo Gallinari missed the next season-plus with a torn ACL. Other than that, not much.
Really, the Nuggets have remained a talented team despite two straight disappointing seasons; unfortunately, they had a coach who wasn’t capable of using the talent he was given.
But in Mike Malone, the Nuggets have a coach that gets it; they have a guy who understands that the only way to play basketball in Denver is fast.
It’s time for a new era of Denver Nuggets basketball, and the only way for them to do that is by getting back to their roots.
There’s no reason to tank:
When it comes to betting on the over-under of a bad team, I almost always lean towards the under for one critical reason: tanking.
In today’s NBA, there’s no reason to be okay; either you’re competing for a title or you’re tanking for a lottery pick. Once a team reaches mid-season and realizes they’re nowhere near the playoff picture, it’s in their best interest to lose as many games as possible to ensure they’re selecting early on draft night.
For the Nuggets, though, there’s no incentive to lose in 2016.
Thanks to the Carmelo Anthony trade, Denver has the right to swap picks with the New York Knicks this season, which means that as long as the Knicks continue to be a dumpster fire — something that’s always fun to root for — the Nuggets are free to be as good as they please and still reap the benefits of a lottery pick.