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.