ESPN: Things are not good with the Denver Nuggets.
Two years removed from a 57-win season -- after which they dismissed coach George Karl and replaced him with Brian Shaw -- the Nuggets entered Sunday with a 20-38 record, meaning the playoffs are simply not happening.
Apparently the players know it. According to this nugget (sorry) from The Denver Post, a chant could be heard at one point during Denver's 104-82 loss at home Friday night to the not-exactly-a-powerhouse Utah Jazz:
"1-2-3 ... six weeks!"
... as in, six weeks until the season is over.
As The Post's Christopher Dempsey points out, this is reminiscent of a 1998 moment in which then-Los Angeles Lakers guard Nick Van Exel, joking (he says) about his team's impending Western Conference finals exit against (coincidentally) the Jazz, chanted in practice, "1-2-3 ... Cancun!" (Even more coincidentally, Van Exel the next season joined the Nuggets.)
This is the latest in a line of issues for Denver this season, with players' effort questioned by Shaw and Shaw's coaching questioned by at least one player.
Still, with 24 games left in a lame-duck season, it's hard to completely fault players for just wanting everything to be over.
Or is it?
This is kinda funny, but at the same time you have to have some level of integrity and pride. The players and coaches know their season is over, but you don't see teams every year doing things like this that show so blatantly that they just don't care. I'm not a big NBA fan, but I've been rooting for the Nuggets for a while now. Loved Melo on the Nuggets and I loved George Karl. A George Karl coached team is always fun to watch. They won 57 games (without Melo) two years ago and went 38-3 at home, but they fired George Karl because they lost in the first round of the playoffs again. Listen, if you're the Lakers or Celtics or any other organization with a storied history of winning NBA titles then you can fire your coach for not winning the title. But when you're the Denver Nuggets who have never won, you can't fire one of the best NBA coaches of all time. George Karl got the best out of everyone on his team. The best player on the Nuggets is Ty Lawson and he's good and I love watching him play but when he's your best player and you're winning 57 games in a season then you know your coach is exceptional. You could make an argument that firing George Karl was the dumbest thing that any NBA front office has ever done. The Lakers hiring (and keeping) Mike D'Antoni could take the cake, but either way it was insanely stupid to not bring back George Karl. Because they hired Brian Shaw who sucks and can't get any respect from the locker room. And that brings me back to the actual topic at hand here. When your team is probably gonna win 30-35 fewer games than it did two years ago with virtually the same roster, how is anyone gonna want to play hard for that coach? Yes, the players are to blame as well and they should act like professionals, but I just want to make it known that Brian Shaw is probably the worst coach in the NBA and if he doesn't get fired, next year is only going to get worse. And the front office is doing NOTHING for Ty Lawson which is why he wants out. If they started building a team around Ty Lawson five years ago instead of drafting shitty foreigners every year then maybe letting George Karl go wouldn't have been such a blow to this team. I'm serious when I say that I think the Nuggets have been the worst team at drafting players over the last 5-10 years. Ty Lawson and Kenneth Faried are the only two players on the team currently that were drafted by the Nuggets and actually contribute anything to the team. Soooooo bottom line is that yeah it's kinda shitty of the players to this blatantly not care about the rest of the season buuuut at the same time management sucks, coaching sucks and most of the players suck and the season is lost. So it's tough to blame them.
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