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.