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.