Najera is Huge and Iverson is Outstanding While Running the Point as the Nuggets Beat the Spurs in Denver 109-96

Few people know that the Spurs and the Nuggets are almost exactly equal in talent. Even fewer know that the Nuggets, if you adjust for their fast pace, are not vastly inferior to the Spurs on defense. The reason the Spurs almost always win, to put it bluntly, is that they are a lot smarter than the Nuggets.

So two of the NBA’s most talented teams, and two of the NBA’s best defensive teams, the Nuggets and Spurs, played in front of a national TV audience and in front of an unusually raucous thank God it’s Friday crowd at the Pepsi Center in Denver. In this clash of titans, Spurs Coach Greg Popovich tried every strategy, called every play, put every player in the game, called every timeout, yelled at every player, and cussed at every official that he could think of. But nothing could stop the extremely fired up Nuggets, who were aided substantially by their crowd for a change, from coming out in the 2nd half and taking no prisoners.

Although Tim Duncan and Manu Ginobili were rock solid as usual, the third piece of the Spurs’ three-headed monster, PG Tony Parker, was almost a disaster, and nothing Popovich did could get the Spurs out of the huge hole that was created by Parker’s poor game.

Eduardo Najera defended well, rotated well, screened well, scrambled for loose balls, hustled from all over the place for rebounds, made 8/10 shots for 19 points in 25 minutes, worked extremely hard for 2 steals, worked smart for 2 assists, and played his game of the year and one of his all time greatest games as a Nugget, as the Denver Nuggets maintained their fighting chance to get one of the last two playoff spots in the West by defeating the San Antonio Spurs in Denver 109-96.

The Nuggets are most likely battling for the last playoff spot, unless the Suns collapse even worse than expected following their loss of Shawn Marion via a bad trade. However, before anyone gets carried away, and starts to think that the Nuggets made a statement, you must know that the Spurs were playing on back to back nights, so the Nuggets had both the home court and the extra rest advantages, and they were fired up even by thank God it’s Friday standards. It is pretty rare for the road team to win when it is playing on back to back nights, and the home team is not.

In one of the highlights of the whole season, Najera raced in from the right corner to grab an offensive rebound from the left side of the rim and pumped it way out to J.R. Smith, who swished a sweet long three. You almost never see that kind of play against the Spurs. As for Smith, he doesn’t even have to be on or near the line to make threes these days. On another Smith long 3 that was swished, the ESPN announcer remarked that the extremely high trajectory of the ball might have disturbed some pigeons in the rafters of the arena.

Both Najera and Smith were especially impulsive in this game. But George Karl thinks impulsiveness is a bad thing in basketball. He thinks that a player should always think for a second before he does anything. But players who have legendary status, such as Allen Iverson, are almost always given the benefit of the doubt by Karl regarding their thinking and decisions in games.

Other Coaches want to help direct the thoughts of their players while games are going on. In other words, they want to do some of the thinking for their players. But Karl perceives his role as limited to trying to get his players to think better in general, so that they can be better thinkers and decision makers during games. This sounds reasonable at first, and it sounds so normal, because that is what the objective of education is, to get students to be better thinkers. Unfortunately, basketball is not the same as life in general.

Karl will sometimes tell a player what he thinks he should do, but he won’t tell a player how to decide when or what he should do in different situations. For example, he will tell Melo to go the rim more, but he won’t tell him when he should instead go to the rim and when he should kick it out to J.R. Smith or Linas Kleiza on the perimeter. What Karl will not tell his players is very important in a basketball game, because most players can see only the trees, the other players, and can not see the forest, which is how the game as a whole is going and how it might be won.

With Karl, the thinking burden is almost all on the player. This helps explain why Karl does not feel the need to call offensive plays, either specifically or generally, in preparation for or during games. Karl thinks the players are supposed to think of offensive plays as they go. Or more precisely, players are supposed to be able to think of the right thing to try at any given time. And Karl holds all of his players responsible for their game decisions and reserves the right to criticize those decisions, even directly to the media, whereas most other Coaches in effect take some of the responsibility for decisions made by players in games, and almost never criticize a player’s decision making in public.

The approach of those other coaches has a more successful record than Karl’s approach in the NBA, particularly in hard fought playoff games. (Coach, I hate to tell you, but even A.I. doesn’t always think about what he is going to do next, even for 1 second. He’ll never tell, so I just revealed his little secret.)

Najera and Smith were key performers in this game precisely because they played impulsively, with instinct, without having to waste a second thinking. Players who have abilities and who have trained to make those abilities ready to rock and roll should be chock loaded with confidence, and a huge amount of confidence naturally leads to impulsive decisions. Unlike life in general, sports rewards those who make decisions extremely quickly, including in no time at all. In short, impulsiveness is not a bad thing in Sports, unless the player does not have the abilities and the training to allow impulsive decisions to pay off. But if that is the case, the player would not be a pro NBA player in the first place, would he? The fact that Karl will never understand this is a true shame.

It was Iverson playing both guard positions for most of the night. PG Anthony Carter did little in this game and PG Chucky Atkins did almost nothing. To say that Iverson was masterful while running things would be an understatement; he made 9 assists and only 2 turnovers while scoring 29 points on 10/16 shooting and 10/11 from the line. For those who think Iverson can’t play point guard: if you don’t think that’s good enough for a point guard, then you have your requirements set way to high, my friend. For those who think J.R. Smith is not a good enough 2-guard, please read some recent game reports, especially the last one for the Suns game, and see if you still think that way.

We have been discussing and proving the folly of having PG Anthony Carter and PG-SG Allen Iverson out on the floor at the same time in recent reports. In this game, it was obvious that Iverson was playing both guard positions for much of the time he was out there, and he was out there for virtually the whole game. Only when J.R. Smith was in the game did Iverson wisely step back a little and mostly limit himself to running the point. The reason for this is that The Answer has become a true believer in Smith’s ability to contribute huge scoring for the Nuggets. On the other hand, Iverson is more and more proceeding almost as if Carter is not even there.

Carter did very little in this game as a result of Iverson’s decisions, exactly as we predicted. Carter had his minutes limited to 19 minutes, down from his season average of 30. Was this because George Karl has finally understood this problem and is starting to address it? No, of course not. Carter’s reduced minutes were due almost entirely to the need to insert PG Chucky Atkins into a game for the first time in about two months.

However, there was a 3 minute stretch, in the middle of the 2nd quarter, when the Nuggets had only 1 point guard out there. Iverson was getting a rare breather, Carter was also out, and Chucky Atkins was the only PG out there at that time. Of course, Atkins did nothing to speak of during that time, but we have been begging for a one point guard offense, and we got it for 3 minutes, and we should be grateful just for that. Now maybe if we wait about 10 years, Karl will finally have realized that Iverson should be the point guard instead of Atkins or Carter.

Chucky Atkins, who was brought on to the team from the Grizzlies to be the starting PG for the Nuggets, played for the first time since early January after having missed 26 straight games due to a hernia.

Nuggets 1 has recently gone all out to point out the folly of having both Carter and Iverson, both very small guards, in the game at the same time, since Iverson is gradually taking over more and more of the point guard duties. Nuggets 1 has pointed out that it is borderline madness to have Carter and Iverson on the floor at the same time for more than about half a quarter, since Carter is close to worthless once Iverson has decided to go into the point guard mode.

The Spurs apparently didn’t get the memo about how Iverson is gradually taking over running the point for the Nuggets, so that he is essentially playing both guard positions at once, even while PG Carter is out there with him, so that there is a bigger payoff than ever if you double team A.I. They instead decided to double team Melo, and they did that well of course, but only in the 1st half. Bruce Bowen especially frustrated the heck out of Melo in the 1st half. Double teaming Melo is so old fashioned, Spurs! Come on, get with the times and double Iverson a lot more next time if the Nuggets have Iverson-Carter or Iverson-Atkins in the back court at the same time! Granted, Melo can still do a lot of damage, but Iverson is the guy from which almost every Nuggets play comes from these days.

George Karl urged Melo to take it to the rim more in the second half to get out of the rut Bowen and company had put him in, and that was exactly the right thing to do. If they are doubling and being physical to take away the midrange jumper, go to the spin moves, the stutter stepping, the pick and rolls, the kick outs. Don’t think you can still make ordinary midrange jumpers when the Spurs are draped all over you like a wet rag. Take it to the rim one way or another. So Melo and the Nuggets did this in the 3rd quarter, and the Spurs were then crushed in that quarter, which eliminated any chance they could win this game. Almost by accident, the way to beat the Spurs was discovered by the Nuggets. Abandon the midrange jumper, and replace it with dunks, layups, offensive rebounds, free throws, and kick outs to the perimeter for threes.

The Nuggets outscored the Spurs in the paint 42-30, and they got a nice 20 points off fast breaks versus 14 fast break points for the Spurs. At the same time, the Nuggets, who are not a good three-point shooting team by any stretch, nevertheless made an amazing 7/14 threes in this game. J.R. Smith was 3/5 and Iverson was 2/3 to lead the Nuggets.

Turnovers were about even, but the Nuggets prevailed in offensive rebounding 5-3 and in defensive rebounding 34-28. Camby made 13 rebounds, Anthony made 8 rebounds, Najera made 6 rebounds, and Martin made 5 rebounds.

Overall, the Nuggets were an astounding 40/74 or 54.1% from the field, while the Spurs were a not quite as astounding 37/75 or 49.3%.

Coach Popovich, realizing that the Spurs’ cause was lost in what is always a long shot situation, trying to win on the road while playing on back to back nights, while the home team is rested, pulled Duncan, Ginobili, Parker, and Bowen half way through the 4th quarter, with the Nuggets leading 96-81 and more fired up than anyone can remember them being this season. This was not a mistake as the ESPN announcer said it might be. Popovich recognizes a lost cause when he sees one.

When you look at this game closely, you can see that the truth is that the Nuggets became a rough, blue collar version of the Spurs for a night. They had to, because the Spurs always insist that you play their way if you want to beat them. The Nuggets changed their stripes, in other words, and were able to defeat the Spurs while playing at the Spurs’ slow pace, and while relying heavily on defense. The shock on Duncan and Parker’s faces late in the 4th after they had been pulled from the game was priceless. They were shocked that Popovich had tried almost everything in the Spurs’ book, and nothing worked well against the Nuggets on this night.

They were even more shocked that the Nuggets had a surface resemblance to themselves. How could this be? they asked themselves. How could a team that knows so little about how to win basketball games have overcome every trick that Popovich and the Spurs threw at them?

I’ll tell you the reasons. First, it was because not all games are won by those who know more about how to win. Some games are won by hard work, talent, and impulsiveness alone.

Second, The Answer has finally figured out that the answer for the Nuggets is for him to make sure that the crucial point guard position is run by someone who has enough talent to do it well, and that would be himself. Allen Iverson has crossed another river in the quest for the ring.

PROJECTIONS

Nuggets 1 Current odds, to the nearest 5%, of the Nuggets making the playoffs: 50%
Nuggets 1 Current odds, to the nearest 5%, that the Nuggets and their suffering fans will be stuck with George Karl for next season: 65%

The current odds of the Nuggets making the playoffs, according to Hollinger at ESPN’s excellent team analysis system, are 67%. However, and I know this is confusing, the Nuggets are projected to most likely be the 9th seed in the Western Conference, meaning that they will not make the playoffs. It seems right now that the Suns, the Warriors, and the Nuggets will be battling it out for the last 2 playoff spots in the West. All three of them are considered likely to make the playoffs, in statistical terms, but not all three are going to make it. Nuggets 1 agrees with Hollinger’s system, which is saying that the Suns and the Warriors are favored in that race, although the Warriors-Nuggets race is razor tight.

The Hollinger odds don’t take into account that, most likely, neither Nene nor Atkins is going to be available in top form for the Nuggets for the stretch run. Atkins was a disaster in his first time back in the Spurs game. If the Hollinger odds adjusted for injuries, it would show a lower percentage chance than 67% for the Nuggets to make the playoffs.

The Lakers, the Rockets, the Spurs, the Jazz, and the Hornets are currently considered locks to make the playoffs, and the Mavericks are currently considered near locks to make the playoffs. However, the Rockets are no longer really total locks, due to the loss of Yao Ming for the season. But they are still near locks. The Suns are in trouble, due to their terrible trade, which was Shawn Marion and Marcus Banks for Shaquille O’Neal.

PLAYOFF TEAMS PROJECTED FINAL RECORDS-HOLLINGER-ESPN
1. Lakers 59-23
2. Spurs 56-26
3. Rockets 55-27
4. Jazz 54-28
5. Hornets 53-29
6. Mavericks 51-31
7. Suns 51-31
8. Warriors 50-32

NON-PLAYOFF TEAMS PROJECTED FINAL RECORDS-HOLLINGER-ESPN
9. Nuggets 49-33
10. Trailblazers 42-40

The Rockets have just lost their best player, and one of the best players in the NBA, Yao Ming, for the rest of the season. Therefore, they will probably drop substantially below their current projection, since the projections do not take injuries into account. The Suns will probably drop a little more also, because they made a bad trade when they gave up “The Matrix,” Shawn Marion. At this time, however, Nuggets 1 does not believe that either the Rockets or the Suns will fail to win at least 50 games, so they will most likely finish ahead of the Nuggets despite their difficulties.

As for the Warriors, they have an easier schedule than the Nuggets the rest of the way, so Nuggets 1 agrees with Hollinger’s system, and thinks that the Warriors will finish very slightly ahead of the Nuggets. If the Warriors and the Nuggets finish with identical records, and the season series between them ends up tied 2-2, the Warriors are likely to get the playoff spot rather than the Nuggets, because it is likely that the Warriors will finish at least 1 game ahead of the Nuggets in Conference record, which would be the tie-breaker if the Warriors and the Nuggets split their 4 head to head games. If either the Nuggets or the Warriors win both of the remaining two head to head games that the teams play, then that winner will earn a big advantage toward securing the final playoff spot. The Nuggets-Warriors games are on Saturday, March 29 in Denver and on Thursday, April 10 in Oakland. Neither the Warriors nor the Nuggets will be playing on back to back nights in either of those games.

So overall, Nuggets 1 agrees with the Hollinger system; as of now, we think the Nuggets will fail to make the playoffs. But it will be an extremely close call, and it could go either way. One extra win by the Nuggets could easily be all that is needed for them to make the playoffs. Specifically, if the Nuggets can go 13-8 in their last 22 games, and finish 50-32, that is likely to be good enough for at least the 8th seed. All bets are off if the Nuggets are 12-9 in their last 22 games. If the Nuggets are 11-10 or worse, it is very unlikely that they will make the playoffs.

If you win a division you get into the playoffs regardless of how poor your record is. For the Nuggets, winning the Northwest Division is very unlikely at this point; the odds on that are at 12%. The odds that Utah will win the Northwest are 88% right now. The Nuggets would most likely have to beat the Jazz in both of their remaining games against them, both of which are in Salt Lake City, and one of which is this Saturday night, in order to have a shot at winning the Northwest.

PLAYERS WHO WERE NOT AVAILABLE
NUGGETS PLAYERS WHO WERE NOT AVAILABLE / INJURY REPORT
Chucky Atkins: returned to the lineup vs. San Antonio on 3/7 after missing the previous 26 games due to a surgically repaired right groin/abdominal strain (Sports Hernia). He is considered probable for tonight’s game against the Jazz.
Nene: underwent successful surgery to remove a testicular tumor on Jan. 14. A timeline for his return is still unknown. He is out until at least the middle of March, but could easily be out for the entire rest of the season. Nene has now missed 27 straight games this season. CBS Sportsline says Nene is likely to be out for the rest of the season.
Carmelo Anthony: suffered a left knee contusion in this game, but is probable for the Jazz game tonight.
Allen Iverson: suffered a sprained right ring finger in this game. X-Rays were negative and he is probable for tonight’s game. CBS Sportsline has Iverson as questionable.
Steven Hunter: A death in the family made him unavailable for last night’s Spurs game, and also for Saturday night’s Jazz game.

SPURS PLAYERS WHO WERE NOT AVAILABLE
None, all Spurs on the roster were available.

ALERT STATUS PROBLEMS
As of March 8, 2008

The Nuggets are under a GREY ALERT, on account of the following problems.

INJURIES, ILLNESSES, SUSPENSIONS, AND LEAVES
1. Nene illness 14 points
2. Steven Hunter 4 points

SEVERE AND UNEXPECTED CRUCIAL PLAYER SLUMPS
Chucky Atkins, 13 points

BAD OR INADEQUATE COACHING
1. George Karl has completely benched one or more players who should not be benched due to his incorrect calculation of the benefits and costs of that player, his hatred of the player, and/or his having the ulterior motive of forcing the player off the team. The problem points would be the points you would have if the player were injured.

No one is currently completely benched who should not be: 0 points.

2. One or more players are partially benched; their minutes are being artificially limited due to abstract and subjective factors that the Denver coaches believe are more important than performance on the court.

J.R. Smith was partially benched: 0 points. Smith was not partially benched.

3. George Karl over relies on his starters and won’t play the non-starters enough: 0-12 Points. The severity varies depending on the circumstances, mainly Karl’s beliefs and moods, and whether the other team is playing well enough to take advantage of the Nuggets playing with not enough breathers, with too many fouls, and so forth. The current points reported are for the use, or should I say the misuse, of the reserves for the most recent games, with the most weight being given to the game being reported on here.

The bad use of reserves score for this game is 0 points. Najera and Smith were huge from off the bench, and they both received their minimum reasonable minutes. Kleiza’s minutes have been cut, but that makes sense because Kleiza is in a slump. Wow, Karl did a great job in this game on the player rotations!

4. The Nuggets have extreme offensive inconsistency and an excessive number of turnovers because they have neither a system nor even a good partial system on offense. They over rely on fast pace and on isolation plays, especially isolation plays by Anthony and Iverson. The damage caused by this would be up to 20 points, except that Iverson’s intelligence in recognizing different situations and responding appropriately, in particular games, reduces the damage. At one time earlier this season, Iverson and Carter were marginalizing Anthony to some extent. That problem went away when Anthony ramped up his rebounding.

However, another problem has developed due to a combination of the unstructured offense and the Karl lineup, and it is not going to go away anytime soon. That would be the double point guard problem. The Nuggets don’t know in advance who is going to be the effective point guard in the game: Iverson, Carter, or both Iverson and Carter roughly equally. And in any case, it is foolish to have two point guards in the game for more than a small number of minutes.

In any event, the Nuggets lack enough tried and tested offensive plays that they can run game after game, perfecting them as they go, and having everyone automatically on the same page for those plays.

On defense a system is much less important than on offense. How good your defense is is determined much more by effort and skill than by strategy. On defense, the main strategic decision is whether you are playing zone or man to man defense. The choice varies during each game, and usually depends on a gut feeling of the coach and/or the defensive floor leader, as to which is better at a particular point in the game, and with a particular opposing lineup on the court. At least as important as whether a zone or a man to man defense is in effect is the quality of the actual defending.

Lack of an adequate number of offensive plays and patterns: 6 Points

INTENSITY, HUSTLE, AND HEART
1. The Nugget’s intensity, hustle and heart are lacking: 0 Points. It’s not anywhere near as bad as some fans think it is.

TOTAL PROBLEM POINTS: 37, which constitutes GREY ALERT.

GREY ALERT (30-39): There are relatively minor problems leading to a small threat against the success of the entire season. It is still possible to beat quality teams, but it will be a little more unusual to beat a quality team, because about 1/4 of what would have been wins against good teams will now be losses when there is a GREY ALERT.

OBSERVATIONS ON THE ALERT STATUS
George Karl has gotten the rotations within reason, for a change, and Iverson has taken over running the point more than ever so, all of the sudden, the Nuggets alert status has improved substantially.

The Nuggets would be all the way up to GREEN alert, except that Chucky Atkins is showing nothing so far in his return from a long injury out. So Nuggets 1 listed him in the “severe and unexpected crucial player slump” section. The points will be reduced as Atkins gets better.

The Nuggets have been unable to issue any prediction about when or whether Nene is going to return to the court. There was a rumor recently that he was going to return by mid-March, but there is no sign that that will become a reality yet. CBS Sportsline is saying that, most likely, Nene will not return to the court at all this season, including for the playoffs. If Nene in fact never returns, and Atkins continues to be a lost cause, and Karl goes back to making his usual mistakes, and if Carter starts to reassert himself at point guard, the Nuggets will return to YELLOW alert. In any event, George Karl is definitely not going to pull a few offensive set plays out of a hat any time soon.

The mid January losses to the Bobcats and the Hawks, and the close calls at home against the Wolves and the Hawks in January, in games that should have and probably would have been relatively easy wins had the alert status been green, grey, or even yellow, illustrate the usefulness and accuracy of the alert system. When you reach ORANGE ALERT and especially RED ALERT, you start losing a substantial number of games that you would normally win. It’s that simple, and there is little anyone can do about it.

RESERVE WATCH
Number of Players Who Played at Least 6 Minutes: Nuggets 9 Spurs 12
Number of Players Who Played at Least 10 Minutes: Nuggets 8 Spurs 9

Nuggets Non-Starters Points: 34
Spurs Non-Starters Points: 28

Nuggets Non-Starters Rebounds: 10
Spurs Non-Starters Rebounds: 8

Nuggets Non-Starters Assists: 8
Spurs Non-Starters Assists: 8

THE RESERVES IN THIS GAME
Coach Greg Popovich of the Spurs is one of the most intelligent basketball coaches in the NBA today, and he is one of only a few coaches who can manage a 9 or 9-plus player rotation in a game. In this game, Popovich played 9 players for 10 or more minutes, and 3 other players for 6, 9, and 9 minutes. Although Popovich pulled his stars half way through the 4th quarter, with the Nuggets leading 96-81, he through everything including the kitchen sink into the effort to win this back to back road game prior to that point. Of those 3 players who played less than 10 minutes, only 1 of them was limited to what Popovich decided was garbage time, Matt Bonner for 6 minutes. The other two, Jacque Vaughn and Fabricio Oberto, played much earlier in the game, for 9 minutes each. So Popovich came extremely close to playing 11 players for 10 or more minutes in non-garbage time basketball, an astounding feat that probably no other coach, even Phil Jackson, would be able to manage well. So the longstanding dispute about who is the smartest coach in basketball, Jackson or Popovich, may have been decided last night, at least pending fresh evidence, in favor of Popovich.

Since J.R. Smith and especially Eduardo Najera were on fire, the Nuggets’ non-starters were able to get relatively unusual wins over the opponent’s non-starters in both points and rebounds.

Nugget’s non-starters generally don’t get many assists at all, but in this game, they got 8, and tied the Spurs’ non-starters, who generally do get a good number of assists in most games. Having the Nuggets’ non-starters get a lot of assists counts as one of those “I thought I’d never see” that moments.

I hope to develop the reserve watch feature further in the future, because I want to try to expand what I already have in terms of a game coaching evaluation system. But the complications involved explain why there are no formal statistics anywhere on the internet on the subject of how much non-starters contribute to different teams, and also why coaches are not compared statistically the way players are. There are a lot of variables that come into the use of reserves that interfere with the objective of judging their use. Statisticians call this “statistical noise,” and if you have a substantial amount of it, then what you are trying to do with your statistics becomes very difficult or next to impossible.

GEORGE KARL CONFIDENCE IN HIS TEAM RATING (Scale of 0 to 10)
3: He's hiding under his seat on the sidelines

PLAYER RATINGS EXPLAINED
You can tell how well every player played at a glance. Of the advanced statistics I have seen on the internet, this one seems to have the best balance between offense and defense. While some are biased in favor of offensive players, such as the efficiency measure at the NBA site, many other advanced statistics are biased in favor of good defenders, and do not reflect the heavy importance of offense in basketball. Here is the formula for the ESPN rating of a player, which I think is a very good balance between offense and defense:

Points + Rebounds + 1.4*Assists + Steals + 1.4*Blocks - .7*Turnovers + # of Field Goals Made +1/2*# of 3-pointers Made - .8*# of Missed Field Goals - .8*# of Missed Free Throws + .25 *# of Free Throws Made

All players on each team who played at least 5 minutes are shown. The number after “game,” is how well the player did in this game, whereas the number after “season” is that player’s overall average for the entire season.

NUGGETS-SPURS PLAYER RATINGS
NUGGETS PLAYER RATINGS

Allen Iverson: Game 47.8 Season 41.5
Eduardo Najera: Game 36.5 Season 13.5
Carmelo Anthony: Game 34.9 Season 39.4
J.R. Smith: Game 24.0 Season 15.9
Marcus Camby: Game 18.6 Season 32.8
Kenyon Martin: Game 12.7 Season 22.4
Anthony Carter: Game 9.3 Season 20.8
Linas Kleiza: Game 7.8 Season 18.2
Chucky Atkins: Game -0.8 Season 5.4

Nene: Did Not Play-Illness
Steven Hunter: Did Not Play-Personal Leave

Yakhouba Diawara: Did Not Play-Coach’s Decision
Taurean Green: Did Not Play-Coach’s Decision

SPURS PLAYER RATINGS
Tim Duncan: Game 44.1 Season 38.9
Manu Ginobili: Game 38.9 Season 34.3
Bruce Bowen: Game 22.1 Season 11.0
Kurt Thomas: Game 16.0 Season 19.2
Ime Udoka: Game 10.6 Season 10.2
Robert Horry: Game 9.9 Season 6.4
Tony Parker: Game 9.9 Season 29.6
Damon Stoudamire: Game 8.8 Season 13.3
Matt Bonner: Game 8.7 Season 9.9
Michael Finley: Game 6.1 Season 15.7
Fabricio Oberto: Game 2.2 Season 13.3
Jacque Vaughn : Game -2.3 Season 8.3

NOTE 1: these stats do not correct for the big differences in playing times. Players with small minutes would get a higher rating if they had more minutes.
NOTE 2: This performance measure does NOT include the quality and quantity of each player’s defending, including the number of shots that the player prevented from going in the basket. The best Nuggets defenders are Camby, Martin, and Najera.

OBSERVATIONS ON THE PLAYER RATINGS:
It was the game of the year for Najera, who was almost 3 times as productive as usual, not even counting his quality defending. Iverson was Iverson plus in this game. The Spurs, despite their obsession with stopping Anthony, despite all of their double teaming and off the ball roughing up of Melo, were able to knock off only 10% from his usual performance level. That right there was pretty much game, set, and match. The Spurs very rarely get such a small return on their player shutdown efforts.

J.R. Smith continued his Amazing 2008 Tour from Fantasyland, by having yet anotherbig game; he was half again as much better than usual.

One of the most amazing things about this game was that, while Najera was huge, 3 of the 4 other front court players were not. Camby and Martin were only slightly more than half as productive as usual, and Kleiza was a little less than half as productive as usual. Seeing Najera far more productive than all but one of the other forwards (all except for Melo) is something that you will rarely, if ever, see again.

PF Duncan and SG Ginobili did about as well as you could expect in a back to back game on the road. SF Bowen was more offensive minded than usual, to go along with his stop Melo efforts, in 25 minutes, and he scored almost double his usual points, so he was twice as productive as usual.

Among the huge list of role players that Popovich played in this game, PF Horry was really the only one who stepped up to any extent.

SF Udoka and PF Bonner were average. C Thomas started at center over C Oberto, but he was 1/5 off his normal and was a key reason why the Spurs lost. Oberto didn’t do much of anything.

PG Stoudamire played fewer minutes than usual, which explains why he was only a little more than half as productive as usual. SG Finley doesn’t have that excuse; he was less than half as productive as usual, so he was a substantial disappointment for the Spurs in this game. PG Vaughn did nothing in 9 minutes.

Despite the long list of disappointments for the Spurs, there was one player who was by far the biggest disappointment of all for them: PG Tony Parker. Just as the Nuggets have three major stars: Iverson, Anthony, and Camby, the Spurs have three mega stars: Duncan, Ginobili, and Parker. But Parker was hardly a mega star in this game. In 29 minutes he was 2/7 for 4 points; he never got to the line once. He made his assist average, 6 assists, but he turned it over 5 times, about twice as much as usual, and he made only 1 steal and 2 rebounds. It could have been even worse, but Parker was only 1/3 as productive as he usually is. Parker created a deficit that, despite Popovich’s massive effort, the Spurs were unable to offset.

REAL PLAYER RATINGS EXPLAINED
The Real Player Rating reflects reality better than the gross player rating, since it washes out differences in playing times among the players. The straight up player rankings are obviously heavily affected by how many playing minutes the various players get. With many teams, you can rely on the coach to give his various players roughly the playing time that makes the most sense for his team. Unfortunately, some coaches bring other factors besides actual performance into their rotation decisions. Therefore, it makes good sense to introduce a new and extremely important statistic that Nuggets 1 calls the Real per Minute Player Rating. As the name implies, this is the gross ESPN player rating divided by the number of minutes. The statistic is called Real Player Rating for short.

This statistic allows anyone to see whether or not players who play only a small number of minutes are doing better than their low gross rating will indicate. You can spot diamond in the rough players who are not getting all the respect and playing time due to them. At the same time, it will allow anyone to see whether players with a lot of minutes are playing worse than, as well as, or better than their gross rating shows.

In summary, the Real Player Rating allows the reader, at a glance, to see exactly how well each player is doing without regard to playing time, which is subject to coaching error and subjective and less important factors such as a player's personality. The Real Player Rating provides the real truth-pure knowledge not available anywhere else.

SCALE FOR THE REAL PLAYER RATINGS
1.80 More Amazing Happens, but only certain players can ever fly this high
1.60 1.80 Superstar Plus-Above Normal Even For Michael Jordan
1.40 1.60 Superstar Performance-A Michael Jordan Type Game
1.20 1.40 Star Plus-Spectacular Performance
1.05 1.20 Star Performance
0.90 1.05 Outstanding Game
0.80 0.90 Very Good Game
0.70 0.80 Good Game
0.60 0.70 Mediocre Game
0.50 0.60 Poor Game
0.40 0.50 Very Poor Game
0.25 0.40 Extremely Poor-Near Disaster
Less 0.25 Total Disaster

NUGGETS-SPURS REAL PLAYER RATINGS
All players who played 5 minutes or more are included. Any player who played only 5-9 minutes is noted.

1. Eduardo Najera, Den 1.460
2. Matt Bonner, SA 1.450…Bonner played for only 6 minutes.
3. Manu Ginobili, SA 1.389
4. Tim Duncan, SA 1.336
5. Allen Iverson, Den 1.086
6. J.R. Smith, Den 0.923
7. Carmelo Anthony, Den 0.895
8. Bruce Bowen, SA 0.884
9. Kurt Thomas, SA 0.667
10. Robert Horry, SA 0.660
11. Damon Stoudamire, SA 0.629
12. Marcus Camby, Den 0.600
13. Linas Kleiza, Den 0.557
14. Anthony Carter, Den 0.489
15. Ime Udoka, SA 0.408
16. Kenyon Martin, Den 0.385
17. Tony Parker, SA 0.341
18. Michael Finley, SA 0.265
19. Fabricio Oberto, SA 0.244…Oberto played for only 9 minutes.
20. Chucky Atkins, Den -0.114…Atkins played for only 7 minutes.
21. Jacque Vaughn, SA -0.256…Vaughn played for only 9 minutes.

OBSERVATIONS ON THE REAL PLAYER RATINGS
Eduardo Najera was the best player on the court and was a superstar in this game. Matt Bonner for the Spurs was also a superstar, but only for very limited minutes. The Spurs had 2 players who were star-plus, Tim Duncan and Manu Ginobili. Allen Iverson was a plain old star. Among the 4 players who were stars or better and who played at least 10 minutes, each team had 2.

J.R. Smith was outstanding for the Nuggets. Anthony for the Nuggets and Bowen for the Spurs were very good.

Thomas, Horry, and Stoudamire were all just mediocre for the Spurs, which was a big disappointment for them. Camby was mediocre for the Nuggets.

For the Nuggets, Kleiza was poor, Carter was very poor, and Martin, not counting his defending, was extremely poor. Martin fouled out late in the game, turned it over 3 times, and failed to get any assists or blocks. On the other hand, he was 4/6 for 8 points and he made 5 rebounds, so it could have been worse. Let’s face it, the Nuggets have no plays planned out in advance to get Martin the ball where he wants it on the court.

The Spurs also had 3 players who were huge disappointments. Udoka was very poor, and both Parker and Finley were extremely poor, with Finley just about a disaster.

NUGGET’S PLUS—MINUS
This tells you how the score changed while a player was on the court. All Nuggets who played at least 10 minutes are shown.

J.R. Smith: +16
Eduardo Najera: +15
Marcus Camby: +10
Linas Kleiza: +10
Allen Iverson: +9
Carmelo Anthony: +6
Kenyon Martin: +0
Anthony Carter: -7

OBSERVATIONS ON PLUS—MINUS
The two stars from off the bench, Smith and Najera, were the most damaging players as far as the Spurs were concerned. Martin and especially Carter were the weakest Nuggets in terms of how the game changed when they were out on the court.

NUGGETS MADE WHAT?
All Nuggets who played at least 5 minutes are shown. The order is from lowest to highest in real player rating.

Turnovers: NBA Average: 14, Nuggets’ Total 15, Team 0, Anthony 3, Atkins 0, Camby 2, Carter 1, Iverson 2, Kleiza 0, Martin 3, Najera 1, Smith 3

Personal Fouls: NBA Average: 21, Nuggets’ Total 20, Anthony 3, Atkins 0, Camby 1, Carter 1, Iverson 1, Kleiza 1, Martin 6, Najera 4, Smith 3

Chucky Atkins played 7 minutes and was 0/1 and 0/1 on 3’s for 0 points.

Kenyon Martin played 33 minutes and was 4/6, 0/1 on 3’s, and 0/2 from the line for 8 points, and he made 5 rebounds and 1 steal.

Anthony Carter played 19 minutes and was 1/2, 1/2 on 3’s, and 2/2 from the line for 5 points, and he made 2 assists and 1 rebound.

Linas Kleiza played 14 minutes and was 0/1 for 0 points, and he made 4 assists and 3 rebounds.

Marcus Camby played 31 minutes and was 4/11 and 0/1 from the line for 8 points, and he made 13 rebounds and 1 assist.

Carmelo Anthony played 39 minutes and was 7/17, 0/1 on 3’s, and 11/16 from the line for 25 points, and he made 8 rebounds, 3 assists, and 2 steals.

J.R. Smith played 26 minutes and was 6/10 and 3/5 on 3’s for 15 points, and he made 3 steals, 2 assists, and 1 rebound.

Allen Iverson played for virtually the whole game, 44 minutes, and was 10/16, 2/3 on 3’s, and 7/10 from the line for 29 points, and he made 9 assists and 2 rebounds.

Eduardo Najera played 25 minutes and was 8/10, 1/1 on 3’s, and 2/2 from the line for 19 points, and he made 6 rebounds, 2 steals, and 2 assists.

NEXT UP
The next game will be Saturday, March 8 in Salt Lake City to play the Jazz at 7 pm mountain time. Both the Nuggets and the Jazz will be playing on back to back nights.

J.R. Smith, Carmelo Anthony, and Allen Iverson Lead the Nuggets Over Shaquille O'Neal and the Suns 126-113

The Suns came to Denver after having defeated the Trailblazers in Portland by a couple of baskets the night before, but they are different Suns now. Shawn Marion, the extremely high quality SF who, unknown to Phoenix Suns General Manager Steve Kerr, was a piece of the Suns that was holding up the other pieces, is gone to Miami now, and he will be a key part of Pat Riley’s Rebuild the Heat in 5 Easy and Quick Steps Program. Kerr, meanwhile, may have more or less destroyed the Suns in One Easy Step.

Sure, Shaquille O’Neal pulled down 18 rebounds in this game, but getting rebounds is not exactly the most difficult to find skill for a basketball team. Even Carmelo Anthony is pulling down a lot of rebounds this year, so it can’t be that difficult, because Melo is just doing it on the side so to speak; he will always be a scorer far and away above and beyond anything else.

What can O’Neal do on offense, besides discombobulate Steve Nash and the Suns? O’Neal is getting a little too old to be the same kind of dominant post player that he used to be in the golden oldie years. Meanwhile, the loss of Shawn Marion has heavily damaged their chemistry and their offensive identity. O’Neal is not only a little too old to be able to be a smart pickup, but his style does not at all fit in with the style that the Suns have been playing with for the last several years. How you are supposed to change an offensive identity and style that has been cemented and perfected over many years in a few short weeks, and expect to be competitive in the playoffs, is beyond me

So O’Neal was in the paint all night, getting his rebounds, and getting a few scores from the only spot from which he can make them, point blank range to the hole, but that was about it. He made no blocks, no steals, and only 2 assists. Marcus Camby he is not. And this was considered Shaq’s best game as a Sun so far. Sorry Mr. Kerr, you blew it and the whole state of Arizona is going to hate you for what you did forever.

And O’Neal’s actual defending is not what it used to be either. As long as you can make a shot from more than 6 feet from the basket, or as long as you can screen around O’Neal or get him to foul you or get him called on a three second violation, you really don’t have to worry too much about Shaq anymore. For both Martin and Camby, it was pretty much business as usual offensively; Shaq wasn’t a large problem for either one of them.

Trailing 40-33 in the second quarter following a basket by Shaq, the Nuggets scored 16 straight points, including back-to-back 3-pointers by Smith, to take a 49-40 lead. They never looked back. The Nuggets defeated the Suns 126-113 to keep their playoff hopes alive. This season, the Nuggets, who love playing tricks on their fans, and who love to play Russian roulette with them as well, are staying right around the 50% chance of making the playoffs odds for weeks on end. They seem to delight in making their fans as stressed out as possible.

The Suns still had one part of their mojo intact to some extent: they made 10/21 threes led by Raja Bell, who was 3/6, and by Leandro Barbosa, who was 3/5. But J.R. Smith, who is from Fantasyland according to Coach Karl, made 6 of 8 threes and Anthony Carter had the right touch and was 3/5, and the Nuggets overall were 10/16. Who knows, maybe you do have to be from Fantasyland to be able to make threes the way J.R. has been making them over the last several weeks.

“We’re going to need J.R. to play that way because he makes it so much easier for everybody else, for spacing the court out,” Iverson said after the game. Finally, Smith is getting some respect in public for his game, although there is still none from his Coach.

Smith only had to be just about the best 3-point shooter in the League over the last month to get Iverson, in whom Karl grants total control of the offense, to commend him. Not that how long it took for Smith to get some respect was Iverson’s fault. Smith had to do the near impossible to get even Iverson to say anything good about him, because everyone on the Nuggets knows that when you say anything good about Smith, you are in defiance of Karl, whose statements about Smith are almost 100% negative, and who would rather play the devil himself than J.R. Smith for 30 minutes. It seems that, unfortunately for him, Mr. Karl is starved for material lately for his anti-Smith campaign.

Is it possible that Smith will lose minutes when PG Chucky Atkins returns next week form his 4-month injury out? Of course that is possible. As soon as Atkins looks halfway decent, Karl will be as tempted to cut Smith’s minutes as a little kid is tempted to steal a couple of brownies before dinner.

Earth to Karl: at ESPN, also known as reality world, J.R. Smith is now the 17th most accurate 3-point shooter in the NBA among players who make close to one three a game or more, tied with Manu Ginobili. You know Ginobili, Coach Karl, he is that superstar SG guy who has several rings and who plays for that Spurs team that you have that huge inferiority complex over. Smith is as good as that guy.

Be careful about making any more comments about Fantasyland, would you, because I have been seeing many comments around the net saying that if there is a basketball fantasyland, it’s you and not Smith who is living in it. In Denver, we start out with the disadvantage of being in a relatively small market compared to other NBA teams. And Denver is a football, hockey, and baseball town before it is a basketball town. The last thing we need is for players on other teams to swear that they will never play for us, because they think the Coach, which is you, lives in Fantasyland.

That was just a well deserved sarcastic word to the wise to the Coach, brought on by Smith playing even better than even I thought he could play. And there isn’t anyone who thought he could play as well as I thought he could play, except maybe his mom and dad.

Among shooting guards, there are only 4 who have been shooting threes better than Smith this year, led by Richard Hamilton of the Pistons. The other three are Anthony Parker of the Raptors, Mike Miller of the Grizzlies, and Brent Barry of the Sonics, formerly of the Spurs. Of those four, only Parker and Miller are in Smith’s ballpark as far as the quantity of threes is concerned. And speaking of quantity, there are only 11 players in the NBA who have made more threes than J.R. Smith has made this year. Of course, all 11 of them have played for substantially more minutes than Smith has.

To say that Karl and his assistants underestimate the importance of 3-point shooting would be an understatement. Smith, who Karl publicly and privately despises, is now averaging 4.0 made threes per 36 minutes, while Linas Kleiza is second for the Nuggets at 1.9. Yakhouba Diawara, who has been mostly benched by Karl since about the 1st of December, is third at 1.4 made threes per 36 minutes. Iverson is fourth with 0.9 made threes per 36 minutes, and Melo and Carter are tied for fifth at 0.7. So J.R. Smith is about the only thing standing between the Nuggets’ 3-point shooting, which is barely middle of the pack in the NBA for made threes, and is only good enough for 21st on accuracy, and dead last in the NBA in three-point shooting across the board. In other words, take away Smith and the Nuggets are without a doubt the worst 3-point shooting team in the NBA. So even to think of benching J.R. Smith in the hypothetical is essentially insane, because you can not possibly win a playoff series without some three-point scoring to help offset the tougher defending in the paint. And last year, Karl not only thought of it, he actually did bench Smith during the Spurs series.

Mr. Karl’s anti-Smith soap opera aside, I am hoping that Smith’s incredible 2008, which has caused Iverson to defy Karl and commend him in public, will at the very least prevent Smith from being completely benched during this year’s playoff series, assuming there is one. I don’t think A.I. is going to have almost no reaction like he did last year, if Smith is again benched this year. Iverson would probably veto a Smith benching this year.

Please A.I., let us fans at least see the only outstanding 3-point shooter on the Nuggets, even if we are doomed to be one series and done again.

We have been discussing the dangerously unique 2 point guards offense that the Nuggets have evolved into since Atkins was injured and since Karl refuses to start Smith at the 2-spot, or shooting guard. In this game, the 2 point guards offense worked very well, the reason being that both the new Suns and the old Suns are and were not good perimeter and open space defenders. The old Suns were like the blue blood version of the Nuggets, who are a very blue collar type of team. The old Suns’ offense was much more refined, more controlled, and more powerful, especially with respect to long-range shooting, than the offense of the Nuggets. But defensively, there never was a large difference between the Suns and the Nuggets. And this year, the Nuggets defense actually became much better than the Suns’ defense, as we will see in greater detail in a moment.

The most important thing you have to keep in mind is that the two point guard offense, like most unusual schemes that few coaches have ever tried, will work against some teams some or most of the time, but it will be an automatic failure against other teams. For it to work, the Nuggets have to be playing a team that sees defending as less important than trying to score a lot of points. The problem is, 6 of the 8 Western Conference teams that the Nuggets are battling for supremacy treat defending as more than an afterthought. And those 6 teams are ready and willing to double team Iverson, which right there creates a crisis for the Nuggets, unless Anthony Carter takes over running the point in full, and does it well, neither of which I would not count on if I were you.

Defensive efficiency means points allowed per 100 possessions, and it is an excellent measure of how good a team is defensively, overall. Here are the defensive efficiency ranks, out of 30 NBA teams, among the top 9 teams in the Western Conference.

Rockets, 2nd
Spurs 3rd
Nuggets, 5th
Lakers, 6th
Hornets, 7th
Jazz, 11th
Mavericks, 13th
Suns, 17th
Warriors 23th

The Nuggets can forget about their two point guard offense working at all against the Rockets, the Spurs, the Lakers, and the Hornets. And they can forget about it working all that well against the Jazz or the Mavericks. The only top Western teams that the Nuggets’ strange approach can work well against sometimes would be the Suns and the Warriors. And even against those two teams, it is by no means a reliable or safe way to run an offense.

Oh, and the next time someone tells you that the Nuggets do not defend, or that they don’t defend well, or that they have a poor defense, tell them they are living in the past. In fact, the only big thing that the Denver coaches have accomplished this year is that they have motivated and trained the Nuggets to defend well, despite the fast pace of many Nuggets games. This is a huge accomplishment, which makes it all the more tragic that so little has been done for the offense.

PROJECTIONS

Nuggets 1 Current odds, to the nearest 5%, of the Nuggets making the playoffs: 45%
Nuggets 1 Current odds, to the nearest 5%, that the Nuggets and their suffering fans will be stuck with George Karl for next season: 65%

The current odds of the Nuggets making the playoffs, according to Hollinger at ESPN’s excellent team analysis system, are 61%. However, the Nuggets are projected to most likely be the 9th seed in the Western Conference, meaning that they will not make the playoffs. The Hollinger odds don’t take into account that, most likely, neither Nene nor Atkins are going to be available in top form for the Nuggets for the stretch run, so the real odds that the Nuggets will make the playoffs are probably around 45-50% now.

The Lakers, the Rockets, the Spurs, the Jazz, and the Hornets are currently considered locks to make the playoffs, and the Mavericks and the Suns are currently considered virtual locks to make the playoffs. However, the Rockets are no longer really total locks, due to the loss of Yao Ming for the season. And the Suns may be in trouble due to their terrible trade, the main part of which was Shawn Marion for Shaquille O’Neal.

PLAYOFF TEAMS PROJECTED FINAL RECORDS-HOLLINGER-ESPN
Lakers 59-23
Spurs 56-26
Rockets 55-27
Jazz 53-29
Hornets 53-29
Mavericks 52-30
Suns 52-30
Warriors 49-33

NON-PLAYOFF TEAMS PROJECTED FINAL RECORDS-HOLLINGER-ESPN
Nuggets 49-33
Trailblazers 41-41

The Rockets have just lost their best player, and one of the best players in the NBA, Yao Ming, for the rest of the season. Therefore, they will probably drop substantially below their current projection, since the projections do not take injuries into account. The Suns will probably drop a little more also, because they made a bad trade when they gave up “The Matrix,” Shawn Marion. At this time, however, Nuggets 1 does not believe that either the Rockets or the Suns will fail to win at least 50 games, so they will most likely finish ahead of the Nuggets despite their difficulties.

As for the Warriors, they have an easier schedule than the Nuggets the rest of the way, so Nuggets 1 agrees with Hollinger’s system, and thinks that the Warriors will finish very slightly ahead of the Nuggets. If the Warriors and the Nuggets finish with identical records, and the season series between them ends up tied 2-2, the Warriors are likely to get the playoff spot rather than the Nuggets, because it is likely that the Warriors will finish at least 1 game ahead of the Nuggets in Conference record, which would be the tie-breaker if the Warriors and the Nuggets split their 4 head to head games. If either the Nuggets or the Warriors win both of the remaining two head to head games that the teams play, then that winner will earn a substantial advantage toward securing the final playoff spot. The Nuggets-Warriors games are on Saturday, March 29 in Denver and on Thursday, April 10 in Oakland. Neither the Warriors nor the Nuggets will be playing on back to back nights in either of those games.

So overall, Nuggets 1 agrees with the Hollinger system; as of now, we think the Nuggets will fail to make the playoffs. But it will be an extremely close call, and it could go either way. One extra win by the Nuggets could easily be all that is needed for them to make the playoffs. Specifically, if the Nuggets can go 14-8 in their last 22 games, and finish 50-32, that is likely to be good enough for at least the 8th seed. All bets are off if the Nuggets are 13-9 in their last 22 games. If the Nuggets are 12-10 or worse, it is very unlikely that they will make the playoffs.

If you win a division you get into the playoffs regardless of how poor your record is. For the Nuggets, winning the Northwest Division is very unlikely at this point; the odds on that are at 13%. The odds that Utah will win the Northwest are 87% right now. The Nuggets would most likely have to beat the Jazz in both of their remaining games against them, both of which are in Salt Lake City, and one of which is this Saturday night, in order to have a shot at winning the Northwest.

PLAYERS WHO WERE NOT AVAILABLE
NUGGETS PLAYERS WHO WERE NOT AVAILABLE
Chucky Atkins: has returned to practice after missing the previous 26 games due to a surgically repaired right groin/abdominal strain (Sports Hernia). He is considered questionable for the Spurs game on Friday, but his return is imminent.
Nene: underwent successful surgery to remove a testicular tumor on Jan. 14. A timeline for his return is still unknown. He is out until at least the first week of March, but could easily be out for the entire rest of the season.

SUNS PLAYERS WHO WERE NOT AVAILABLE
None, all Suns on the roster were available.

ALERT STATUS PROBLEMS
As of March 6, 2008

The Nuggets are under a YELLOW ALERT, on account of the following problems.

INJURIES, ILLNESSES, SUSPENSIONS, AND LEAVES
1. Chucky Atkins injury 18 points
2. Nene illness 14 points

SEVERE AND UNEXPECTED CRUCIAL PLAYER SLUMPS
None, 0 points

BAD OR INADEQUATE COACHING
1. George Karl has completely benched one or more players who should not be benched due to his incorrect calculation of the benefits and costs of that player, his hatred of the player, and/or his having the ulterior motive of forcing the player off the team. The problem points would be the points you would have if the player were injured.

No one is currently completely benched who should not be: 0 points.

2. One or more players are partially benched; their minutes are being artificially limited due to abstract and subjective factors that the Denver coaches believe are more important than performance on the court.

J.R. Smith was partially benched: 2 points. .

3. George Karl over relies on his starters and won’t play the non-starters enough: 0-12 Points. The severity varies depending on the circumstances, mainly Karl’s beliefs and moods, and whether the other team is playing well enough to take advantage of the Nuggets playing with not enough breathers, with too many fouls, and so forth. The current points reported are for the use, or should I say the misuse, of the reserves for the most recent games, with the most weight being given to the game being reported on here.

The bad use of reserves score for this game is 0 points. Najera had major foul trouble, which explains why he didn’t play much.

4. The Nuggets have extreme inconsistency and an excessive number of turnovers because they have neither a system nor even a good partial system on offense. They over rely on fast pace and isolation plays. The damage caused by this would be up to 20 points, except that Iverson reduces the damage. At one time earlier this season, Iverson and Carter were marginalizing Anthony to some extent. That problem went away when Anthony ramped up his rebounding.

However, another problem that has developed due to a combination of the unstructured offense and the Karl lineup, and it is not going to go away anytime soon. That would be the double point guard problem. The Nuggets don’t know in advance who is going to be the effective point guard in the game: Iverson, Carter, or both Iverson and Carter roughly equally. And in any case, it is foolish to have two point guards in the game for more than a small number of minutes.

In any event, the Nuggets lack enough tried and tested offensive plays that they can run game after game, perfecting them as they go, and having everyone automatically on the same page for those plays.

On defense a system is much less important than on offense. How good your defense is is determined much more by effort and skill than by strategy. On defense, the main strategic decision is whether you are playing zone or man to man defense. The choice varies during each game, and usually depends on a gut feeling of the coach and/or the defensive floor leader, as to which is better at a particular point in the game, and with a particular opposing lineup on the court. At least as important as whether a zone or a man to man defense is in effect is the quality of the actual defending.

Lack of an adequate number of offensive plays and patterns: 6 Points

INTENSITY, HUSTLE, AND HEART
1. The Nugget’s intensity, hustle and heart are lacking: 0 Points. It’s not anywhere near as bad as some fans think it is.

TOTAL PROBLEM POINTS: 40, which constitutes YELLOW ALERT. But that total is on the border with GREY alert, so we will show both explanations:

YELLOW ALERT (40-54): Minor damage is occurring to the season. The entire season is under medium threat. Beating quality teams is much more difficult and will be pretty rare. About 1/2 of all wins against good teams will now be losses. Beating mid-level teams is a little more difficult. About 1/4 of games that would be wins against mid-level teams will now be losses. Beating low level teams is still relatively easy, but no longer almost a sure bet. A good team has become in between a good team and a mid-level team when it is under this alert.

GREY ALERT (30-39): There are relatively minor problems leading to a small threat against the success of the entire season. It is still possible to beat quality teams, but it will be more unusual to beat a quality team, because about 1/4 of what would have been wins against good teams will now be losses when there is a GREY ALERT.

The damage description assumes that Nuggets opponents are in a GREY ALERT or better status. When the Nuggets play teams that are in yellow alert or worse, the damage they suffer from being in a significant alert status will be substantially reduced. In other words, opponents who are themselves in significant alert situations will obviously be more beatable, even when the Nuggets are in a significant alert situation.

OBSERVATIONS ON THE ALERT STATUS
The Suns are currently in either a high GREY or a YELLOW alert, for the unusual reason of a poor trade..

So the Nuggets and the Suns were in a similar alert status for this game. But the Nuggets had both the home court and the extra rest advantages.

Both Atkins and Nene are definitely going to be out for many more days and either one of them or both of them could easily be out for the entire rest of the season. And George Karl is definitely not going to pull a few offensive set plays out of a hat any time soon. Therefore, the Nuggets are doomed to be in ORANGE ALERT or YELLOW ALERT for most or all of the rest of the season, which endangers their chances of making the playoffs.

The mid January losses to the Bobcats and the Hawks, and the close calls at home against the Wolves and the Hawks in January, in games that should have and probably would have been relatively easy wins had the alert status been green, grey, or even yellow, illustrate the usefulness and accuracy of the alert system. When you reach ORANGE ALERT and especially RED ALERT, you start losing a substantial number of games that you would normally win. It’s that simple, and there is little anyone can do about it.

RESERVE WATCH
Number of Players Who Played at Least 6 Minutes: Nuggets 8 Suns 8
Number of Players Who Played at Least 10 Minutes: Nuggets 8 Suns 8

Nuggets Non-Starters Points: 28
Suns Non-Starters Points: 43

Nuggets Non-Starters Rebounds: 5
Suns Non-Starters Rebounds: 6

Nuggets Non-Starters Assists: 3
Suns Non-Starters Assists: 9

THE RESERVES IN THIS GAME
There is no more Shawn Marion and no more Marcus Banks for the Suns, so there will be few games where 9 players play 10 minutes or more, and there will now be few road wins earned from a deep bench alone. But some traditions die hard, and the Suns non-starters beat the Nugget’s non-starters in points, rebounds, and especially in assists. Nuggets’ non-starters make very few assists, which may not be as bad a thing as it seems. The Nuggets are running a 2 point-guard offense, and the assists are already very spread out with just the starters considered.

I hope to develop the reserve watch feature further in the future, because I want to try to expand what I already have in terms of a game coaching evaluation system. But the complications involved explain why there are no formal statistics anywhere on the internet on the subject of how much non-starters contribute to different teams, and also why coaches are not compared statistically the way players are. There are a lot of variables that come into the use of reserves that interfere with the objective of judging their use. Statisticians call this “statistical noise,” and if you have a substantial amount of it, then what you are trying to do with your statistics becomes very difficult or next to impossible.

GEORGE KARL CONFIDENCE IN HIS TEAM RATING (Scale of 0 to 10)
3: He's hiding under his seat on the sidelines

PLAYER RATINGS EXPLAINED
You can tell how well every player played at a glance. Of the advanced statistics I have seen on the internet, this one seems to have the best balance between offense and defense. While some are biased in favor of offensive players, such as the efficiency measure at the NBA site, many other advanced statistics are biased in favor of good defenders, and do not reflect the heavy importance of offense in basketball. Here is the formula for the ESPN rating of a player, which I think is a very good balance between offense and defense:

Points + Rebounds + 1.4*Assists + Steals + 1.4*Blocks - .7*Turnovers + # of Field Goals Made +1/2*# of 3-pointers Made - .8*# of Missed Field Goals - .8*# of Missed Free Throws + .25 *# of Free Throws Made

All players on each team who played at least 5 minutes are shown. The number after “game,” is how well the player did in this game, whereas the number after “season” is that player’s overall average for the entire season.

NUGGETS-SUNS PLAYER RATINGS
NUGGETS PLAYER RATINGS
Allen Iverson: Game 55.6 Season 41.4
Carmelo Anthony: Game 50.6 Season 39.4
Anthony Carter: Game 31.5 Season 21.0
J.R. Smith: Game 28.0 Season 15.8
Marcus Camby: Game 27.5 Season 33.1
Kenyon Martin: Game 26.1 Season 22.6
Linas Kleiza: Game 10.2 Season 18.4
Eduardo Najera: Game 6.0 Season 13.1

Chucky Atkins: Did Not Play-Injury
Nene: Did Not Play-Illness

Yakhouba Diawara: Did Not Play-Coach’s Decision
Taurean Green: Did Not Play-Coach’s Decision
Steven Hunter: Did Not Play-Coach’s Decision

SUNS PLAYER RATINGS
Boris Diaw: Game 35.8 Season 19.1
Amare Stoudemire: Game 33.8 Season 41.3
Shaquille O’Neal: Game 32.4 Season 25.2
Steve Nash: Game 30.6 Season 37.8
Leandro Barbosa: Game 20.4 Season 25.2
Raja Bell: Game 20.2 Season 19.8
Grant Hill: Game 20.0 Season 26.3
Gordan Giricek: Game 16.2 Season 6.4
Linton Johnson: Game -0.7 Season 4.7

NOTE 1: these stats do not correct for the big differences in playing times. Players with small minutes would get a higher rating if they had more minutes.
NOTE 2: This performance measure does NOT include the quality and quantity of each player’s defending, including the number of shots that the player prevented from going in the basket. The best Nuggets defenders are Camby, Martin, and Najera.

OBSERVATIONS ON THE PLAYER RATINGS:
Well, by looking at these ratings, you can see that the story of this game was simple: the Suns, playing on back to back nights, and still trying to get used to Shaquille O’Neal being on the team, could not begin to stop either Iverson or Anthony. The combined performance of these two was as high as it has been all season. O’Neal was busy guarding Martin and Camby, who are not huge Nuggets offensive weapons. Shawn Marion used to make life miserable for Anthony, but he plays for Miami now. Grant Hill had his moments, but he is not the defender that Marion is.

J.R. Smith was at almost double his average performance on the strength of 6/8 from downtown, and Carter was half again better than his average, on the strength of his 11 assists. Martin was a little better than usual.

Camby was noticeably worse than usual, and the Linas Kleiza slump continued on, but it was not as extreme as in recent games. Najera, whose value is primarily at the defensive end, could not play much due to heavy foul trouble. He was called for 3 fouls in the first 3 minutes of the 2nd quarter alone, and ended up with 5 fouls.

Coach Mike D’Antoni of the Suns has two alternatives at SF in the wake of the loss of Marion: Diaw and Grant. Grant started at the position, but Diaw played 37 minutes anyway, and he played extremely well.

PF Stoudemire had all kinds of problems in this game, and were it not for his extreme talent level and sheer athletic power, his rating would have been much lower than it was. He had foul trouble, he turned it over too much, and he is still trying to adjust to the presence of Shaquille O’Neal on his team. Martin was able to just about match Stoudemire both offensively and defensively, which was a major reason why the Nuggets could win this game. Often in Phoenix, and sometimes in Denver, Stoudemire is unstoppable, and he has been known to make Martin look like a D-League player.

This was one of C O’Neal’s best games as a Sun, highlighted by 18 rebounds and 12 points on 5/6 from the field and 2/4 from the line, but he also turned it over 5 times.

While SG Bell was exactly at his season normal, PG Nash, PG Barbosa, and SF Hill were all at about 80% of their normals.

SG Giricek, acquired from the 76’ers recently, played almost twice as many minutes as he did on average for the 76’ers.

Among the 6 Suns who have been Suns all season, only 1 of them, SF Diaw, performed substantially above his usual level. This adds another little piece of evidence to the theory that the Suns have been left in disarray by their big and very controversial trade.

REAL PLAYER RATINGS EXPLAINED
The Real Player Rating reflects reality better than the gross player rating, since it washes out differences in playing times among the players. The straight up player rankings are obviously heavily affected by how many playing minutes the various players get. With many teams, you can rely on the coach to give his various players roughly the playing time that makes the most sense for his team. Unfortunately, some coaches bring other factors besides actual performance into their rotation decisions. Therefore, it makes good sense to introduce a new and extremely important statistic that Nuggets 1 calls the Real per Minute Player Rating. As the name implies, this is the gross ESPN player rating divided by the number of minutes. The statistic is called Real Player Rating for short.

This statistic allows anyone to see whether or not players who play only a small number of minutes are doing better than their low gross rating will indicate. You can spot diamond in the rough players who are not getting all the respect and playing time due to them. At the same time, it will allow anyone to see whether players with a lot of minutes are playing worse than, as well as, or better than their gross rating shows.

In summary, the Real Player Rating allows the reader, at a glance, to see exactly how well each player is doing without regard to playing time, which is subject to coaching error and subjective and less important factors such as a player's personality. The Real Player Rating provides the real truth-pure knowledge not available anywhere else.

SCALE FOR THE REAL PLAYER RATINGS
1.80 More Amazing Happens, but only certain players can ever fly this high
1.60 1.80 Superstar Plus-Above Normal Even For Michael Jordan
1.40 1.60 Superstar Performance-A Michael Jordan Type Game
1.20 1.40 Star Plus-Spectacular Performance
1.05 1.20 Star Performance
0.90 1.05 Outstanding Game
0.80 0.90 Very Good Game
0.70 0.80 Good Game
0.60 0.70 Mediocre Game
0.50 0.60 Poor Game
0.40 0.50 Very Poor Game
0.25 0.40 Extremely Poor-Near Disaster
Less 0.25 Total Disaster

NUGGETS-SUNS REAL PLAYER RATINGS
All players who played 5 minutes or more are included. Any player who played only 5-9 minutes is noted.

1. J.R. Smith, Den 1.333
2. Carmelo Anthony, Den 1.332
3. Allen Iverson, Den 1.293
4. Amare Stoudemire, Pho 1.166
5. Shaquille O'Neal, Pho 1.080
6. Steve Nash, Pho 1.020
7. Boris Diaw, Pho 0.968
8. Anthony Carter, Den 0.851
9. Gordan Giricek, Pho 0.810
10. Marcus Camby, Den 0.786
11. Grant Hill, Pho 0.769
12. Kenyon Martin, Den 0.768
13. Leandro Barbosa, Pho 0.658
14. Raja Bell, Pho 0.631
15. Eduardo Najera, Den 0.500
16. Linas Kleiza, Den 0.486
17. Linton Johnson, Pho -0.140…Johnson played only 5 minutes.

OBSERVATIONS ON THE REAL PLAYER RATINGS
By a tiny fraction, J.R. Smith beat out Anthony as the best player on the court. Those two and Iverson were star-plus for the Nuggets. O’Neal and Stoudemire were stars for the Suns. So the Nuggets had 3 of the 5 players who were stars or better.

Diaw and Nash were outstanding for the Suns, and the Nuggets had no one in that category. So among the 7 players who were outstanding or better, the Suns had 4 of them.

Carter for the Nuggets and Giricek for the Suns were very good, while Camby and Martin for the Nuggets and Hill for the Suns were just good.

Each team had 2 disappointments. Barbosa and Bell were only mediocre for the Suns. For the Nuggets, Najera was poor and Kleiza, who has been in a slump, due to one extent or another to his ankle sprain suffered in the Feb. 19 Celtics game, was very poor. Kleiza aggravated the sprain in practice on Monday, but he has to play or else Smith would have to play 30 minutes, and Karl might have a nervous breakdown if that transpired.

NUGGET’S PLUS—MINUS
This tells you how the score changed while a player was on the court. All Nuggets who played at least 10 minutes are shown.

J.R. Smith: +15
Anthony Carter: +15
Eduardo Najera: +10
Marcus Camby: +8
Kenyon Martin: +7
Carmelo Anthony: +6
Allen Iverson: +1
Linas Kleiza: -3

OBSERVATIONS ON PLUS—MINUS
Coach Karl’s favorite player, Carter, and his least favorite player, Smith, were top dogs in the plus-minus. Despite limited playing time and big foul problems, the Nuggets were +10 while Najera was out there. Iverson’s number is partly bad luck, since the Nuggets won by 13 points and he was out there 43 of 48 minutes. Kleiza was left out of the flow of the offense for the most part, and he is not a particularly good defensive player, so his number was negative during 21 minutes.

NUGGETS MADE WHAT?
All Nuggets who played at least 5 minutes are shown. The order is from lowest to highest in real player rating.

Turnovers: NBA Average: 14, Nuggets’ Total 11, Team 0, Anthony 3, Camby 1, Carter 2, Iverson 0, Kleiza 2, Martin 1, Najera 0, Smith 2

Personal Fouls: NBA Average: 21, Nuggets’ Total 21, Anthony 3, Camby 3, Carter 5, Iverson 1, Kleiza 0, Martin 4, Najera 5, Smith 0

Linas Kleiza played 21 minutes and was 2/3, 1/1 on 3’s, and 1/2 from the line for 6 points, and he made 2 rebounds, 1 block, and 1 steal.

Eduardo Najera played 12 minutes and was 1/2 and 0/1 on 3’s for 2 points, and he made 2 assists and 1 rebound.

Kenyon Martin played 34 minutes and was 7/12, 0/1 on 3’s, and 3/6 from the line for 17 points, and he made 5 rebounds, 2 steals, and 1 assist.

Marcus Camby played 35 minutes and was 3/8 and 3/4 from the line for 9 points, and he made 8 rebounds, 4 blocks, 4 assists, and 1 steal.

Anthony Carter played 37 minutes and was 4/9 and 3/5 on threes for 11 points, and he made 11 assists, 3 rebounds, and 2 steals.

Allen Iverson played most of the game, 43 minutes, and was 12/25 and 7/9 from the line for 31 points, and he made 12 assists, 5 rebounds, and 1 steal.

Carmelo Anthony played 38 minutes and was 12/20 and 6/8 from the line for 30 points, and he made 13 rebounds, 2 blocks, and 1 assist.

J.R. Smith played 21 minutes and was 7/12 and 6/8 on 3’s for 20 points, and he made 2 rebounds and 1 assist.

NEXT UP
The next game will be Friday, March 7 in Denver to play the Spurs at 8:30 pm mountain time. The Spurs will be playing on back to back nights, but the Nuggets will not be. So the Nuggets will have both the home court and the extra rest advantages.

The Nuggets Lose a Key Game to the Rockets 103-89, and Why the Nuggets' Offense Can't Get it Done in Big Games

This was the game that the Nuggets had to win to reestablish their credentials as a true playoff team. Yao Ming, the Rockets best player, is out for the season, and the Rockets overall are now equal to the Nuggets in damage from players not being available. The stage was set for the Nuggets to redeem themselves from their post all-star break extreme inconsistency. But not only did they not win, they had no chance of winning. Not only did they have no chance of winning, but they looked bad while not having any chance of winning. Not only did they look bad, but they were truly helpless and hopeless, considering that Iverson has been given 100% control to do whatever he wants, but he was having one of his serious downer games, and there is no Plan B for Iverson downer games.

The Nuggets started off decently, but trailed all the way after the 1st quarter, and they lost 103-89 to the Rockets. The Nuggets should be thankful it was not a 20 point blowout, like the other visit to Houston was earlier in the season.

The bottom line is that the Nuggets have not shown themselves to be a true playoff team, meaning one that has a chance to win more than 1 game in a playoff series. Quite honestly, their record is a little misleading on the upside, because of a relatively soft schedule and because of an unusual number of lucky wins. Most of the reasons for the Nuggets failing to match the expectations of experts have already been identified in prior game reports, and we can’t rehash them here because it would bore the regular readers to death and it would take too long.

However, I am planning to summarize the reasons why the Nuggets will not make the playoffs in the next game report, the one for the Suns game. But if the Nuggets beat the Suns, I will delay it a little, since the Nuggets odds of making the playoffs will be up around 50% again if they win that game and, more importantly, you don’t want to post why the Nuggets are failures after they have won a big game. The Suns are playing on back to back nights, and they no longer have Shawn Marion, and these factors give the Nuggets a fighting chance to win that game.

The Nuggets have 3 mega stars and none of them played well in this game. I can’t recall another game where all three among Iverson, Anthony, and Camby all played far below their usual levels at once. According to the Real Player Ratings, Camby and Anthony were just good, which is actually bad, relatively speaking, and Iverson was poor, which is a disaster, relatively speaking. The best Nugget in the game was Anthony Carter, because he made all 4 shots he put up, and because he made 3 steals to go along with his 5 assists. However, Carter and Iverson continued to play a lot of minutes simultaneously, and it was completely unclear in this game who the PG was supposed to be, since both of them were continually switching off running the point while they were both out there.

The only other Nugget who played well besides Carter was J.R. Smith, who at least was allowed to play a relatively generous 25 minutes. Smith made 3 of 5 threes, and 4 of 8 shots overall, along with 3 steals 3 rebounds, and an assist. Meanwhile, the Bad Smith was nowhere to be found: Smith made only 1 turnover and 2 fouls.

C Dikembe Mutombo and PF Carl Landry are the main two players to receive Yao’s minutes. Landry was fairly big on both offense and defense, while Mutombo was reasonably good on defense. But it was SF Shane Battier and PF Luis Scola who really stepped up for the Rockets in the paint. PG Rafer Alston made some sweet looking shots and some sweet looking passes for scores. And of course SG Tracy McGrady made even more of them than did Alston. But don’t kid yourself, the smart way that the Rockets were sharing and moving the ball, while maintaining a clear identity at the point guard position, made it as if Adelman himself was running around out there and getting a triple double. The Rockets’ head coach kicked some serious rear end in this game, believe that.

A well run offense needs to get between 22 and 25 assists per game or more, with the requirement varying depending on it’s pace. The Nuggets are the fastest pace team in pro basketball, wild and free, so they would need to be getting at least 25 assists per game to be considered a well run offense. But the Nuggets are only making 23.7 assists per game, so they are about 10% short. It doesn’t sound like much, and I admit that the Nuggets offense could be a lot worse than it is, but keep in mind that my job is to tell you why the Nuggets have not made the playoffs if they don’t, and to tell you why they have lost in the playoffs when they do. That seemingly small shortage of assists is a symptom of a much larger problem, which is that the Nuggets are not organized enough on offense to be able to support their extremely fast pace. It’s great to get all the fast breaks that you can get, but a fast pace for the sake of a fast pace, while running without set plays to get players in position to make their favorite shots, is not a smart offense.

In total, the Nuggets made a total of just 19 assists in this game. The Nuggets failed to make even the average number of assists that an NBA team gets in a game, which rounded off is 22, let alone the number of assists that a very fast paced team is supposed to get, which is 25.

Now let’s break this game’s offense down to the player level. There is an important playmaking guideline that must be followed in every game, without fail. The very best run offenses feature one PG dominating in assists, making 1/3 to 1/2 of all of the assists in every game. Think of the Hornets, the Suns, the Warriors, the Jazz, and the new Mavericks. The next best option is to have your starting PG and your starting SG combine for between 1/2 and 2/3 of the assists in every game. Think of the Lakers, the Spurs, and these Rockets, with Alston and McGrady teaming up for the Rockets. The third best option is to have 2 point guards combine to get at least half the assists, but no more than 2/3 of the assists in every game. In rare cases, such as with the current 76’ers, you might be halfway decent with 1 PG and one G-F or SF combining for between 1/2 and 2/3 of the assists in every game.

In every single game where none of these guidelines is met, it means that the assists are too spread out. This indicates a team that is too wild and too on the fly to be able to have enough consistency or, in other words, to be able to have players on the same page often enough. On these unstructured offense teams, some players are mostly left out of the offense. Think Yakhouba Diawara. On these teams, there can be more than 2 players who are often looking for cutters and open men at the same time, which doesn’t make any sense because the primary objective is to score. There should always be either 3 or 4 players who have getting into scoring position as their top objective. These players make an assist only when the extra pass will mean an almost certain score.

In other words, with unstructured offenses, players get confused about whether they should be screening, cutting, and getting open, or whether they should be looking for someone else to be screening, cutting, and getting open. Carmelo Anthony himself fell into this confusion during this game, which was a big reason why the Nuggets had no chance to win it.

Guess which teams commonly can not meet any of the playmaking guidelines? You guessed it; these would be the lottery teams. Examples would be the Grizzlies, the Timberwolves, and the Clippers without Shaun Livingston.

Without enough offensive consistency coming from a playmaking identity, which you get by following the guidelines, you are making life too difficult for yourself. You are making your team a hostage to too much confusion, too many turnovers, and to too little sweet looking cutting, passing, and shooting.

Whenever the Nuggets fail to meet the guidelines, they almost always lose. The Nuggets generally fail to make the guidelines when Iverson makes too many shot attempts and not enough assists. Carter is nowhere near good enough to rescue the Nuggets when Iverson decides to do this. They also fail to make the guidelines when Melo starts to worry about assisting as much as he worries about scoring, including 3-point scoring. And by not being a good finisher at the rim offensively, Camby does not help the Nuggets in the least with this major offensive problem.

The solution to prevent the Nuggets from failing to meet the guidelines is clear: Iverson starts and plays PG and is held responsible if his shooting goes wild at the expense of his assisting. Carter and Iverson should be on the court at the same time as little as possible, for half a quarter at the most.

As mentioned already, in this game, the Nuggets made a total of just 19 assists. Carter made 5, Iverson 4, Anthony 4, Camby 3, and Martin, Najera, and Smith made 1 assist each. So you can see that the Nuggets violated the rule: their top two assist players made 9 assists instead of 10-12 of them. Why did neither of the Nuggets’ point guards, Carter, or Iverson, have substantially more assists than Anthony, a forward? There is no good answer for that. Why, if Carter is the PG, which he most certainly is according to Karl, did he not get substantially more assists than any other Nugget, in one the most important games of the season? There is no good answer for that. Why, out of a 48 minute game, were Iverson and Carter on the floor at the same time for over 22 minutes, so that the Nuggets had a strange and confusing 2 point-guard offense during this time? There is no good answer for that either. Who was the Denver Nuggets’ point guard for this game? Your guess is as good as mine, son.

The Rockets have now won 15 straight games, 12 with Yao Ming and 3 without him, tying their franchise record. The Rockets never lost a game during February; the last time they lost was on January 27. The winning streak is the longest in the NBA this season. The Rockets are now 19-1 in their last 20 games. Do the Rockets have 3 superstars, 1 star, and 1 high potential SG like the Nuggets do? No, they have 2 superstars, one of whom is gone for 3 games now, and a bunch of hardworking players who have been instructed by Coach Rick Adelman on what they should do and what they should not do in order to win games.

“We know how good we are and we’re showing it,” McGrady said. “We’re a focused group, a group that understands how to win ballgames.” Damn you McGrady! Just when everyone, and I do mean everyone, is finally in agreement with Nuggets 1 and is saying that the Nuggets need to have a way to win, because Karl and his staff have not provided one yet, you have to rub it in by telling everyone that the Rockets have been provided with the golden knowledge of a way to win by the wily old Adelman. Damn you for rubbing it in anyway, while we are trying to deal with a real head case of a team up here in Denver and the very real chance that the Nuggets will be the biggest disaster in basketball this year. And damn Adelman too, for not being in love with Denver and for not approaching the Denver front office to see if he could coach here.

PROJECTIONS

Nuggets 1 Current odds of the Nuggets making the playoffs: 35%
Nuggets 1 Current odds that we will be stuck with George Karl for next season: 60%

The current odds of the Nuggets making the playoffs, according to Hollinger at ESPN’s excellent team analysis system, are 56%. However, the Nuggets are projected to most likely be the 9th seed in the Western Conference, meaning they will not make the playoffs. The Hollinger odds don’t take into account that, most likely, neither Nene nor Atkins are going to be available in top form for the Nuggets for the stretch run, so the real odds that the Nuggets will make the playoffs are probably around 40-45% now. The subjective odds are just 30-35%, because of how bad the Nuggets looked against the Rockets.

The Lakers, the Hornets, the Spurs, the Mavericks, the Jazz, the Suns, and the Rockets are currently considered virtual locks to make the playoffs. However, the Rockets are no longer total locks, due to the loss of Yao Ming for the season.

Here are the computer projections for the final records of Western Conference teams:

PLAYOFF TEAMS PROJECTED FINAL RECORDS-HOLLINGER ESPN
1. Lakers 58-24
2. Spurs 56-26
3. Rockets 54-28
4. Jazz 53-27
5. Mavericks 52-30
6. Hornets 52-30
7. Suns 52-30
8. Warriors 48-34

NON-PLAYOFF TEAMS PROJECTED FINAL RECORDS-HOLLINGER ESPN

9. Nuggets 47-35
10. Trailblazers 42-40

The Rockets have just lost their best player, and one of the best players in the NBA, Yao Ming, for the rest of the season. Therefore, they will probably drop substantially below their current projection, since the projections do not take injuries into account. The Suns will probably drop a little more also, because they made a bad trade when they gave up “The Matrix,” Shawn Marion. At this time, however, Nuggets 1 does not believe that either the Rockets or the Suns will fail to win at least 49 games, so they will most likely finish ahead of the Nuggets despite their difficulties. As for the Warriors, they have an easier schedule than the Nuggets the rest of the way, so Nuggets 1 agrees with Hollinger’s system that the Warriors will finish slightly ahead of the Nuggets.

So overall, Nuggets 1 agrees with the Hollinger system; we think the Nuggets will fail to make the playoffs.

If you win a division you get into the playoffs regardless of how poor your record is. For the Nuggets, winning the Northwest Division is very unlikely at this point; the odds on that are at 13%. The odds that Utah will win the Northwest are 87% right now. The Nuggets would most likely have to beat the Jazz in both of their remaining games against them, both of which are in Salt Lake City, and one of which is this Saturday night, in order to have a shot at winning the Northwest.

PLAYERS WHO WERE NOT AVAILABLE
NUGGETS PLAYERS WHO WERE NOT AVAILABLE
Chucky Atkins: He was diagnosed with a right groin/abdominal strain (sports hernia) on Jan. 9 and underwent successful surgery on Jan. 11. He is expected to be sidelined a minimum of eight weeks. Atkins is out until at least March 10. With any luck, he will be back in the Nuggets lineup by late March.
Nene: underwent successful surgery to remove a testicular tumor on Jan. 14. A timeline for his return is still unknown. He is out until at least the first week of March, but could easily be out for the entire rest of the season.

ROCKETS PLAYERS WHO WERE NOT AVAILABLE
Yao Ming: He will miss the rest of the season with a stress fracture in his foot.
Steve Francis: He will be out for the indefinite future as he was diagnosed with bi-lateral quadricep tendonitis on Dec. 31.
Adam Haluska: Ankle injury: Out indefinitely. He could miss remainder of the season.

ALERT STATUS PROBLEMS
As of March 3, 2008

The Nuggets are under a YELLOW ALERT, on account of the following problems.

INJURIES, ILLNESSES, SUSPENSIONS, AND LEAVES
1. Chucky Atkins injury 18 points
2. Nene illness 14 points

SEVERE AND UNEXPECTED CRUCIAL PLAYER SLUMPS
None, 0 points.

BAD OR INADEQUATE COACHING
1. George Karl has completely benched one or more players who should not be benched due to his incorrect calculation of the benefits and costs of that player, his hatred of the player, and/or his having the ulterior motive of forcing the player off the team. The problem points would be the points you would have if the player were injured.

No one is currently completely benched who should not be: 0 points.

2. One or more players are partially benched; their minutes are being artificially limited due to abstract and subjective factors that the Denver coaches believe are more important than performance on the court.

J.R. Smith was partially benched: 0 points. Smith was not partially benched.

3. George Karl over relies on his starters and won’t play the non-starters enough: 0-12 Points. The severity varies depending on the circumstances, mainly Karl’s beliefs and moods, and whether the other team is playing well enough to take advantage of the Nuggets playing with not enough breathers, with too many fouls, and so forth. The current points reported are for the use, or should I say the misuse, of the reserves for the most recent games, with the most weight being given to the game being reported on here.

The bad use of reserves score for this game is 2 points. Najera should have played a little more.

4. The Nuggets have extreme inconsistency and a truly excessive number of turnovers because they have neither a system nor even a partial system on offense. The damage caused by this would be up to 20 points, except that Iverson reduces the damage. In broad terms, the team has failed to decide whether it wants Melo alone, Iverson alone, Melo and Iverson together, or neither of them to be firstly responsible for scoring enough points to keep the Nuggets in games. If it were neither, I call the name of that strategy the "share the wealth" strategy. More specifically, the Nuggets lack enough tried and tested offensive plays that they can run game after game, perfecting them as they go, and having everyone automatically on the same page for those plays.

On defense a system is much less important than on offense. How good your defense is is determined much more by effort and skill than by strategy. On defense, the main strategic decision is whether you are playing zone or man to man defense. The choice varies during each game, and usually depends on a gut feeling of the coach and/or the defensive floor leader, as to which is better at a particular point in the game, and with a particular opposing lineup on the court. More important than whether a zone or man to man defense is in effect is the quality of the actual defending.

Lack of an adequate number of offensive plays and patterns: 15 Points

INTENSITY, HUSTLE, AND HEART
1. The Nugget’s intensity, hustle and heart are lacking: 2 Points. It’s not anywhere near as bad as some fans think it is.

TOTAL PROBLEM POINTS: 51, which constitutes YELLOW ALERT.

YELLOW ALERT (40-54): Minor damage is occurring to the season. The entire season is under medium threat. Beating quality teams is much more difficult and will be pretty rare. About 1/2 of all wins against good teams will now be losses. Beating mid-level teams is a little more difficult. About 1/4 of games that would be wins against mid-level teams will now be losses. Beating low level teams is still relatively easy, but no longer almost a sure bet. A good team has become in between a good team and a mid-level team when it is under this alert.

The damage description assumes that Nuggets opponents are in a GREY ALERT or better status. When the Nuggets play teams that are in yellow alert or worse, the damage they suffer from being in a significant alert status will be substantially reduced. In other words, opponents who are themselves in significant alert situations will obviously be more beatable, even when the Nuggets are in a significant alert situation.

OBSERVATIONS ON THE ALERT STATUS
Yao Ming is 35 alert status points, Steve Francis is 10 points, and Adam Haluska is 0 points, for a total of 45 points from injuries alone. The Rockets are either in a high YELLOW or a low ORANGE alert, so the alert status of the Rockets and the Nuggets was about the same.

Both Atkins and Nene are definitely going to be out for many more days and either one of them or both of them could easily be out for the entire rest of the season. And George Karl is definitely not going to pull a few offensive set plays out of a hat any time soon. Therefore, the Nuggets are doomed to be in ORANGE ALERT or YELLOW ALERT for most or all of the rest of the season, which endangers their chances of making the playoffs.

The mid January losses to the Bobcats and the Hawks, and the close calls at home against the Wolves and the Hawks in January, in games that should have and probably would have been relatively easy wins had the alert status been green, grey, or even yellow, illustrate the usefulness and accuracy of the alert system. When you reach ORANGE ALERT and especially RED ALERT, you start losing a substantial number of games that you would normally win. It’s that simple, and there is little anyone can do about it.

RESERVE WATCH
Number of Players Who Played at Least 6 Minutes: Nuggets 8 Rockets 9
Number of Players Who Played at Least 10 Minutes: Nuggets 8 Rockets 8

Nuggets Non-Starters Points: 23
Rockets Non-Starters Points: 25

Nuggets Non-Starters Rebounds: 13
Rockets Non-Starters Rebounds: 10

Nuggets Non-Starters Assists: 2
Rockets Non-Starters Assists: 4

Both coaches played 8 players for 10 minutes or more, but Rick Adelman for the Rockets added 1 more, Chuck Hayes, for 8 minutes. But Hayes did not do anything much for the Rockets.

Scoring was about even between the non-starters of the Nuggets and the Rockets. Led by Najera’s 6 rebounds, the Nuggets’ non-starters out rebounded the Rockets’ non-starters, 13-10. As usual, the other team’s non-starters made more assists than did the Nuggets’ non-starters, in this case by 4-2.

I hope to develop the reserve watch feature further in the future, because I want to try to expand what I already have in terms of a game coaching evaluation system. But the complications involved explain why there are no formal statistics anywhere on the internet on the subject of how much non-starters contribute to different teams, and also why coaches are not compared statistically the way players are. There are a lot of variables that come into the use of reserves that interfere with the objective of judging their use. Statisticians call this “statistical noise,” and if you have a substantial amount of it, then what you are trying to do with your statistics becomes very difficult or next to impossible.

GEORGE KARL CONFIDENCE IN HIS TEAM RATING (Scale of 0 to 10)
3: He's hiding under his seat on the sidelines

PLAYER RATINGS EXPLAINED
You can tell how well every player played at a glance. Of the advanced statistics I have seen on the internet, this one seems to have the best balance between offense and defense. While some are biased in favor of offensive players, such as the efficiency measure at the NBA site, many other advanced statistics are biased in favor of good defenders, and do not reflect the heavy importance of offense in basketball. Here is the formula for the ESPN rating of a player, which I think is a very good balance between offense and defense:

Points + Rebounds + 1.4*Assists + Steals + 1.4*Blocks - .7*Turnovers + # of Field Goals Made +1/2*# of 3-pointers Made - .8*# of Missed Field Goals - .8*# of Missed Free Throws + .25 *# of Free Throws Made

All players on each team who played at least 5 minutes are shown. The number after “game,” is how well the player did in this game, whereas the number after “season” is that player’s overall average for the entire season.

NUGGETS-ROCKETS PLAYER RATINGS
NUGGETS PLAYER RATINGS
Carmelo Anthony: Game 27.3 Season 39.3
Marcus Camby: Game 25.7 Season 33.1
Anthony Carter: Game 23.3 Season 20.9
Allen Iverson: Game 21.0 Season 41.1
J.R. Smith: Game 20.5 Season 15.6
Kenyon Martin: Game 17.6 Season 22.5
Eduardo Najera: Game 12.6 Season 13.2
Linas Kleiza: Game 2.9 Season 18.5

Chucky Atkins: Did Not Play-Injury
Nene: Did Not Play-Illness

Yakhouba Diawara: Did Not Play-Coach’s Decision
Taurean Green: Did Not Play-Coach’s Decision
Steven Hunter: Did Not Play-Coach’s Decision

ROCKETS PLAYER RATINGS
Tracy McGrady: Game 36.4 Season 34.2
Shane Battier: Game 35.7 Season 19.7
Luis Scola: Game 33.1 Season 17.2
Rafer Alston: Game 33.1 Season 23.8
Carl Landry: Game 21.5 Season 15.6
Luther Head: Game 15.1 Season 12.7
Dikembe Mutombo: Game 11.4 Season 5.4
Bobby Jackson: Game 10.2 Season 12.0
Chuck Hayes: Game 0.3 Season 11.3

NOTE: these stats do not correct for the big differences in playing times. Players with small minutes would get a higher rating if they had more minutes.

OBSERVATIONS ON THE PLAYER RATINGS:
A team that has no player with at least a 30 rating is normally a lottery, rebuilding type of team, so the fact that the highest Nugget, Anthony, made just a 27 rating tells you that the Nuggets’ stars all simultaneously played relatively poorly in this game. It could have been a massive rout, similar to the other Nuggets-Rockets game in Houston earlier this season. Anthony and Camby were only about 70% of normal, and Iverson was only about 50% of normal.

Anthony Carter, by making virtually every shot he attempted and by leading the team in assists, broke out of his slump in this game, and was above normal for a change. The only other Nugget who was better than normal was J.R. Smith, who was 3/5 on threes and 4/8 overall. Smith is known for playing better on the road than in Denver, and is also known for playing very well when many other Nuggets are playing poorly.

Najera just missed his average, and Martin was off roughly 1/3 from his. Linas Kleiza should not have bothered to suit up.

For the Rockets, it was an extremely impressive across the board team effort.

For the Rockets, the three big step-up players were PG Alston, SF Battier, and PF Scola, the latter two being much more important to the Rockets now that Yao Ming is out for the season. 41 years old C Mutombo joined Battier and Scola with a big step-up type of performance in the front court.

SG Tracy McGrady was right on target, but by no means spectacular.

From the Rockets bench came the very solid games from SG Head and PF Landry. Unlike Coach Karl with the Nuggets non-starters, Coach Adelman was able to integrate Rockets non-starters into the flow of the offense.

PG Jackson was only a fraction off his usual game, and Hayes didn’t do anything much but he only played 8 minutes so it didn’t matter.
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REAL PLAYER RATINGS EXPLAINED
The Real Player Rating reflects reality better than the gross player rating, since it washes out differences in playing times among the players. The straight up player rankings are obviously heavily affected by how many playing minutes the various players get. With many teams, you can rely on the coach to give his various players roughly the playing time that makes the most sense for his team. Unfortunately, some coaches bring other factors besides actual performance into their rotation decisions. Therefore, it makes good sense to introduce a new and extremely important statistic that Nuggets 1 calls the Real per Minute Player Rating. As the name implies, this is the gross ESPN player rating divided by the number of minutes. The statistic is called Real Player Rating for short.

This statistic allows anyone to see whether or not players who play only a small number of minutes are doing better than their low gross rating will indicate. You can spot diamond in the rough players who are not getting all the respect and playing time due to them. At the same time, it will allow anyone to see whether players with a lot of minutes are playing worse than, as well as, or better than their gross rating shows.

In summary, the Real Player Rating allows the reader, at a glance, to see exactly how well each player is doing without regard to playing time, which is subject to coaching error and subjective and less important factors such as a player's personality. The Real Player Rating provides the real truth-pure knowledge not available anywhere else.

SCALE FOR THE REAL PLAYER RATINGS
1.80 More Amazing Happens, but only certain players can ever fly this high
1.60 1.80 Superstar Plus-Above Normal Even For Michael Jordan
1.40 1.60 Superstar Performance-A Michael Jordan Type Game
1.20 1.40 Star Plus-Spectacular Performance
1.05 1.20 Star Performance
0.90 1.05 Outstanding Game
0.80 0.90 Very Good Game
0.70 0.80 Good Game
0.60 0.70 Mediocre Game
0.50 0.60 Poor Game
0.40 0.50 Very Poor Game
0.25 0.40 Extremely Poor-Near Disaster
Less 0.25 Total Disaster

NUGGETS-ROCKETS REAL PLAYER RATINGS
All players who played 5 minutes or more are included. Any player who played only 5-9 minutes is noted.

1. Anthony Carter, Den 1.059
2. Rafer Alston, Hou 1.034
3. Luis Scola, Hou 0.974
4. Luther Head, Hou 0.944
5. Carl Landry, Hou 0.896
6. Tracy McGrady, Hou 0.888
7. Shane Battier, Hou 0.850
8. J.R. Smith, Den 0.820
9. Marcus Camby, Den 0.779
10. Bobby Jackson, Hou 0.729
11. Carmelo Anthony, Den 0.700
12. Eduardo Najera, Den 0.663
13. Allen Iverson, Den 0.500
14. Dikembe Mutombo, Hou 0.475
15. Kenyon Martin, Den 0.463
16. Linas Kleiza, Den 0.161
17. Chuck Hayes, Hou 0.038…Hayes played only 8 minutes.

OBSERVATIONS ON THE REAL PLAYER RATINGS
There was only 1 star in this game: Carter of the Nuggets. But the Rockets had 3 outstanding players, while the Nuggets had none. Alston led the Rockets, and Scola and Head were also outstanding. So the Rockets had 3 of the 4 players who were outstanding or better. Playing very well were Battier, McGrady, and Landry for the Rockets, and J.R. Smith for the Nuggets. Among all players who were very good or better, the Rockets crushed the Nuggets 6-2.

Anthony was right on the border between good and mediocre, but since his average rating is outstanding, this was basically a disaster, relatively speaking. Iverson, who is also normally outstanding, was right on the border between mediocre and poor, and this was a disaster for the Nuggets, relatively speaking, no doubt about it.

Mutombo is out there for his defense only these days, and man to man defending is not rated by this or any other rating system, so his very poor rating is a little misleading. Martin is also a good defender, but he is also an important Nuggets’ offensive player, and he missed 9 of 13 shots, so his very poor rating is not really misleading. Playoff teams can not afford many one-dimensional players, offensive or defensive, that’s for sure.

Kleiza was a complete and total disaster in this game for the Nuggets; Hayes played only 8 minutes for the Rockets and did very little.

NUGGET’S PLUS—MINUS
This tells you how the score changed while a player was on the court. All Nuggets who played at least 10 minutes are shown.

J.R. Smith: -1
Eduardo Najera: -6
Anthony Carter: -7
Kenyon Martin: -10
Linas Kleiza: -10
Marcus Camby: -12
Allen Iverson: -13
Carmelo Anthony: -14

OBSERVATIONS ON PLUS—MINUS
J.R. Smith led the Nuggets in the plus-minus in a road game where the team was playing poorly, as has happened many times this season, especially in the past month. Najera and Carter were not as whipped by the Rockets as were the other Nuggets. The three top Nuggets stars, Camby, Iverson, and Anthony, were all routed by the Rockets.

NUGGETS MADE WHAT?
All Nuggets who played at least 5 minutes are shown. The order is from lowest to highest in real player rating.

Turnovers: NBA Average: 14, Nuggets’ Total 17, Team 0, Anthony 4, Camby 0, Carter 1, Iverson 4, Kleiza 2, Martin 4, Najera 1, Smith 1

Personal Fouls: NBA Average: 21, Nuggets’ Total 17, Anthony 5, Camby 2, Carter 1, Iverson 0, Kleiza 1, Martin 4, Najera 2, Smith 2

Linas Kleiza played 18 minutes and was 1/5 and 1/2 on 3’s for 3 points, and he made 3 rebounds.

Kenyon Martin played 38 minutes and was 4/13 and 4/8 from the line for 12 points, and he made 10 rebounds, 1 block, 1 assist, and 1 steal.

Allen Iverson played for most of the game, 42 minutes, and was 7/22, 1/7 on 3’s, and 2/3 from the line for 17 points, and he made 4 assists, 3 steals, and 3 rebounds.

Eduardo Najera played 19 minutes and was 2/4 and 1/2 on 3’s for 5 points, and he made 6 rebounds and 1 assist.

Carmelo Anthony played 39 minutes and was 7/17, 0/2 on 3’s, and 5/6 from the line for 19 points, and he made 6 rebounds and 4 assists.

Marcus Camby played 33 minutes and was 3/4 and 2/2 from the line for 8 points, and he made 8 rebounds, 3 assists, and 2 blocks.

J.R. Smith played 25 minutes and was 4/8, 3/5 on 3’s, and 1/2 from the line for 12 points, and he made 3 steals, 3 rebounds, and 1 assist.

Anthony Carter played 22 minutes and was 4/4, 1/1 on 3’s, and 1/2 from the line for 10 points, and he made 5 assists and 3 steals.

NEXT UP
The next game will be Wednesday, March 5 in Denver to play the Suns at 7 pm mountain time. The Suns will be playing on back to back nights, but the Nuggets will not be. So the Nuggets will have both the home court and the extra rest advantages.