Return of Nuggets 1: Forum Comments From Late July, 2008

Forum commentary I did from March 2008 through July 2008, when I didn't have enough time for the detailed and extensive reports I like to do, is being posted in early October, 2008. The primary themes are how the Nuggets are blowing a great (and expensive!) opportunity to play the game of basketball in such a way that respects the sport and that takes as much advantage as possible of who they have on the roster. The 2006-09 Nuggets have turned out to be an excellent case study of how not to run a basketball team; many things you should not do if you are a basketball manager or coach can be identified from what the Nuggets actually did during these years.

In these comments, do not look for the usual huge amount of detail and proof that you see in the ordinary releases here at Nuggets 1. Some of this is more like everyday conversation than like top quality sports writing. On the other hand, some of the comments do include some detailed reasoning and proof that I pride myself on in the primary reports I release.
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LATE JULY 2008 FORUM COMMENTARY ON THE NUGGETS, ESPECIALLY ABOUT THEIR MISTAKES

This is more commentary following the Camby giveaway. See also the immediately preceding post, (posted on the same day) titled: "Return of Nuggets 1: Forum Comments From Middle of July, 2008"

Every time I read a Hollinger article all the way through I think he is more of a loony than before. In this gem, he endorses the apparent Nuggets crash and burn plan of going in one year flat from one extreme to the other financially. It's a backhanded compliment, because he says the only way the Camby offloading makes any sense at all is if you realize that the C Anthony-Iverson thing was a horrible mistake. (With compliments like that, who needs criticisms?)

So he talks about the Nuggets possibly going under the cap, and the possibility of their using the trade exception in 2009. He's silent as to the odds of that working out but believe me, he will be the first to criticize if it doesn't work out.

Hollinger also contradicts himself as he often does. First he claims that the Nuggets gain from the offloading of Camby. Then in the last 3 paragraphs, he goes into how the Nuggets are devastated by this move in basketball terms, and are heading for the "second tier" of the Conference.

Which is it Hollinger? He really should make his mind up in advance, so he doesn't write such a mealy mouthed article.
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Now we know that the Nuggets really were exploring Melo trades, no matter what they say in public, and no matter what they told him and his agent. They had the carving knife out from day one of the off season.

A Melo trade was a serious possibility, as I said before, though at the time I said that I didn't know what I know now, so I wasn't totally sure of it at the time I first said it.

What do you think phil77 you think Melo is going to stay if there are major losing seasons, or will he want to go?
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If the Nuggets realized that rebuilding is needed after they fell into the trap of using Iverson the same way the 76'ers did, then I give them credit for that at least.

But I can not figure out for the life of me why the Nuggets did not want a draft pick this year if they are truly now in rebuilding

The obvious best guess, as I said, is that Mr. Kroenke is consolidating his finances due to the rough and threatening economy. Maybe even for someone like him, times can be tough?
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Just about any other way of moving Camby would have been better than this, other than dumping him in a river somewhere.

As just one example, the Nuggets could have traded Camby and their first round draft pick for a higher draft pick, and then use that to draft one of the best centers available in the draft. That deal would be weighted in favor of the other team, but would not be a giveaway. Under this scenario, the Nuggets would get a promising but young replacement for Camby, and get substantial payroll relief at the same time.

The Nuggets saying that they needed to dump Camby because of an immediate need for huge payroll relief is nothing more than meatball surgery.
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Well, if the Nuggets could not find a team with payroll space, they should have waited until they could. It's not really difficult. Find a team that has cap space, offer them a deal that is lopsided in their favor, and avoid dumping Camby in the river. Get something for him, for gods sakes.

The Nuggets, whether they admit it publicly or not, have gone into rebuilding without exhausting the possibilities with their present high talent roster, though that may sound ironic coming from someone who had lost faith in them ever doing that. But I never asked them to admit they were failures in managing this roster, as they now have.

To me, the front office and the coaches in effect admitting they could not make the 2007-08 roster, one of the NBA's best, work out, before exhausting their efforts, is as bad as them not being able to make the roster work out in the first place! At least try to do it! You might get lucky, for one thing. AI might have decided to pass more on his own for example.

All of this raises the question: why did they in the first place spend the big bucks, including the big luxury tax, if there was a possibility they would short circuit the project and dismantle the team before making certain that the expenditure of all that money was not going to work out? Now the Nuggets have more or less wasted the money they spent on the big salary players and on the luxury tax, by not waiting long enough to get much of a return.

If they had given it one more year, they could have at the very least attracted more big names to be interested in playing in Denver, similar to the way Ron Artest was interested last year. But now that the team is being carved up, which good players are going to be willing to cut the Nuggets a little salary slack in order to be able to play with the mighty Nuggets? No one. To get anyone to play in Denver now, the Nuggets have to pony up and offer an extra several million dollars compared with what it might have been.

In other words, the Nuggets are signaling to the League and all of its players that they are not a truly front line, contending franchise, and those top players and their agents will respond accordingly. The Nuggets are reversing their investment before getting any return on it, with the snubbing of Ron Artest being part of that self destructive process.

But worse still, and this may be the most relevant point at this juncture, the Nuggets are screwing up the rebuilding in its early stages, Getting nothing for Camby (and nothing for Najera) is to say the least not a good start for the rebuilding. Repeatedly getting nothing for something is not going to get you anywhere, no matter how many hypothetical payroll razzmatazz possibilities you want to discuss for the future.

The trade exception is nothing more than an option for a team to acquire a new player and new salary and go over the cap at the same time. It doesn't mean you get the player for free if you use it, which is the way some posters make it sound sometimes. You have to acquire that player somehow, and you have to pay his salary too, the "trade exception" thing is just an NBA payroll accounting rule.
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Someone really smart and correct made an on point list:

I agree i'm hoping something big is in the works. Because right now this brain trust is just stupid to me.

1.Sign Reggie Evans to more than he was worth, then dump him for a far worse player to save money FROM THEIR SIGNING
2.Sign Nene to $60 million when he hadnt proved anything, and there were no teams with cap space that would have came close to offering it.
3.Trade our PG for AI but instead of making AI a PG who sets up his team they move him to SG but still mandate he controls the ball 20 seconds out of every posession.
4.Not make one dent in the draft, though some of the players we have drafted and traded for other teams have done pretty well.
5.Keep a coach that is not a fit for this team at all
6.Let eddie go because we have no money, then after he signs dump a bunch of salary for absolutely nothing. Not even a second round pick, nothing.
7.Future $7 mil a year deal that JR will get only to sit on the bench while AI/Chucky/Carter run the show
8.Say stupid s**t like "its a chess move". Yeah Memphis was playing Chess when they gave away gasol for nothing too.

I can understand if we said that we needed to clear salary and start over, but the majority of the salary issues we have were created by this front office, Kenyon is the only hold over, the other dumb contracts are on these guys. Wark/Bearup/Chapman clearly do not know what they are doing at this point.

My response was add to an already great commentary:

Excellent list; but now you have to at the least add #9: the Camby dumping.

The JR acquisition for almost nothing and the AI acquisition, and a few other minor positives, are swamped by these negatives. The front office has failed overall.
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Someone made a joke about J.R. Smith:

Sure...he could be worth 10 million next season. or he could run over david stern's granddaughters puppy while smoking a joint and be banished from the nba for life.

I added:

Seriously, another risk for him is an injury, for example from a fluke landing on a dunk, from another neck tackle, or from trying to fly like a bird with his vehicle.
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Well it was a glass full or glass half empty situation. On one hand, those who think strategically and who are basketball fanatics could tell that, the way the Nuggets were managing their team, they were never going to succeed, at least insofar as the playoffs. So if you look at it that way, as I usually do, you would say "alright, this is a failure; end it and stop paying the luxury tax for no reason immediately."

On the other hand, you could look at the glass as half full, and if you did, the Nuggets had no right to consider themselves to be at a logical dead end, and to short circuit the Melo/AI/Luxury Tax era. Consider:

1. From a what we officially know perspective, there hasn't been one word, nor one hint of a word, in public, about the Nuggets reaching an end to their project to become a real contender in the West. Quite to the contrary, Nuggets management has been consistent in saying that they are still on course to being a contender. Is this a stealth rebuilding or something?
2. From a basketball strategy perspective, the Nuggets could not possibly be at a logical end unless they actually, really, fully deployed Allen Iverson at the PG position, instead of just inserting him in that slot for the playoffs, for grins only.
3. From a performance measure perspective, you can't possibly say that one of the very most talented teams in the NBA has reached a logical end and has to begin rebuilding. If Camby and Najera were retiring, you could say that maybe, but they were not retiring. Would Boston, Los Angeles, or at least a dozen top NBA franchises be caught dead starting to rebuild while they were still one of the most talented teams in the NBA?
4. From the actual basketball results strategy, the Nuggets won 50 out of 82 games in 2007-08, one of their highest total number of wins ever. Moreover, the gap between their offensive efficiency and defensive efficiency in 2007-08 was substantially up from the year prior, and was one of their most positive gaps ever. You are not at the logical dead end when you have just completed your best season in many, many years.

In short, you have to wait until you are actually at the logical dead end until you take drastic action as a result of being at the logical dead end. The Nuggets are acting as if they are paranoid about finding out whether they were about to reach the logical dead end, which is ridiculous.

This is about like a man, suspecting that he is going to die soon, going to the funeral home, jumping in a casket, and telling the funeral director to bury him now!

I as a critic am entitled to look at the glass as half empty, but the Nuggets as a professional sports organization are supposed to look at the glass as half full, and act accordingly. Moreover, as I said, the Nuggets and any organization anywhere is supposed to continue to manage an investment until there is definitely no chance for a return from it, rather than cutting and running and failing to get a return before the possibilities for a return are exhausted.

Now switching gears, assuming that the Nuggets have gone into rebuilding, the question becomes how are they doing in the early going? And in my view they are doing rotten, and I don't see how that is disputable or complicated. How can you expect to have a successful rebuilding if you decline your one and only draft pick, and opt for dumping both Camby and Najera, with no young players with potential in exchange. I know that Karl is biased against younger players, but this is ridiculous.

To have a successful rebuilding (or a successful team in general, for that matter) it seems to me that you need to be continuously developing your younger players, making them better, and working them into your offensive and defensive strategies and schemes.

For the Nuggets to say: "We'll pick up everyone we need next year, and/or the year after that" is poor management in my book. For one thing, by not getting any young player who will be an important part of the rebuilding now, in particular a center or a point guard, they are totally wasting 2008-09, because obviously you can't be working with a player if he's not on your team.

Furthermore, it sounds like the Nuggets, by doing all the offloading this year and planning all the uploading for next year or two, are creating a very tall order for the front office to accomplish next year. This tall order is supposed to be satisfied in the jungle that is the NBA draft, trading and acquisition world, where any combination among 29 other teams can frustrate your efforts to get what you need, especially if you are in a hurry. Generally, the more you count on acquisitions via trade to make up for the lack of on court development of key players in your system, the more you are dependent on being lucky when you maneuver for position with the other 29 teams. And going from getting 0 players from the draft one year, to 3-4 players from the draft the next year, is another inconsistency that you should avoid if at all possible.

If the Nuggets, in this rebuilding, do in fact finally get some promising younger players in 2009, all at once, then there will be a logjam of younger players, and no coach, least of all Karl, will be able to work all of them in in just one season, so one or more of them will be wasted that season.

If on the other hand, the Nuggets, in this rebuilding, are actually just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic; if they intend, in other words, to continue to overload with huge money aging veterans, and not worry about developing younger players into their system, then they will fail again with new names.

To be successful, you absolutely must have some kind of a balance between younger, cheaper players, and older, expensive ones. The payroll rules and the salary pattern make that mandatory.

In summary, I don't think rebuilding is something that you can wake up in the morning and say: "Alright, it's time to rebuild, and we're going to do it in 2009, and dump off some players this year to stop paying the luxury tax. To be a successful franchise, you generally are going to have to always be rebuilding to some extent. Every single year, you should be developing players who will in a year or two or three be crucial, as the older players go away. Every single year, you should be on the lookout for mid-level type players, including swingmen and guards who can hit threes, who appear on track to become quality starters.

I agree you need 2 or preferably 3 huge players to succeed, but if you spend most of your time and most of your money looking for and acquiring them, and if you overload with them, then what do you think is going to happen with the rest of the roster? Correct, it's going to rot to one extent or another. And your team overall will be top heavy and will fail in the playoffs.
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There are ways to criticize Camby's defensive style and choices without making a fool of yourself but this is not one of them.

Also, it's interesting to note that the Clippers are apparently going to start Camby at power forward, which if comments like this are correct, will devastate their defense, while the defense of the Nuggets will be much better without Camby.

This is seriously going to be an interesting test to see whether a defender who makes slightly unusual defensive choices is in fact a player who the mainstream, due to rebounding, blocking, and +/- statistics, thinks is a good defender, but is really a poor defender due to style, including choice of priorities.

As an important side point, obviously, a player's style and priorities depend on that player's real athletic capabilities, which in turn depend to some extent on that player's body and what he can do with it. So what the Camby haters are in effect saying is that no one with Camby's type of body and hand skills should be starting for a pro basketball team.

So we will have to see what happens to the defenses of the Clippers and the Nuggets this year: will they be better or worse than last year, and by how much? If the Clippers improve more than the Nuggets defensively, I for one will continue to never seriously consider that choices a player makes regarding playing style can be a major or a large factor in determining the real value of that player, enough to make all statistics and awards meaningless. Simply put, assuming there are no non-Camby related huge shocks regarding the defenses of either team:

Nuggets defense improves more than does the Clippers defense: Camby's defensive style and priorities did in fact partly or largely offset his raw production of rebounds, blocks, plus/minus, and overall team defensive efficiency.

Clippers defense improves more than does the Nuggets defense: Production is what counts; style and choice of priorities may be the derivative of production, but the derivative only matters much in calculus class.

Note: I have been staying away from NT because I am too negative about the Nuggets now to get any advantage from this board, but in coming here to find a link, I could not resist reading some topics, and then I noticed the quoted comment above, and I just could not stop myself from commenting. The idea that people can be happy that Camby was given away for nothing is so insane to me that I could not resist a comment and a follow up plan. So I will probably not be able to stop myself from coming back late this year to claim victory or admit defeat on this subject.

Remember, it was not Katrina that killed much of New Orleans, it was the fact the levees failed when they were not supposed to. Similarly, it will not be the trading of Camby that kills the Nuggets (assuming it does); it will be the fact that Camby was dumped overboard in a big hurry, without anything being obtained in exchange. Don't get it twisted.