The Trailblazers Defeat the Nuggets, 99-96, Despite Huge Carmelo Anthony and Allen Iverson Games

The night before, versus the Rockets, was a game that the Nuggets should have won easily, but it was as difficult a win as you will see. In this game, you had the same context, as it should have been an easy win for the Portland Trailblazers, but they made life overly difficult for themselves just as the Nuggets did to themselves the night before. But Portland did eventually beat the Nuggets, 99-96. Four injuries to two power forwards and two centers left the Nuggets with just one power forward and one center available. Plus, the Nuggets were playing on back to back nights on the road, whereas the Trailblazers were rested. But the Nuggets, with some great Iverson shooting, led 52-50 at the half. And they led 76-69 after 3 quarters, as the Trailblazers failed to take full advantage of the devastation to the Nuggets front court, by not taking it into the paint enough.

Trailblazers coach Nate McMillan, whose team has now won 10 straight and turned a poor start completely around, gets high marks for player development and rotation, but low marks in this game for guiding his team in shot selection in particular and offense in general. The Trailblazers over relied on jump shooting and chose not to go to the hoop as much as they could and should have. Had they played all their cards right, they could have just about routed the Nuggets in this game. Aside from Melo, who was spectacular, and A.I., who was outstanding, the Nuggets had no one playing very well in this game.

In case you can’t believe how so many front court players could be out at once, here is the run down of them. Denver center Marcus Camby did not play because of a mid-back bruise he suffered against the Rockets. The Nuggets started Jelani McCoy at center instead. McCoy, resigned with the Nuggets on Friday. He played in five games this season before he was waived just two days earlier, on Wednesday. Starting PF Kenyon Martin was inactive due to a right hamstring strain he suffered in the 2nd quarter of the Rockets game the night before this game. The second string power forward Nene remained out. He has begun to participate in full practices after missing the past six weeks due to a torn ulnar collateral ligament in his left thumb suffered at Boston on November 7. Finally, reserve Denver center Steven Hunter remained sidelined while recovering from successful November 16 arthroscopic surgery on his right knee.

The Nuggets quickly lost their 7 point lead as the 4th quarter got underway. Travis Outlaw hit two jump shots and PG Steve Blake scored his only points of the game, a 3-pointer, in the first 1:15 of the quarter, while Iverson missed a short jumper and PG Chucky Atkins, back from a 7-weeks start of the season injury layoff for his second game, missed a long 2-pointer. So now it was 76-76.

For Denver, the next few minutes were dominated by Chucky Atkins misses and Bobby Jones fouls, while Travis Outlaw and James Jones were knocking down a few shots for Portland. With 8:13 left, the Trailblazers were leading in the quarter 16-2 and leading in the game 85-78. Then the Trailblazers got really carried away with the jump shooting, as James Jones, Jarrett Jack, and Travis Outlaw all missed long range jumpers on three straight plays. Carmelo Anthony used this opportunity to hit a couple short jumpers and get the Nuggets right back into contention for the upset special. It was 85-84 with 6:13 left.

Channing Frye then made a layup, while Chucky Atkins missed yet another jumper. Then Carmelo Anthony and Allen Iverson answered LaMarcus Aldridge and Brandon Roy, so it was 92-90 Trailblazers with 3:16 to go. Following a Portland turnover, Najera tipped in a little Iverson floater to tie the score. Then Brandon Roy missed a very short jumper, but Carmelo Anthony had his short jumper blocked by SF Travis Outlaw, in what was the first of 3 super key Trailblazer blocks. It was 92-92 with 2:06 left.

Then Outlaw made a very short jumper, but Anthony responded with a layup for 94-94 with 1:27 left. Then, with the game on the line, neither Brandon Roy nor Allen Iverson could make clutch shots. Carmelo Anthony was then whistled for a foul on James Jones, who sunk 1 of 2 free throws for 95-94 Trailblazers with 36 seconds left. Following a full Denver timeout, Brandon Roy blocked Carmelo Anthony’s 11-footer, which was the second of the three crucial late in the game blocks.

Kleiza intentionally fouled Travis Outlaw with 16 seconds left, and Outlaw made both free throws, for 97-94 Trailblazers. Iverson laid it in with 6 seconds left. so now it was 97-96 Trailblazers. The Nuggets should definitely have insisted on a 3-point attempt in that situation, so you had bad tactics there. Jarrett Jack made both free throws off the ensuing intentional foul. With less than a second left, Travis Outlaw made the third of three late clutch blocks for the Trailblazers, as he disrupted the Linas Kleiza 3-pointer attempt for the tie. So the final score was 99-96 Trailblazers, and it was very nice of them not to hand the Nuggets another rout, or at least a thrashing, similar to the 116-105 thumping they put on the Nuggets in Denver just 5 days earlier.

Iverson and Carmelo Anthony certainly put the Nuggets in position for the upset win, but as is so often the case when the Nuggets lose, there was almost no one to supplement their great offensive games. J.R. Smith, who is roughly half in and half out of the huge George Karl doghouse these days, was held to just 9 minutes, and made 1/3 threes during this limited time. SF Bobby Jones showed tremendous offensive potential in early games to go along with his known defensive quickness and cover skills. But he inevitably landed in the doghouse when his youthful exuberance produced a few too many unwise shots and blown covers for the fragile Nuggets’ Coach, whose nerves are apparently made of flimsy tissue paper.

The 4 front court injuries were the equivalent of putting a gun to Karl’s head and forcing him to play Jones. But in typical Karl fashion, he played Jones for relatively limited time under the extreme circumstances, 14 minutes. Jones, who like all doghouse players was not going to automatically get the ball from Iverson, Melo, or Anthony Carter even when open, used his limited minutes to try to reestablish his core defensive credentials, which he was not able to do. Jones’ play had bench rust all over it, as he was called for 4 personal fouls and committed 2 turnovers while getting only 2 rebounds.

One thing you have to understand about cheating reserves out of playing time when they are producing is that they will come back to cheat you later when you have no choice but to go to them. You reap what you sow. Just like last season when Karl sowed discord and bad vibes into J.R. Smith, and ended up reaping almost nothing from him when the fate of the team for the season was being decided, Karl this season is sowing lack of confidence and lack of real game experience for Bobby Jones, and you can already see that Jones’ performance is sinking into the muck, compared with what it was in the first few weeks of the season, which was promising to say the least. Or, to put it another way, George Karl is the ultimate self-fulfilling prophesy coach. He way too quickly loses confidence in many a reserve player, benches them, and then is stuck with players who themselves have lost confidence and, even more to the point, have lost the quick defensive instincts and expert shooting touch under pressure that can come only from adequate playing time in real games.

At the very least, an NBA coach must “keep up with the Jones’s,” the Coaches of the top teams, with respect to keeping the reserves as ready to perform as possible, by giving them critical playing time on a regular basis. Instead of keeping up with the Jones’s, Karl is busy limiting the potential of the Jones he has on his team.

ALERT STATUS PROBLEMS
As of December 22, 2007

The Nuggets are under an unusually dangerous and damaging alert status, so the following update is provided.

INJURIES & SUSPENSIONS
1. Marcus Camby injury 19 points
2. Kenyon Martin injury 13 Points
1. Nene injury 9 Points
2. Steven Hunter injury 2 Points

UNEXPECTED STAR PLAYER PERFORMANCE PROBLEMS
None

BAD OR INADEQUATE COACHING
1. George Karl over relies on his starters and won’t play the non-starters enough: 5-20 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. Karl will normally be in the 5-15 range, but it could spike to as much as 20 in the event of the benching of a major player such as Kenyon Martin. 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 12 points.

2. Lack of adequate offensive schemes: 8 Points. This would be up to 18 points, except that Iverson reduces the damage. Another way of describing this is that 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 the game. If it were neither, I call the name of that strategy the "share the wealth" strategy.

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

TOTAL PROBLEM POINTS: 63, which constitutes ORANGE ALERT.

ORANGE ALERT (55-74): Moderate damage is occurring to the season. The entire season is under serious threat, and you can just about forget about beating quality teams. About 3/4 of all wins against good teams will now be losses. Beating mid-level teams is much more difficult ORANGE ALERT. About 1/2 of games against mid-level teams that would have been won will be lost under this alert. Even poor teams can often beat an otherwise good team that is under this alert. Close to 1/4 of games against low level teams that would have been won will be lost under this alert. A good team has been reduced to being a mid-level team, at best, when it is under this alert.

RESERVE WATCH

Number of Players Who Played at Least 6 Minutes: Trailblazers 9 Nuggets 9
Number of Players Who Played at Least 10 Minutes: Trailblazers 9 Nuggets 8

This feature is under development, and it will be expanded. The complications involved explain why (a) there are no formal statistics anywhere on the internet on the subject of how much non-starters contribute to different teams and (b) 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)
1.0 He has absconded to Mexico with Najera’s wife.

ESPN PLAYER RATINGS FOR THIS GAME:
You can tell how well they 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. 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:

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
Carmelo Anthony: Game 51.9 Season 37.5
Allen Iverson: Game 44.3 Season 41.3
Anthony Carter: Game 22.9 Season 19.4
Linas Kleiza: Game 16.9 Season 17.0
Eduardo Najera: Game 11.9 Season 14.3
Jelani McCoy: Game 7.0 Season 2.4
J.R. Smith: Game 5.6 Season 15.1
Chucky Atkins: Game 1.7 Season 8.7
Bobby Jones: Game -0.2 Season 5.6

Yakhouba Diawara: Did Not Play-Coach’s Decision:
Von Wafer: Did Not Play-Coach's Decision

Marcus Camby: Did Not Play-Injury
Kenyon Martin: Did Not Play-Injury
Nene: Did Not Play-Injury
Steven Hunter: Did Not Play-Injury

TRAILBLAZERS
LaMarcus Aldridge: Game 32.8 Season 29.3
Martell Webster: Game 31.0 Season 18.6
Brandon Roy: Game 24.1 Season 31.8
Channing Frye: Game 23.2 Season 13.4
Travis Outlaw: Game 22.1 Season 20.1
James Jones: Game 18.4 Season 15.5
Steve Blake: Game 16.5 Season 16.8
Jarrett Jack: Game 9.0 Season 16.4
Joel Przybilla: Game 7.6 Season 14.4

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 RATINGS:
The injuries to Camby, Kenyon Martin, and Nene have led to a game like this, with Allen Iverson and Carmelo Anthony having to perform even better than usual for the Nuggets to even have a chance to win. And when there are this many injuries, you can also clearly see George Karl’s inability to develop and play reserve players in stark relief. Both J.R. Smith and Bobby Jones, the two players Karl has cheated the most for playing time, were miserable in this game, unable to create or buy confidence for themselves, when their Coach has none for them, out of thin air, and unable to shake off the bench rust in the instincts and the shooting touch.
Steve Blake remains one of the most overrated players in pro basketball. Anthony Carter has outplayed Blake this season, even though Blake is the multi-millionaire starter, whereas Carter was supposed to be a stop gap measure until Atkins returned for the Nuggets. But in this game, Atkins was a no show, so Karl will now undoubtedly continue to start and give more minutes to Carter over Atkins.

In the worst case scenario, this will get another self-fulfilling prophesy going, with Karl thinking Carter is better for the Nuggets than Atkins. The more Atkins is kept out of the starting lineup and out of the heart of the Denver offense, the more he might indeed appear to be inferior to Carter, who is now at the heart of the Denver offense, and so the more Atkins, as a kind of outsider, might end up with disaster games like this one. Then, when the Nuggets venture into the playoffs, they will have a no name PG like Anthony Carter, with no playoff experience at all, who is supposed to play the point against teams like the Mavericks and the Spurs. Those teams will utterly destroy Carter, resulting in the almost complete shutdown of the Nugget’s offense for long stretches. Such is the fate that awaits the Nuggets unless Karl comes to his senses.

NUGGETS REAL PLAYER RATINGS--EXPLANATION
A Great New Feature from Nuggets 1

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, you can not rely on George Karl to award playing time in just about the best way possible. He brings other factors besides actual performance into his rotation decisions. Therefore, it makes good sense to introduce a new and very important statistic that Nuggets 1 will call the Real Per Minute Player Rating which, as the name implies, is the gross ESPN player rating divided by the number of minutes. The statistic is called Real Player Rating for short.

This statistic allows everyone to see whether or not players who play only a small number of minutes are doing better than their low gross rating will indicate. At the same time, it will allow everyone to see whether players with a lot of minutes are playing worse than, as well as, or better than their gross rating shows. This is another big improvement in the Nuggets 1 never ending quest to give readers total information about the Nuggets. This statistic allows the reader, at a glance, to see exactly how well each player is doing without regard to playing time. So it gives you pure knowledge not available anywhere else..

SCALE FOR THE REAL PLAYER RATINGS
1.60 More Superstar Performance beyond the Michael Jordan Level
1.40 1.60 Superstar Performance-Michael Jordan Level
1.20 1.40 Superstar Performance
1.00 1.20 Star Performance
0.90 1.00 Outstanding Game
0.80 0.90 Very Good Game
0.70 0.80 Good Game
0.60 0.70 Alright Game
0.50 0.60 Mediocre Game
0.40 0.50 Poor Game
0.30 0.40 Very Poor Game
0.20 0.30 Near Disaster
Less 0.20 Total Disaster

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

1. Carmelo Anthony, Den 1.298
2. Channing Frye, Por 1.160
3. Martell Webster, Por 1.148
4. LaMarcus Aldridge, Por 0.994
5. Allen Iverson, Den 0.984
6. Travis Outlaw, Por 0.921
7. James Jones, Por 0.681
8. Anthony Carter, Den 0.654
9. Steve Blake, Por 0.635
10. Brandon Roy, Por 0.634
11. J.R. Smith, Den 0.622 Note: Smith played only 9 minutes.
12. Joel Przybilla, Por 0.585
13. Linas Kleiza, Den 0.497
14. Eduardo Najera, Den 0.496
15. Jelani McCoy, Den 0.389
16. Jarrett Jack, Por 0.321
17. Chucky Atkins, Den 0.081
18. Bobby Jones, Den -0.014

OBSERVATIONS ON THE NUGGETS-TRAILBLAZERS REAL PLAYER RATINGS
You can see from this that J.R. Smith actually was half way decent in limited playing time. You can also see that Chucky Atkins had the kind of game that will have Anthony Carter starting for a long time to come, which starts to get one thinking of a nightmare scenario of Carter starting against Tony Parker or Steve Nash in the playoffs. That would not be a very good result for the Nuggets, I can assure you.

C-F Channing Frye, F-G Martell Webster, and C-F LaMarcus Aldridge all took advantage of the too young Kleiza, the too out of practice Jelani McCoy, and the too overrated Eduardo Najera. In a game like this, you can clearly see the limitations of Eduardo Najera at the power forward position in a high pressure situation. Najera might be alright in conjunction with a Marcus Camby or a Kenyon Martin, but when he is supposed to be the main man defensively, he is not good enough to slow down the primary power forwards and centers of the other team. On the other hand, Najera has added value to his generous playing time this year by becoming a scoring weapon for the Nuggets from beyond the arc. But it is way to early to say whether he will be able to hit threes in the playoffs, or whether he will just be another playoff shooting bust, similar to Linas Kleiza and J.R. Smith in the Spurs playoff series.

NUGGET’S PLUS—MINUS
This tells you how the score changed while a player was on the court. All Nuggets who played at least 6 minutes are shown.

Anthony Carter: +13
Carmelo Anthony: +4
J.R. Smith: +2
Eduardo Najera: +0
Jelani McCoy: -1
Linas Kleiza: -5
Allen Iverson: -5
Bobby Jones: -11
Chucky Atkins: -12

OBSERVATIONS ON PLUS—MINUS
Bobby Jones and Chucky Atkins were eaten alive. Najera was unable to produce a net benefit for the Nuggets, though it would have made more sense to start him at the 4-spot rather than Kleiza. Against the relatively soft Portland defense, Anthony Carter became the real point guard, over Allen Iverson, instead of the point guard on paper only, which he frequently is.

NUGGETS MADE WHAT?
All Nuggets who played at least 6 minutes are shown.

Jelani McCoy played 18 minutes and was 1/1 for 2 points, and he made 4 rebounds and 1 block.

Bobby Jones played 14 minutes and was 0/1 for 0 points, and he made 2 rebounds.

Eduardo Najera played 24 minutes and was 2/3 and 0/1 on 3’s for 4 points, and he made 5 rebounds, 1 assist, and 1 steal.

Anthony Carter played 35 minutes and was 2/3 and 1/1 on 3’s for 5 points, and he made 9 assists, and 5 rebounds.

Chucky Atkins played 21 minutes and was 1/8 and 1/5 on 3’s for 3 points, and he made 2 assists.

Linas Kleiza played 34 minutes and was 4/8, 1/4 on 3’s, and 2/4 from the line for 11 points, and he made 5 rebounds and 1 assist.

J.R. Smith played 9 minutes and was 1/3 on 3’s for 3 points, and he made 2 rebounds and 1 assist. Smith didn’t produce much, but since he played only 9 minutes, his real player game rating came out in the “alright” range.

Carmelo Anthony played for most of the game, 40 minutes, and he was 14/26, 0/1 on 3’s, and 6/9 from the line for 34 points, and he made 12 rebounds, 1 assist, and 1 steal.

Allen Iverson played for virtually the whole game, 45 minutes, and was 11/26, 1/5 on 3’s, and 11/12 from the line for 34 points, and he made 4 rebounds, 3 assists, and 2 steals.

NEXT UP
The next game will be Sunday, December 23 in Sacramento to play the Kings at 7 pm mountain time. Neither the Nuggets nor the Kings will be playing on back to back nights.

Carmelo Anthony and Allen Iverson Lead the Nuggets to a Double Overtime Win Over the Rockets 112-111

In a struggle of a game that should have been an easy win for the Nuggets, it was instead an extremely difficult win and almost a loss. In double overtime, the Nuggets defeated the Houston Rockets 112-111. The Nuggets had the home court advantage. Also, the Rockets were playing on back to back nights, while the Nuggets were playing after an unusually long break of 3 nights off. And Houston was playing without their top scorer, Tracy McGrady. Finally, the Rockets just could not hit a lot of shots in this game. They ended up with a total of 40/102 made shots, or .402, which is generally not good enough to get a win or an overtime.

It could have been a truly classic game had the Rockets superstar tandem of Yao Ming and McGrady been in to battle the Nugget’s superstar tandem of Allen Iverson and Carmelo Anthony. But with McGrady out, the Rockets playing on the road, playing without rest, and missing too many shots, it should have been an easy victory for the Nuggets.

Why was it so difficult? This time, it was not all George Karl’s fault, though, as usual, he is to blame for not allowing the Nuggets 5th or 6th best player, J.R. Smith, to play at all. And since both Eduardo Najera and especially Linas Kleiza played poorly, this was another game tailor made for Bobby Jones to contribute to, but once George Karl has a player in bench mode, it simply doesn’t matter to what degree that player might be able to improve on someone else’s poor play in a particular game. If you’re benched under George Karl, you are not going to play unless hell freezes over.

But it wasn’t all Karl’s fault. The Nuggets were as dependent on two players to score as you can get in professional basketball. The entire Denver front court besides Melo was either injured, benched, or mostly unable to score. Keep in mind that this was a double overtime game when you consider the following small scoring outputs. Eduardo Najera scored just 7 points on 2/10 shooting. Linas Kleiza scored just 3 points on 1/3 shooting. Kenyon Martin scored just 8 points on 2/11 shooting. And Marcus Camby scored just 2 points on 1/7 shooting. Combined, every Nuggets power forward and center other than Anthony scored only 20 points on miserable 6/31 shooting.

So to win, both Iverson and Melo had to have big games, meaning that Melo would have to come out of his shooting and scoring slump. But Melo’s slump only got worse in the first half. He was just 2/17 from the field and just 4/9 from the line in the 1st half, although he did make 9 rebounds. But in the second half, he stormed back to be even better than the Carmelo Anthony all Nuggets fans have come to rely on for scoring in general and especially jump shot scoring when the paint is clogged. In the third quarter alone, Anthony was 8/8 for 15 points, and he made 2 steals, an assist, and a block. After coming back down to Earth in the 4th quarter, with a comparatively small 8 points on 2/6 shooting and 4/4 from the line, Melo was largely out of the offensive picture again. He took only 1 shot from the field in the 10 minutes of overtime and made it. When you add 3 of 4 made free throws, he scored 5 points in the 10 minutes of overtime.

Also needed for the Nuggets to even just barely beat the Rockets would be more than just Anthony Carter at the point. Just in time to the rescue was Chucky Atkins, who was making his first appearance as a Nugget. Atkins had been out with a groin injury since just before the season started. Although Carter has played relatively well for the Nuggets this year, and better than most expected, it remains true that Atkins is the better player. But naturally, as I predicted, Karl refused to start the returning Atkins. In regulation time, Carter played 33 ½ minutes, while Atkins played 16 minutes. This is roughly opposite what the allocation should have been. It seems to me that George Karl right now is one of only a very few people who believe that Anthony Carter is a better player than Chucky Atkins. Although ironically it was an Anthony Carter floater that won it for the Nuggets at the end of the second overtime, Chucky Atkins led the Nuggets in scoring during the overtimes, and made two clutch shots in the second overtime, one of which was a three.

Meanwhile, the Rockets, even without Tracy McGrady, were able to fight the Nuggets into two overtimes due to the giant Yao Ming, who scored 26 points and made 19 rebounds, which is just another day at the office for him, and to 3 other players who came up with mammoth games: Luther Head, Rafer Alston, and Bonzi Wells. Luther Head played so well in place of Tracy McGrady that it was practically like having McGrady himself out there. Head is a 3rd year SG and is not having a particularly great year. It’s just that the Nuggets in general and Iverson in particular did not guard him very well and he made 5 of 10 threes on the perimeter. Head must have had his best game of the season in this one. Veteran starting PG Rafer Alston, in his 9th year, made his mark by making 10 assists, 3 steals, and 7 rebounds, to go along with his 18 points on 7/18 shooting. 7 rebounds are huge for a point guard. Reserve G-F Bonzi Wells is playing just a little bit better than last year, and he’s average at best, but he made several fantastic cuts toward the basket that allowed a teammate, usually Yao Ming, to give him a pass inside for the easy score. Wells ended up with 8 rebounds, 2 steals, 1 assist, and 1 block to go along with his 17 points on 7/15 shooting. Wells productivity per minute was astounding.

So these four Rockets, Ming, Head, Alston, and Wells, all played brilliantly, but Allen Iverson and Carmelo Anthony are so good at what they do that they were able to carry the Nuggets to the win mostly by themselves, despite the usual poor coaching and the unusual collapse of inside scoring. The Nuggets ended up with just 30 points in the paint, whereas the Rockets scored 42 in the paint. Overall shooting was .402 to .366 in favor of the Rockets. The Rockets made 12/34 threes, or 35.5% of them, whereas the Nuggets made just 5/20 of theirs, or 25.0%. The Nuggets won the rebounding by just a little, and the assisting was roughly equivalent.

So the good news here is that Anthony emerged from his shooting slump, made a career high 16 rebounds, and, even more importantly, broke free from enough double teams and moved around and got Iverson’s attention enough to get the ball enough times to be able to be Iverson’s full partner in the task of beating the Rockets. Despite how ridiculously difficult the win was, there was a very good feeling about how Melo and Iverson both had huge games for a change.

As Carmelo Anthony’s slump was at its worse at the end of the 1st half of this game, he kept smiling with each missed shot. The cable broadcast commentator, Doug Collins, said that good players do this to try to hide how frustrated they are. I don’t think Melo was smiling to hide how frustrated he was, I think he was smiling because he loves basketball and smiles often during games. He was smiling more than usual because he knew that his slump was just a temporary thing and not worth getting all upset about. And he was smiling because he was thinking about how much fun it was going to be to be to eventually catch up with Allen Iverson and be again, at the least, the co-leader of the Nugget’s offense. Had he been smiling to hide something, he would not have exploded in the 2nd half.

Smiling when things are bad is much better than getting upset. Carmelo Anthony is mostly a simple player who doesn’t understand how, why, and to what extent some strategies, tactics, and coaches are better than others. But any great player who can, unlike most other players, smile at the darkest hour, when the bad stuff has accumulated to it’s highest level, is a player I would want on my team more than somebody who gets all upset and starts pointing fingers and spreading blame around. We Nuggets fans are pitiful as we keep following an extremely talented team that logic, however, tells us can not possibly win in the playoffs. Maybe we should do what Carmelo Anthony does when times are tough: just smile and think about how, win or lose, slump or no slump, we really are one of the very best teams in basketball. Smiling enough will make us just about as happy as we would be if we won our true fair share.

ALERT STATUS PROBLEMS
As of December 21, 2007

The Nuggets are under an unusually dangerous and damaging alert status, so the following update is provided.

INJURIES & SUSPENSIONS
1. Nene injury 9 Points
2. Steven Hunter injury 3 Points
3. Kenyon Martin during the game injury 8 Points

UNEXPECTED STAR PLAYER PERFORMANCE PROBLEMS
1. Carmelo Anthony’s jump shooting is a little off from recent years and he is still inconsistent in rebounding. Making matters worse, George Karl and Allen Iverson have decided that it is acceptable that Melo be removed from the heart of the Nugget’s offense, and that he frequently be little more than a decoy, so that the rest of the Nuggets on the court can run a 4 on 3 offense and hope that Iverson can keep them in the game. The combination of Melo’s accuracy drop off from last year, together with his partial marginalization, makes for a very substantial and worsening star player performance problem. 2 Points.

2. Inability of Nuggets forwards to consistently give Camby enough rebounding and defending support inside: 2 Points

BAD OR INADEQUATE COACHING
1. George Karl over relies on his starters and won’t play the non-starters enough: 5-20 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. Karl will normally be in the 5-15 range, but it could spike to as much as 20 in the event of the benching of a major player such as Kenyon Martin. 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 12 points.

2. Lack of adequate offensive schemes: 8 Points. This would be up to 18 points, except that Iverson reduces the damage. Another way of describing this is that 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 the game. If it were neither, I call the name of that strategy the "share the wealth" strategy.

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

TOTAL PROBLEM POINTS: 44, 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 like the Nuggets has become in between a good team and a mid-level team when it is under this alert.

RESERVE WATCH

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

This feature is under development, and it will be expanded. The complications involved explain why (a) there are no formal statistics anywhere on the internet on the subject of how much non-starters contribute to different teams and (b) 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)
1.0 He has absconded to Mexico with Najera’s wife.

ESPN PLAYER RATINGS FOR THIS GAME:
You can tell how well they 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. 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:

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
Allen Iverson: Game 58.1 Season 40.8
Carmelo Anthony: Game 53.9 Season 35.8
Marcus Camby: Game 27.7 Season 32.0
Kenyon Martin: Game 17.8 Season 20.5
Chucky Atkins: Game 17.1 Season 17.1
Anthony Carter: Game 15.8 Season 20.3
Eduardo Najera: Game 11.2 Season 14.4
Linas Kleiza: Game 5.3 Season 17.0

J.R. Smith: Did Not Play-Coach’s Decision
Bobby Jones: Did Not Play-Coach’s Decision
Yakhouba Diawara: Did Not Play-Coach’s Decision:
Von Wafer: Did Not Play-Coach's Decision

Nene: Did Not Play-Injury
Steven Hunter: Did Not Play-Injury

ROCKETS
Yao Ming: Game 52.1 Season 39.2
Rafer Alston: Game 37.7 Season 18.6
Luther Head: Game 34.0 Season 7.7
Bonzi Wells: Game 29.9 Season 16.2
Shane Battier: Game 24.1 Season 16.5
Chuck Hayes: Game 14.2 Season 12.3
Aaron Brooks: Game 7.3 Season 2.3
Luis Scola: Game 5.3 Season 13.0
Mike James: Game 1.5 Season 12.4

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 RATINGS:
You can see that it was very touch and go for the Nuggets here. Iverson and Carmelo were huge, but no one else played particularly well and Kleiza was bad. Melo came out of his slump for at least this game, while Marcus Camby remained stuck in a shooting slump of his own. Nuggets PF Kenyon Martin left the game in the second half with a knee aggravation and did not return. He is questionable for Friday's game in Portland.

NUGGETS REAL PLAYER RATINGS--EXPLANATION
A Great New Feature from Nuggets 1

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, you can not rely on George Karl to award playing time in just about the best way possible. He brings other factors besides actual performance into his rotation decisions. Therefore, it makes good sense to introduce a new and very important statistic that Nuggets 1 will call the Real Per Minute Player Rating which, as the name implies, is the gross ESPN player rating divided by the number of minutes. The statistic is called Real Player Rating for short.

This statistic allows everyone to see whether or not players who play only a small number of minutes are doing better than their low gross rating will indicate. At the same time, it will allow everyone to see whether players with a lot of minutes are playing worse than, as well as, or better than their gross ranking shows. This is another big improvement in the Nuggets 1 never ending quest to give readers total information about the Nuggets. This statistic allows the reader, at a glance, to see exactly how well each player is doing without regard to playing time. So it gives you pure knowledge not available anywhere else.

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.

Allen Iverson, Den 1.096
Carmelo Anthony, D 1.078
Bonzi Wells, Hou 1.068
Yao Ming, Hou 1.022
Chuck Hayes, Hou 0.888
Luther Head, Hou 0.829
Rafer Alston, Hou 0.769
Chucky Atkins, Den 0.713
Marcus Camby, Den 0.660
Kenyon Martin, Den 0.574
Shane Battier, Hou 0.536
Aaron Brooks, Hou 0.521
Linas Kleiza, Den 0.482
Anthony Carter, Den 0.479
Luis Scola, Hou 0.331
Eduardo Najera, Den 0.329
Mike James, Hou 0.250 Played only 6 minutes

OBSERVATIONS ON THE NUGGETS REAL PLAYER RATINGS
You can see here what I have been saying, that Chucky Atkins is a good point guard, better than Anthony Carter and about equal to Andre Miller. There is no excuse for George Karl if he refuses to start Chucky Atkins and give him more playing time than Anthony Carter starting with the next game. Atkins is completely recovered from his injury, and he played much better than Carter in his first game back, so if he does not start and play more than Carter, it is just plain stupidity on Karl’s part.

As you can see, there were four star performances in this game, by Iverson, Anthony, Yao Ming, and Bonzi Wells. The Rockets had the next three best players. Despite having 5 of the best 7 players on the court, the Rockets could not quite escape Denver with the win.

NUGGET’S PLUS—MINUS
This tells you how the score changed while a player was on the court. All Nuggets who played at least 6 minutes are shown.

Linas Kleiza: +12
Allen Iverson: +6
Chucky Atkins: +4
Kenyon Martin: +2
Eduardo Najera: +2
Anthony Carter: -5
Marcus Camby: -6
Carmelo Anthony: -10

OBSERVATIONS ON PLUS—MINUS
Kleiza was just plain lucky here, because he did not play well himself. It was very nice to see Chucky Atkins come out with a + in his first game for the Nuggets. Carmelo Anthony was, strangely enough, the biggest minus. I don’t think there is much more than bad luck involved there.

NUGGETS MADE WHAT?
All Nuggets who played at least 6 minutes are shown. This game was a double overtime game, 58 minutes long.

Eduardo Najera played 36 minutes and was 2/10, 2/6 on 3’s, and 1/2 from the line for 7 points, and he made 6 rebounds and 2 blocks.

Anthony Carter played 36 minutes and was 3/8 for 6 points, and he made 8 assists and 4 rebounds.

Linas Kleiza played 13 minutes and was 1/3, 0/1 on 3’s, and 1/1 from the line for 3 points, and he made 3 rebounds and 1 steal.

Chucky Atkins played 24 minutes and was 5/11 and 3/9 on 3’s for 13 points, and he made 2 assists and 1 rebound.

Kenyon Martin played 31 minutes and was 2/11 and 4/6 from the line for 8 points, and he made 10 rebounds, 3 blocks, and 2 assists.

Marcus Camby played 42 minutes and was 1/7 for 2 points, and he made 18 rebounds, 6 blocks, 2 assists, and 1 steal.

Carmelo Anthony played most of the game, 51 minutes, and was 13/32 and 11/17 from the line for 37 points, and he made 16 rebounds, 3 steals, 2 blocks, and 2 assists.

Allen Iverson played for virtually the whole game, 57 minutes, and was 14/30, 0/4 on 3’s, and 8/8 from the line for 36 points, and he made 9 assists, 5 rebounds, and 2 steals. .

NEXT UP
The next game will be Friday, December 21 in Portland to play the Trailblazers at 8 pm mountain time. The Nuggets will be playing on back to back nights, while the Trailblazers will not be. Therefore, the Trailblazers will have both the home court and the rest advantages.

Coach Nate McMillan, Channing Frye, and Brandon Roy Lead the Trailblazers Over the Nuggets in Denver, 116-105

The Trailblazers won their 7th straight game by defeating the shorthanded Nuggets 116-105. The game was not as close as the final score suggests, because the score at the end of 3 quarters was 92-73, so the 4th quarter was largely though not totally garbage time. I say the Nuggets were shorthanded because they have their starting point guard, their backup power forward, and their backup center still out with injuries, and because George Karl made this bad situation worse by refusing to play qualified reserves. In this game, J.R. Smith, who is the fifth best player on the Nuggets if you look at the season to date Real Player Ratings, was benched and he will remain so for an indefinite period of time, until Karl becomes less upset about whatever he is upset about.

Portland ended a stretch of futility in Denver. The Blazers got their first win in Denver since Feb. 26, 2003, and snapped the Nuggets' nine-game home winning streak against them. The Nuggets had won 15 of the last 17 meetings at home dating back to the 1999-2000 season

C-F 3rd year man Channing Frye, who is having his best year yet on limited minutes, exploded against the Nuggets, who, like it or not, need Nene’s post presence to balance out the defensive skills of Camby and Kenyon Martin. Brandon Roy, who was a no show in the earlier Trailblazer appearance in the Mile High City, played just about as well as Allen Iverson. But it was the Portland playing roster as a whole that made the Nuggets look bad. 9 of 10 Trailblazers played better than their season to date averages, whereas the Nuggets had only 3 of 7 of their players playing better than their season to date averages, namely Iverson, Kenyon Martin, and Eduardo Najera.

Coach Nate McMillan has apparently done a spectacular job with the Trailblazers. This game by the Trailblazers was a coaching work of art.

Carmelo Anthony is now considered to be and known by everyone to be in a major scoring slump, and Camby has not been hitting any jumpers lately to speak of, and major scoring threat J.R. Smith has been benched for reasons that don’t make any sense. And Bobby Jones has been benched for several weeks now. And Chucky Atkins and Nene remain out with injuries. And there is no offensive structure to coordinate and optimize the NBA’s leading scoring tandem, A.I. and Melo. I swear, when you watch a Nuggets game, it sometimes seems that there are three teams on the court: one with Melo as the leading scorer, one with Iverson as the leading scorer, and the team that the Nuggets are playing.

So in this game, it was therefore, by default, essentially all Iverson all the time on offense, but there are years and years of evidence from when A.I. played for the 76’ers to prove the futility of that approach to winning games. Not to mention that it failed against the Spurs last Spring. Sure, you can score a lot of points, but all Iverson all the time on offense not only makes you totally dependent on one player, which is stupid, but it also tends to reduce morale to the point where the defensive hustle and intensity is compromised. Even players who don’t actually score a lot want and need to at the least think of themselves as part of the flow of the offense. They want to and need to receive and make passes from time to time, even if they don’t score squat.

The only good news in the Iverson takeover of the offense lock stock and barrel situation is that, amazingly, George Karl has already recognized this to be a developing major problem, not only for Carmelo Anthony himself, but for the team as a whole. He has announced to the Denver press that he and his assistants are going to set about trying to “free up” Melo from what has him tied down, which would be the endless double teams specifically and Iverson having total control of the offense generally.

This is the second time this year I have been pleasantly surprised by a Karl development, the first time being when he was using 9 players for a stretch of about 4 games rather than his usual 7-8. And although I was brutally frustrated when he went back to the scrooge rotations, I am going to be an eternal optimist and hope that Melo can be brought back into the heart of the offense before the all-star break, even if it’s done with little or no adding of offensive structure to the mix. Failure to achieve this will mean that the Nuggets have adopted the failed 76’ers strategy of all Iverson all the time, and it will mean another quick exit from the playoffs, or no appearance at all in the playoffs.

I’m not a professional psychologist, but I had a brainstorm the other day about exactly how Karl falls into the trap of benching good players time and time again. Karl punishes players by reducing their minutes, by benching them, or by making negative comments to reporters about them, if he thinks they are not doing as well as they could, and/or how well he thinks they should be doing. He partly ignores or distorts how well they actually are doing in the process. In other words, Karl has these images, actually movies, running in his head about how and how well a player should play. If the player departs substantially from that movie in his head, he gets upset. If he gets too upset, he takes action against that player. Just between last year and this year, I have seen him do that with J.R. Smith, Carmelo Anthony, Linas Kleiza, Yakhouba Diawara, Bobby Jones, and, Reggie Evans

But this doesn't make any sense, because how does Karl know in advance how or how well a player should play? He can't know. And Karl ignores or distorts how well the player actually is doing when he takes action against that player. So he hurts the team when he, for example, keeps J.R. Smith's minutes overly restricted because J.R. Smith does not live up to the image Karl has of Smith.

Furthermore, Karl uses subjective evaluations of player’s personalities, especially the relatively vague aspect of a personality that he calls “mental toughness,” when he is making a decision as to whether to partially bench or completely bench a player. To put it simply, if you are playing for him and he does not like your personality, or if he thinks you are not mentally tough, you will be partially and completely benched from time to time, and there is almost nothing you can do about it, because it is essentially or actually impossible for someone to change their personality.

Mental toughness is almost never explained by those who use the term, least of all Karl, so let me offer up a definition. Let’s say that mental toughness is the ability to not lose focus and concentration on the tasks at hand during a high pressure game against a good team. If a player keeps his mental focus, he continues to play to his ability or better no matter how much the pressure rises in a game. And that player avoids symptoms of getting carried away by pressure, such as taking unbalanced or heavily defended shots, blowing layups, blowing rebounds, making a lot of turnovers, and so forth.

As I have said before, it sounds nice and it is to some degree necessary for a team and for individual players to have mental toughness. But it is not the most important thing that determines who wins basketball games. The most important factors are the abilities of the players, which come from what they were born with, from what they have physically developed into, from their experience in games, and from how hard they work when they are off the court. The next most important factors that determine winning or losing are the strategies and tactics that are used to coordinate the various players on the team into a unified whole, so that both the offense and the defense of the team are optimized as much as possible. Mental toughness and other personality factors would fall in behind both abilities of players and strategies and tactics in importance.

You could have the most mentally tough team in the NBA, but if your players are not very athletic, or if your strategies or tactics are no good, you are definitely not going to go very far in the playoffs. The Nuggets have the abilities, but are lacking the strategies and tactics right now to be a major winning team, or to be able to go far in the playoffs. And I would say, for what it’s worth, that the Nuggets are below average but by no means one of the worst teams in the League with respect to the mental toughness factor. The Nuggets just about lead the NBA in turnovers, which is an important clue that they are below average in mental toughness. But I know for a fact that the way Karl overreacts to the mental toughness factor with his rotation and benching decisions hurts the Nuggets even more than the turnovers do.

ALERT STATUS PROBLEMS
As of December 17, 2007

The Nuggets are under an unusually dangerous and damaging alert status, so the following update is provided.

INJURIES & SUSPENSIONS
1. Nene injury 9 Points
2. Chucky Atkins injury 7 Points
3. Steven Hunter injury 3 Points

UNEXPECTED STAR PLAYER PERFORMANCE PROBLEMS
1. Carmelo Anthony’s jump shooting is a little off from recent years and he is still inconsistent in rebounding. Making matters worse, George Karl and Allen Iverson have decided that it is acceptable that Melo be removed from the heart of the Nugget’s offense, and that he frequently be little more than a decoy, so that the rest of the Nuggets on the court can run a 4 on 3 offense and hope that Iverson can keep them in the game. The combination of Melo’s accuracy drop off from last year, together with his partial marginalization, makes for a very substantial and worsening star player performance problem. 9 Points.

2. Inability of Nuggets forwards to consistently give Camby enough rebounding and defending support inside: 3 Points

BAD OR INADEQUATE COACHING
1. George Karl over relies on his starters and won’t play the non-starters enough: 5-20 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. Karl will normally be in the 5-15 range, but it could spike to as much as 20 in the event of the benching of a major player such as Kenyon Martin. 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 13 points.

2. Lack of adequate offensive schemes: 8 Points. This would be up to 18 points, except that Iverson reduces the damage. Another way of describing this is that 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 the game. If it were neither, I call the name of that strategy the "share the wealth" strategy.

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

TOTAL PROBLEM POINTS: 52, 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 like the Nuggets has become in between a good team and a mid-level team when it is under this alert.

RESERVE WATCH

Number of Players Who Played at Least 6 Minutes: Trailblazers 10 Nuggets 7
Number of Players Who Played at Least 10 Minutes: Trailblazers 9 Nuggets 7

You can see from this simple observation that either (a) the Nuggets have a grossly inferior bench to the Trailblazers or (b) the Nuggets have a coach who is unable or unwilling to play a substantial and competitive number of reserves. The correct one is (b) of course.

This feature is under development, and it will be expanded. The complications involved explain why (a) there are no formal statistics anywhere on the internet on the subject of how much non-starters contribute to different teams and (b) 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)
1.0 He has absconded to Mexico with Najera’s wife.

ESPN PLAYER RATINGS FOR THIS GAME:
You can tell how well they 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. 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:

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
Allen Iverson: Game 54.7 Season 41.6
Kenyon Martin: Game 31.9 Season 20.3
Carmelo Anthony: Game 24.2 Season 36.6
Marcus Camby: Game 23.7 Season 31.8
Eduardo Najera: Game 19.8 Season 14.2
Linas Kleiza: Game 16.6 Season 16.5
Anthony Carter: Game 16.2 Season 20.2

J.R. Smith: Did Not Play-Coach’s Decision
Bobby Jones: Did Not Play-Coach’s Decision
Yakhouba Diawara: Did Not Play-Coach’s Decision:
Von Wafer: Did Not Play-Coach's Decision

Nene: Did Not Play-Injury
Chucky Atkins: Did Not Play-Injury
Steven Hunter: Did Not Play-Injury

TRAILBLAZERS
Brandon Roy: Game 44.6 Season 32.3
Channing Frye: Game 38.0 Season 12.4
Travis Outlaw: Game 27.4 Season 20.4
James Jones: Game 26.4 Season 15.0
Joel Przybilla: Game 21.8 Season 14.3
Steve Blake: Game 18.0 Season 16.6
Jarrett Jack: Game 17.1 Season 16.2
Sergio Rodriguez: Game 11.6 Season 6.3
Raef LaFrentz: Game 5.6 Season 5.5
Martell Webster: Game 4.4 Season 18.6

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 RATINGS:
This one very clearly shows the partial marginalization and the slump of Melo, and the flipside of that, the appearance of the all Iverson all the time 76’ers strategy in Denver. Camby, who was upstaged by Channing Frye, had his second below normal game in a row. Najera and Kenyon Martin played well, but Linas Kleiza and Anthony Carter were just average.

The Trailblazers played lights out, as you can clearly see. They had 9 of their 10 players who played at least 5 minutes have above normal games. This is something you will very rarely see. All I can say is wow, and congratulations to Coach Nate McMillan and the Trailblazers for all of a sudden becoming a truly good team, and for doing so in a very smart way.

NUGGETS REAL PLAYER RATINGS--EXPLANATION
A Great New Feature from Nuggets 1

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, you can not rely on George Karl to award playing time in just about the best way possible. He brings other factors besides actual performance into his rotation decisions. Therefore, it makes good sense to introduce a new and very important statistic that Nuggets 1 will call the Real Per Minute Player Rating which, as the name implies, is the gross ESPN player rating divided by the number of minutes. The statistic is called Real Player Rating for short.

This statistic allows everyone to see whether or not players who play only a small number of minutes are doing better than their low gross rating will indicate. At the same time, it will allow everyone to see whether players with a lot of minutes are playing worse than, as well as, or better than their gross ranking shows. This is another big improvement in the Nuggets 1 never ending quest to give readers total information about the Nuggets. This statistic allows the reader, at a glance, to see exactly how well each player is doing without regard to playing time. So it gives you pure knowledge not available anywhere else.

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

Channing Frye, Por 1.462
Sergio Rodriguez, Por 1.450 Played only 8 minutes
Allen Iverson, Den 1.189
Brandon Roy, Por 1.115
Travis Outlaw, Por 0.979
Kenyon Martin, Den 0.886
James Jones, Por 0.880
Eduardo Najera, Den 0.861
Jarrett Jack, Por 0.777
Joel Przybilla, Por 0.703
Marcus Camby, Den 0.697
Steve Blake, Por 0.667
Linas Kleiza, Den 0.615
Carmelo Anthony, D 0.576
Raef LaFrentz, Por 0.560
Anthony Carter, Den 0.559
Martell Webster, Por 0.244


OBSERVATIONS ON THE NUGGETS REAL PLAYER RATINGS
Channing Frye had the kind of huge game that will be remembered in Portland for a long time. Najera and Martin played well, but Camby being off made it inevitable that the Nuggets were going to suffer from the Frye explosion. Brandon Roy just about matched Iverson. More broadly, and amazingly, the Trailblazers who played well simply grossly outnumbered the Nuggets who played at all. We’ll never know whether J.R. Smith or Bobby Jones might have matched Travis Outlaw or Jarrett Jack, because they were tied down to the bench by Coach Scrooge.

NUGGET’S PLUS—MINUS
This tells you how the score changed while a player was on the court. All Nuggets who played at least 6 minutes are shown.

Linas Kleiza: +2
Eduardo Najera: +2
Marcus Camby: -11
Allen Iverson: -12
Carmelo Anthony: -13
Anthony Carter: -13
Kenyon Martin: -19

OBSERVATIONS ON PLUS—MINUS
Kleiza and Najera seem to be commonly in the plus in losing games. They are hustling and playing well. Kenyon Martin, Marcus Camby, and Eduardo Najera were beaten up front by Channing Frye, Joel Przybilla, and James Jones, regarded as one of the weakest front court trios in the NBA. Who would have predicted that?

NUGGETS MADE WHAT?
All Nuggets who played at least 6 minutes are shown.

Eduardo Najera played 23 minutes and was 4/5 and 1/2 on 3’s for 9 points, and he made 4 rebounds, 2 assists, and 1 steal.

Anthony Carter played 29 minutes and was 4/6 and 0/1 on 3’s for 8 points, and he made 2 assists, 2 rebounds, and 1 steal.

Linas Kleiza played 27 minutes and was 4/11, 2/5 on 3’s, and 1/2 from the line for 11 points, and he made 6 rebounds, 1 assist, and 1 block.

Kenyon Martin played 36 minutes and was 7/11 for 14 points, and he made 5 rebounds, 4 blocks, and 3 assists.

Marcus Camby played 34 minutes and was 2/7 for 4 points, and he made 9 assists, 7 rebounds, and 2 blocks.

Carmelo Anthony played for most of the game, 42 minutes, and was 6/17, 2/6 on 3’s, and 5/8 from the line for 19 points, and he made 4 rebounds, 3 assists, 2 steals, and 1 block.

Allen Iverson played for virtually the whole game, 46 minutes, and was 11/22, 3/6 on 3’s, and 13/15 from the line for 38 points, and he made 6 assists, 3 steals, and 2 rebounds. .

NEXT UP
The next game will be Thursday, December 20 in Denver to play the Rockets at 8:30 pm mountain time. The Rockets will be playing on back to back nights, while the Nuggets will not be. Therefore, the Nuggets will have both the rest and the home court advantages.

The Nuggets Can't Deal With a 1-Game Kenyon Martin Suspension and Get Blown Out at San Antonio 102-91

The San Antonio Spurs defeated the Denver Nuggets 102-91, but the game was essentially over after 3 quarters, when the score was 92-68. Starting power forward Kenyon Martin’s 1 game flagrant foul suspension, along with an off rebounding night from Marcus Camby, who had way too much to handle from C Fabricio Oberto, who was huge, and PF Tim Duncan, destroyed the Nuggets rebounding and made a Spurs victory all but certain. Kenyon Martin was removed from the squad at exactly the worst possible time, right after Camby and company had started to trust K-Mart to be a big factor on the boards. Just when Camby was accustomed to finally getting some real help on rebounding, that help was taken away by David Stern who, after waiting until the cows came home, finally announced Kenyon’s 1 game suspension on the day of the Spurs game, Saturday, even though the game in which the flagrant foul happened was Wednesday evening.

Martin was assessed a flagrant foul against Melvin Ely of the Hornets, for striking Ely in the head with an elbow in the 2nd quarter of the Nuggets' 105-99 win. Ely has a fractured left eye socket and missed the Hornets' 89-80 loss at Dallas on Friday night. In a written statement released by the Nuggets, Martin said he was disappointed to miss the game against the Spurs. "What happened with Melvin in Wednesday's game was inadvertent. I apologized to him on the court and again after the game. He told me he knew it was an accident."

Nuggets Coach George Karl said the timing of the suspension was disappointing. "We had a couple days of practice, if they (the league) would have made the edict two days ago, we'd have been able to say 'OK, We probably now have to double Duncan more,"' Karl said. "It seemed to be a lot of space there. I think Kenyon talked to the league office two or three days ago. And it seemed like we were out of the woods.”

Way to go, Mr. Karl, nice criticism. After this, no one had better claim that I never ever report anything good about him. Don’t forget that I quickly commended him a few weeks ago when for a short time he had decent player rotations during the Nuggets series of routs at home. Then I was made to look kind of silly for commending him, though, when he went back to the same old scrooge policies for the reserves.

Unfortunately for Coach Karl, I am now using a very effective tool from the internet to monitor who has played, for how long, and when during the game each player played. It is a bar graph diagram that clearly shows exactly when and for how long each player played. This is especially useful when there is garbage time, as there was in this game. I can look at the diagram to determine whether the Nuggets starters had enough potential help from the reserves or not during the game time before the garbage time.

When I did that for this game, it was revealed that George Karl once again half surrendered to the Spurs before the start of the game tip-off. Karl played only 7 players for 6 minutes or more during the first 3 quarters, whereas Coach Greg Popovich has developed his bench, his offense, and his defense to where he could profit from playing 10 players during the first 3 quarters. Bobby Jones played two 2 minute stints for the Nuggets, but even if you count him, the Spurs still had 10 players ready to contribute toward their win, whereas the Nuggets put out only 8. I contend that Jones’ minutes were too small for him to get anything going at all, so that the real players used margin should be 10 to 7 in favor of the Spurs. A compromise view would be 10 to 7 ½. Anyway you slice it, the Nugget’s Coach simply didn’t provide the Nuggets with enough opportunities for a surprise big game from somebody off the bench.

The fact that Bobby Jones, a forward, played only two 2-minute stints is actually absurd, given the fact that Kenyon Martin was out and the Nuggets were getting destroyed on the boards. Jones and/or Yakhouba Diawara were desperately needed for defending and rebounding, but neither one of them played a substantial amount of time. Meanwhile, Coach Greg Popovich of the Spurs was managing his team like the expert he is. He employed 5 players other than the starters, with each one of those 5 having a well defined role, and each one of them being given minutes in proportion to their potential contributions. When Coaches like Popovich and Lakers Coach Phil Jackson coach, it is like a work of art. When George Karl coaches, the resulting who played when flow chart looks like the team simply doesn’t have enough players on the roster. The more you analyze who was on the court and when for the Nuggets, the more you realize it made little if any sense.

In a rare development caused by the suspension, Carmelo Anthony led the Nuggets in rebounding with 9, while Camby made 6 rebounds, Linas Kleiza made just 4 in 32 minutes, and five other Nuggets made 3 rebounds or less.

Although Camby didn’t get his usual rebounds, he made more than his usual number of blocks, as he made 5 of those. In fact, the Nuggets defeated the Spurs in blocks 8-2 and in steals 11-4. Despite Manu Ginobili flops resulting in Denver offensive fouls, and despite both Carmelo Anthony and especially Allen Iverson committing more turnovers than usual, the Nuggets amazingly ended up with fewer total turnovers than the Spurs, 17 versus 20. Not only was it the first time in anyone’s memory that the Nuggets had fewer turnovers than the Spurs did in a head to head, but it came while the Nuggets are cruising the very bottom of the NBA barrel in the turnover category. The Supersonics are, for the moment, very slightly worse than the Nuggets in blowing possessions without getting a shot off.

The huge rebounding advantage was not enough for the Spurs, who made their win even more certain by going on a massive three point rampage that they seem to save up for the upstart Nuggets. The Spurs buried an almost incredible 11 of 22 of the long rangers, with the usual suspects, SG Michael Finley, who made 4/5 threes, and SF Brent Barry, who made 3/6 of them, leading the way. It often seems that Finley, Barry, and defensive specialist Bruce Bowen, who aside from his good defending made 2/3 threes himself, have been put on Earth, sent from hell itself, for just one reason: to make absolutely certain that the Denver Nuggets never win the Western Conference. Combined, Finley, Barry, and Bowen were 9/14 from downtown. As a Nuggets fan, I would like to ask if these three are not the three faces of the apocalypse, than what else could they possibly be?

Aside from the almost bizarre onslaught of threes, Manu Ginobili, who has a knack for getting more respect from referees than almost anyone, engineered a bunch of offensive foul calls against the Nuggets by flopping on the ground after small amounts of forward motion contact. All told, the Nuggets, who seemingly have never finished with fewer fouls than the Spurs in a head to head game with them in all of history, were called for 20 fouls, while the Spurs were called for just 15. At one point, in the 1st quarter, George Karl got a rare technical foul because the fouls being called against the Nuggets were too much for even him to stomach sitting down.

So far this season, there is only 1 team that gets called for fewer personal fouls per game than the Spurs, the Phoenix Suns, interestingly enough. The Spurs average 19 personal fouls per game, while the Nuggets, who are about in the middle of the 30 team pack, are averaging about 22 personal fouls per game. But whenever the Nuggets play the Spurs head to head, it seems that whatever normal advantage in personal fouls the Spurs have is always increased, to the point where Nuggets fans are certain that favoritism is being shown by the referees toward the Spurs. Carmelo Anthony, in particular, was the victim of at least a couple of bad calls. Melo ended up with 4 fouls in total, and narrowly avoided having his playing time substantially reduced by all of the extracurricular activity of the refs.

The Spurs had no trouble routing the Nuggets even though PF Tim Duncan played just 20 minutes and PG Tony Parker didn't play at all due to a sprain. This would just about offset the unavailablity of PF Kenyon Martin, PF Nene, and PG Chucky Atkins for the Nuggets. So the only thing you can logically conclude is that the Nuggets have no chance if they meet the Spurs again in the playoffs, unless the way the Nuggets are managed radically changes. I guess we'll have to hope that the Suns knock off the Spurs before the Nuggets ever have to play them. How's that for optimism in the face of disaster?

ALERT STATUS PROBLEMS
As of December 16, 2007

The Nuggets are under an unusually dangerous and damaging alert status, so the following update is provided.

INJURIES & SUSPENSIONS
1. Nene injury 9 Points
2. Chucky Atkins injury 7 Points
3. Steven Hunter injury 3 Points
4. Kenyon Martin suspension 15 Points

UNEXPECTED STAR PLAYER PERFORMANCE PROBLEMS
1. Carmelo Anthony’s jump shooting is a little off from recent years and he is still inconsistent in rebounding. Making matters worse, George Karl and Allen Iverson have decided that it is acceptable that Melo be removed from the heart of the Nugget’s offense, and that he frequently be little more than a decoy, so that the rest of the Nuggets on the court can run a 4 on 3 offense and hope that Iverson can keep them in the game. The combination of Melo’s accuracy drop off from last year, together with his partial marginalization, makes for a very substantial and worsening star player performance problem. 8 Points.

2. Inability of Melo to give Camby enough rebounding and defending support inside: 3 Points

BAD OR INADEQUATE COACHING
1. George Karl over relies on his starters and won’t play the non-starters enough: 5-20 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. Karl will normally be in the 5-13 range, but it could spike to as much as 20 in the event of the benching of a major player such as Kenyon Martin. 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 12 points.

2. Lack of adequate offensive schemes: 8 Points. This would be up to 18 points, except that Iverson reduces the damage. Another way of describing this is that 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 the game. If it were neither, I call the name of that strategy the "share the wealth" strategy.

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

TOTAL PROBLEM POINTS: 50, 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 like the Nuggets has become in between a good team and a mid-level team when it is under this alert.

Note: The Kenyon Martin suspension was a 1 game suspension, so the problem points for that are not included in the current alert point count. During the Spurs game, the problem point count spiked up to about 65, constituting an ORANGE ALERT. With an orange alert status, it is extremely unlikely that the Nuggets will win over an outstanding team such as the Spurs. Sure enough, they had little if any chance in the game. (The alert system seems to have worked very nicely here.)

RESERVE WATCH
It’s under development. The complications involved explain why (a) there are no formal statistics anywhere on the internet on the subject of how much non-starters contribute to different teams and (b) 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)
2.0 He’s making a run for the exits.

ESPN PLAYER RATINGS FOR THIS GAME:
You can tell how well they 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. 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:

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 6 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
Allen Iverson: Game 39.7 Season 40.3
Carmelo Anthony: Game 29.6 Season 36.6
Linas Kleiza: Game 28.8 Season 17.0
Marcus Camby: Game 22.4 Season 32.3
Anthony Carter: Game 16.5 Season 20.7
Eduardo Najera: Game 14.6 Season 14.1
J.R. Smith: Game 12.7 Season 15.4
Bobby Jones: Game 8.7 Season 6.0
Yakhouba Diawara: Game -0.8 Season 7.0

Jelani McCoy: Did Not Play-Coach’s Decision
Von Wafer: Did Not Play-Coach's Decision

Kenyon Martin: Did Not Play-Suspension
Nene: Did Not Play-Injury
Chucky Atkins: Did Not Play-Injury
Steven Hunter: Did Not Play-Injury

SPURS
Fabricio Oberto: Game 51.1 Season 17.7
Michael Finley: Game 36.7 Season 14.5
Brent Barry: Game 22.8 Season 14.7
Manu Ginobili: Game 22.7 Season 33.2
Jacque Vaughn: Game 20.5 Season 7.2
Tim Duncan: Game 13.9 Season 32.9
Bruce Bowen: Game 12.5 Season 12.5
Francisco Elson: Game 9.8 Season 10.0
Darius Washington: Game 4.8 Season 4.9
Ime Udoka: Game 0.9 Season 5.0
Robert Horry: Game -2.4 Season 5.7

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 RATINGS:
The starting Spurs center, Fabriciao Oberto, more than made up for the partial absence of Tim Duncan, the starting power forward. .

NUGGETS REAL PLAYER RATINGS--EXPLANATION
A Great New Feature From Nuggets 1
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, you can not rely on George Karl to award playing time in just about the best way possible. Therefore, it makes good sense to introduce a new and very important statistic that Nuggets 1 will call the Real Per Minute Player Rating which, as the name implies, is the gross ESPN player rating divided by the number of minutes.

This statistic allows everyone to see whether or not players who play only a small number of minutes are doing better than their low gross rating will indicate. At the same time, it will allow everyone to see whether players with a lot of minutes are playing worse than, as well as, or better than their gross ranking shows. This is another big improvement in the Nuggets 1 never ending quest to give readers total information about the Nuggets. This statistic allows the reader, at a glance, to see exactly how well each player is doing without regard to playing time. So it gives you pure knowledge not available anywhere else.

NUGGETS REAL PLAYER RATINGS—SPURS GAME
All players who played 3 minutes or more are included.

J.R. Smith 977
Allen Iverson 902
Linas Kleiza 900
Carmelo Anthony 822
Marcus Camby 772
Bobby Jones 544
Eduardo Najera 521
Anthony Carter 516
Yakhouba Diawara -114

OBSERVATIONS ON THE NUGGETS REAL PLAYER RATINGS
This new Nuggets 1 report is the best thing that could have happened for J.R. Smith, and any other player cheated for playing time by George Karl, here at Nuggets 1. Smith often, but not always, crams a lot of performance into his small minutes. Everyone knows that J.R. Smith has too many turnovers. But keep in mind that the rating includes the turnovers as a negative factor. The bottom line is that this statistic does not in any way cheat or favor any player, since all aspects of the game are included in it, and all of the aspects are combined and then shown adjusted for playing time by dividing by the minutes played.

If you wondered who really and truly played better against the Spurs, Melo or A.I., you now have your answer: it was The Answer. Notice too that although Kleiza finished slightly behind Melo in the gross rating, he actually played a little better than Melo on a per minute basis. I would sum up this first Nuggets Real Player Ratings report by saying that J.R. Smith, Allen Iverson, and Linas Kleiza played very well against the Spurs, while Carmelo Anthony and Marcus Camby played well. Jones, Najera, and Carter were mediocre at best, while Diawara didn’t do much of anything during his 6 1/2 minutes, all of which was in garbage time.

Of course, Nuggets 1 will be able to evaluate these numbers better and better as more and more games are reported out.

NUGGET’S PLUS—MINUS
This tells you how the score changed while a player was on the court. All Nuggets who played at least 6 minutes are shown.

Yakhouba Diawara: +7
Linas Kleiza: +5
J.R. Smith: +4
Bobby Jones: +2
Carmelo Anthony: -11
Anthony Carter: -12
Marcus Camby: -15
Allen Iverson: -13
Eduardo Najera: -20

OBSERVATIONS ON PLUS—MINUS
The + numbers you see for Diawara, Kleiza, Smith, and Jones are from the 4th quarter, which was essentially all garbage time. But these numbers are not totally meaningless. They are more evidence that Karl should have given Diawara and Jones some burn before the game was decided in the Spurs favor, which he did not. During the 1st 3 quarters, while the game was being decided, Diawara did not appear at all, and Bobby Jones made 2 token appearances lasting less than 4 minutes in total.

The theory that Najera’s hustle, defending, and occasional 3-point shooting offsets his weak overall scoring and weak rebounding obviously takes a hit when you see his -20 number here. Najera seems to be particularly ineffective against the best teams, just when it is most important that he be effective.

NUGGETS MADE WHAT?
All Nuggets who played at least 6 minutes are shown.

Bobby Jones played 16 minutes and was 1/3 and 1/2 on 3’s for 3 points, and he made 2 rebounds, 1 assist, 1 steal, and 1 block.

Yakhouba Diawara played 7 minutes and was 0/1 for 0 points.

Eduardo Najera played 28 minutes and was 3/5 and 0/2 on 3’s for 6 points, and he made 3 assists, 2 rebounds, and a steal.

Linas Kleiza played 32 minutes and was 7/12 and 2/3 on 3’s for 16 points, and he made 4 rebounds, 3 assists, and 2 steals.

J.R. Smith played 13 minutes and was 2/5, 1/2 on 3’s, and 2/2 from the line for 7 points, and he made 2 rebounds, 2 assists, and 1 steal.

Anthony Carter played 32 minutes and was 4/8 and 2/2 from the line for 10 points, and he made 4 assists and 1 rebound.

Marcus Camby played 29 minutes and was 2/2 for 4 points, and he made 6 rebounds, 5 blocks, 2 steals, and 1 assist.

Carmelo Anthony played 36 minutes and was 7/15 and 1/2 on 3’s for 15 points, and he made 9 rebounds, 4 assists, 1 block, and 1 steal.

Allen Iverson played for virtually the whole game, 44 minutes, and was 10/22, ½ on 3’s, and 9/11 from the line for 30 points, and he made 5 assists, 3 steals, and 3 rebounds.

NEXT UP
The next game will be Sunday, December 16 in Denver to play the Trailblazers at 6 pm mountain time. The Nuggets will be playing on back to back nights, while the Trailblazers will not be. The Trailblazer’s rest advantage will roughly offset the Nugget’s home court advantage.