The Nuggets Rout the Knicks 115-83, and a River is Crossed in the Quest for the Ring

The Nuggets led from start to finish and easily routed the New York Knicks in Denver 115-83. The Knicks were playing on back to back nights, while the Nuggets were playing after two nights off. PF Zach Randolph returned quickly after his Grandmother’s funeral and led the Knicks with 11 rebounds and 16 points on 8/23 shooting. PF David Lee also had 11 rebounds, and scored 9 points on 4/6 shooting. Black sheep PG Stephon Marbury played just 16 minutes but made 5 assists, and the Knicks overall had 20 assists while the Nuggets exploded for 32. None of the Knick guards were able to get anything going offensively; Jamal Crawford was the biggest disappointment.

Overall, the Knicks shot just .381 while the Nuggets were an impressive .489. The Knicks were a modest 4/13 from 3-point land. The Nuggets, following a bad outing from long range against Portland, resumed their very good long range shooting by making 11 of 26 threes or .423. Carmelo Anthony was 2/2, J.R. Smith was 3/6, and Diawara was 2/3 from beyond the arc to lead the Nuggets in this crucial category.

The Knicks had 8 steals, accounting for almost all of the 11 Nugget’s turnovers, which is almost 7 fewer turnovers than the norm for the fast breaking but sometimes sloppy Nuggets. J.R. Smith and Bobby Jones, the two players most likely to be benched in error in the future by George Karl, committed just 0 and 1 turnover, respectively. G Fred Jones had 3 steals for the Knicks, and Kenyon Martin led the Nuggets with 4 steals

Marcus Camby, otherwise known as the “ultimate defender,” made 20 rebounds and 5 boards. Even though Zach Randolph played, the Knicks were unable to get their offensive rebounding machine into a very high gear. They finished with 17 offensive reboiunds, but the Nuggets had 18.

Using the NBA’s comprehensive but nicely simple efficiency stat, the Nuggets were led by Camby +29, Melo +23, Kleiza +18, Iverson +17, and Diawara +15. The Knick’s best players were David Lee +18, and Mardy Collins +13. According to the more complicated comprehensive ESPN rating, the Nuggets were led by Melo 40.7, Camby 38.3, and Iverson 30.7. According to this formula statistic, Melo was slightly better than normal, Camby was better than normal, and Iverson was well below his normal performance level.

I have been covering and reporting on the Nuggets for just a couple years now, and during that time one of the biggest problems I have identified with George Karl’s coaching style and methods is that he is too conservative with respect to giving the best reserves a good chance to contribute in games. He doesn’t give the reserves enough minutes. He continuously has put too many eggs in too few baskets, by over relying on key starters. Whenever even one key starter has a bad game under such a strategy, the game can be transformed from a win to a loss in short order. When two of the starters have poor games, a game can turn into an ugly fiasco quickly.

Unless you have a team like the Phoenix Suns, where every single starter is an all-star or a near all-star, the objective for a good coach should be to get as much contribution from reserves as possible without over using the reserves. It is rare in the NBA for reserves to be over used, so you can generally forget about that possible problem unless you have a truly incompetent coach.

There are two ways I use to determine whether the reserves were used enough in a game. I am going to show you one of the ways here. You start by counting up all the minutes of the starters and all the minutes of the non-starters. The sum of all minutes will be 240, or 5 players x 48 minutes in a game = 240 total player minutes. For a team like the Nuggets, the reserves should play a total of at least 82 minutes of the total time. That’s the lowest reasonable amount. A better minimum, which should produce more wins, is 88 minutes. Here is a chart that will enable you to keep tabs on George Karl as the Nuggets, with any luck, continue to move toward the West finals:

Total Minutes
Played by the
Reserves Evaluation
<70 minutes.........Totally incompetent; you will lose a lot of games you could have won
70-76 minutes.......Incompetent; you will often lose games you could have won
76-82 minutes.......Very light use of the reserves and an inferior strategy; you will from time to time lose games you could have won
82-88 minutes.......Right on the money conservative use of the reserves.
88-94 minutes.......Right on the money generous use of the reserves.
94-100 minutes......Very heavy use of the reserves, and will generally be an inferior strategy resulting in losing some games that should have been won.
100-106 minutes.....Incompetent; you will often lose games you could have won
>106 minutes........Totally incompetent; you will lose a lot of games you could have won.

To sum this chart up, the reserves should be played for between 82 and 94 minutes a game, for the best chance of victory. Remember, this chart is custom made for the Nuggets. Teams such as the Suns and the Hornets, who have great starters at every position and poor reserves, would have a smaller number of minutes for reserves than the ones shown here.

Nuggets fans may be scratching their heads right now as to how the Nuggets lost to the Knicks on November 6 by the score of 119-112, and then routed them on November 17 115-83. While by no means the only reason, a big reason for the earlier loss to the inferior Knicks is that Karl gave the reserves a total of only 62 minutes, which is not even close to being competitive. Iverson was out there wearing out for 45 minutes. Melo played almost 40. Linas Kleiza played about 32 minutes and didn't do much except score 18 points. Camby played 35 minutes and Nene, who was somewhat out of condition, played 26 minutes. Diawara was cheated with only 9 minutes and J.R. Smith was given the short shrift with 23 minutes. Najera, at 30 minutes, was the only other player who played, so there were only a total of 8 players who played, 1 of which played an insignificant 9 minutes. This was a recipe for wearing out your starters and blowing the game to the Knicks. Melo having an off night and Diawara being a total non-factor offensively was all it took to turn the probable win into a certain loss.

The Knicks have terrible reserves, but they still got more playing time than the Nugget’s reserves did in that game: 66 minutes. So now you know the biggest reason why the Nugget’s blew double digit leads and got beat by a much less skilled team on November 7.

In the playoffs, not having your reserves ready to play and/or not giving them enough playing time will kill you even more quickly than doing that in the regular season. The Nuggets and the Spurs last Spring were total opposites with regard to how dependent they were on their starters. The Nuggets were mostly dependent on 5 players and almost totally dependent on 7 players, while the Spurs had a full 9 players they could rely on during the series. For any given game, the Spurs had many more possible combinations of good player performances that would give them a win than did the Nuggets.

Now fast forward to November 17, 2007, to the Pepsi Center in Denver CO. George Karl seemingly had some kind of a stroke, or an epiphany, or a brainstorm, or a panic attack, or something, after the Celtics disaster of November 7, because he hasn’t been coaching like George Karl since then. Last night’s Knicks game was the fifth game in a row where Karl has used the reserves enough and has scaled back the starter minutes so that the starters are not more tired than they should be, especially in the 4th quarter.

Remember all those blown games in the 4th quarter last year? Now you know the biggest reason they happened.

So, helped immensely by Karl’s huge change of policy, the Nuggets have won 5 games straight, with 4 of those games being the kind of start to finish dominations that teams like the Spurs and the Suns do commonly but never the Nuggets until now. Until these 5 games, it was never a safe bet to predict that the Nuggets would win a game, even against a lousy team. But with the reserves being used adequately, with Camby, Iverson, and Melo playing like all-stars, with Kenyon Martin, J.R. Smith, Najera, and Linas Kleiza all solidly contributing, and with, to everyone’s shock and amazement, both Yakhouba Diawara and Bobby Jones being given substantial minutes in the same games and contributing substantially in the same games, the Nuggets suddenly look like a normal high powered Western team, the kind of team they take for granted in Texas but has never existed in the NBA in Colorado.

So now the question that looms over all Nuggets fans as we proceed from the introduction to the season to the first chapter of it, so to speak, is: "how long will all this last"? How long will Diawara keep hitting some shots in most games? How long will Camby and Iverson keep playing at career highs? How long before another injury? And perhaps most importantly, how long before Karl has another panic attack and shifts back to his old pattern of over relying on his starters and his favorites, and keeping anyone who makes him nervous tied down on the bench. As a specific example, Bobby Jones has been getting more playing time than anyone would have thought this early in the season. Close watchers of the Nuggets are nervous as hell that this could come to a crashing halt if the fast moving and aggressively playing forward were to make just one more mistake than Karl’s fragile psyche could tolerate, so that then he would be mostly or completely benched, and we would be back to playing with one hand tied behind our backs again.

The fact that the Nuggets have won 5 straight with a soft schedule means little. But the fact that they led from start to finish in 4 of those games means everything. All I could do during this five game winning streak was to look on in amazement, with my mouth and eyes wide open, and with my brain repeating in the background over and over again: “I see it, but I don’t believe it.”

The Nuggets have now, at least temporarily, overcome one of the big obstacles that was standing between them and success in their Quest for the Ring. They have crossed one of the rivers, but there are more rivers ahead, and some of them have rapids.

Mike Wilks played 13 minutes and was 0/1 for 0 points, and he had 2 rebounds. Eduardo Najera played 27 minutes and was 2/7, 0/1 on 3’s, and 2/3 from the line for 6 points, and he had 4 rebounds, 3 steals, 2 blocks, and 2 assists. Linas Kleiza played 23 minutes and was 7/13, 2/7 on 3’s, and 2/3 form the line for 18 points, and he had 4 rebounds, 2 assists, and a steal. Yakhouba Diawara played 24 minutes and was 4/6 and 2/3 on 3’s for 10 points, and he had 3 assists, 3 rebounds, a block, and a steal.

Bobby Jones played 19 minutes and was 2/7, 0/2 on 3’s, and 2/2 from the line for 6 points, and he had 8 rebounds and 4 assists.

J.R. Smith played 22 minutes and was 3/8, 3/6 on 3’s, and 3/4 from the line for 12 points, and he had 3 assists, 2 steals, and 2 rebounds.

Kenyon Martin played 19 minutes and was 3/4 and 0/2 from the line for 6 points, and he had 4 steals, 3 rebounds, 1 block, and 1 assist.

Camby played 29 minutes and was 3/9, 0/1 on 3’s, and 0/2 from the line for 6 points, and he had 20 rebounds, 5 blocks, 6 assists, and a steal.

Iverson played 35 minutes and was 7/13, 1/3 on 3’s, and 8/9 from the line for 23 points, and he had 4 assists and 1 rebound.

Carmelo Anthony played 30 minutes and was 11/18, 2/2 on 3’s, and 0/4 from the line for 24 points, and he had 6 assists, 3 rebounds, and 2 blocks. So Melo made two of two threes but missed all 4 free throws!

The next game will be Tuesday, November 20 in Denver to play the Bulls at 7 pm mountain time. Neither team will be playing on back to back nights.