The Nuggets Rout Another Lottery Team in the Mile High City, the Bucks, 125-105

According to the under development Real Team Ratings, which no one has seen yet because they have yet to be posted for the first time, there are only 5 teams in the NBA worse than the Milwaukee Bucks. So since the Nuggets, unlike last year when they could and did lose to anyone anywhere, have been going to town on almost all of the lottery teams that have come to the Mile High City, it was no surprise that the Nuggets routed the Bucks 125-105. The Nuggets assumed the lead 5 minutes into the game on a mid-range Allen Iverson jumper and never looked back.

The Nuggets led 28-17 after the 1st quarter, 68-38 at halftime, and 95-66 after 3 quarters. Therefore, the entire 4th quarter was garbage time, also known as J.R. Smith time in George Karl’s brain. The Nuggets defeated the lottery bound Bucks 125-105 after surrendering 39 points in garbage time with garbage defense, while scoring 30 in that period themselves.

The Bucks had no injuries to key players, a situation that the Nuggets almost but not quite enjoyed for the 1st time this season, but since Michael Redd, by far their scoring leader, had one of the worst games of his career, the Bucks never had a chance in this game. Redd was 1/8, 0/3 on 3’s, and 7/8 from the line for 9 points, not exactly typical for one of the top ten scorers in the League. Maybe he had too much wine or turkey during the holiday the day before. But his teammates and coaches were of no assistance in getting the ball to him, so they bear a large part of the blame.

The Nuggets were not quite injury free, because Kenyon Martin’s hamstring problem limited his playing time and production severely.

PG Mo Williams was by far the best Buck in this game. He made 7 assists, 3 rebounds, and 2 steals to go along with his 28 points on 12/24 shooting. One of his point guard backups, Royal Ivey, also played extremely well in limited minutes. William’s other PG backup, Charlie Bell, played well, as did PF Charlie Villanueva. But that was it for the Bucks, so the shortage of Bucks playing well and the Redd disaster made it oh so easy for the Nuggets to showboat (in a good way) to the easy win.

If you are wondering what ever happened to Earl Boykins, who played very well for the Nuggets at the point early in the 2006-07 season, he decided to become a free agent, rather than to fulfill the option year on his 2 year contract with the Bucks. No team has signed him since that questionable decision. Maybe this was his round about way of retiring?

The high flying Nuggets had a huge 44 fast break points in this game, while keeping their turnovers within reason. The Nuggets demolished the Bucks in the paint 54-34, and almost managed a rare instance of having their reserves score more points than the reserves of their opponent. Howver, the Buck’s reserves defeated the Nugget’s reserves 52-49.

Yi Jianlian, the rookie starting power forward for the Bucks, made his first appearance in the Mile High City, but didn’t play well at all. On the season, though, Jianlian has earned his role as a starter. He’s only 7 feet instead of 7 ½ feet like Yao Ming, but he makes threes and other jump shots better than Yao does. Right now he’s just a poor man’s Yao, but he will definitely get better, and most likely become one of the top dozen power forwards within half a decade or so.

But in this game, Jianlian and the Center, Andrew Bogut, who played better than Jianlian but still not very well, could have learned some things from Marcus Camby, who made 10 blocks and 11 rebounds to go along with 10 points, 5 assists, and 2 steals. I think we should just give Camby the defensive player of the year award right here and now because it’s obvious he’s the NBA’s top man on defense. The Spurs may have the team as far as defense is concerned, but the Nuggets clearly have the man. And if Nene and Kenyon Martin were to both be healthy come playoff time, which I know is like asking for the moon, and if Anthony were to continue to keep his rebounding up, which may be asking for another moon, the Nuggets could then maybe have a defense that Camby could be proud of.

When you write about a sports team and you watch for every little thing, you sometimes get annoyed that a player has caused you to start putting out complaints and warnings that later turn out to be a lot to do over relatively little. In this case I’m talking about the Carmelo Anthony slump, and how it seemed like the world was coming to an end because Allen Iverson, Anthony Carter, and George Karl had taken over the Denver offense, left Anthony out of the front seat, and were destined to drive the team into the ditch. Karl himself was quoted as saying that he was going to figure out what to do to bring Carmelo Anthony back into the central flow of the Nugget’s offense.

We now know for sure that Carmelo was trying to be a superstar on the cheap during the slump days. What seems to have happened is that Anthony finally realized that if you base most of your worth as a player on your scoring, and you think you are one of the greatest jump shooters of all time, but then you start missing a few jumpers that normally go in every game, suddenly you are just an ordinary player and Allen Iverson has completely taken over the show. Realizing that the Carmelo Anthony show just didn’t have enough variety in it, and was getting trashed in the ratings by the Iverson show, Anthony set about to expand out the variety in his production. Starting with the December 20 Rockets game, Melo switched from a score as much as possible and assist on the side overall approach to a score and rebound aggressively and assist on the side overall approach.

When he started rebounding big, everything on the points side came back to him, including the seemingly unrelated jumpers. But nothing is unrelated in basketball. If a player cheats any aspect of his game, from time to time other aspects of his game will suffer, as if the player was being punished by his own soul for bringing a cheap version of his game to the court. The usual mechanism for that is that teammates sense intuitively whether a player is going all out or not, and if they feel he is not, they won’t make as much effort to get the ball to him in easy scoring situations. In this case, specifically, Melo has been rewarded for this rebounding by players such as Iverson, Carter, and Camby, who have become more willing to get the ball to him, despite the frequent double teaming of Anthony.

This is a much more likely reason for the new Melo than thinking that Karl did anything big about stopping the developing all Iverson all the time train wreck that was threatening to destroy the Nuggets. When was the last time Karl used a basketball strategy to solve a tough basketball problem? No, all Karl did was to tell Melo to rebound more. Since Anthony is not an idiot, I am sure he could, and in fact did, figure out on his own the how to get the ball more equations I just discussed here.

And the referees, like teammates, also respond favorably when they see a player who can be kind of lazy sometimes fighting for rebounds and loose balls. They reward that player with more trips to the foul line and a break here and there on turnover calls against him such as offensive fouls. The refs don’t even know they are doing it; they do it unconsciously.

J.R. Smith was actually fully back in the doghouse with the returns of Nene and Chucky Atkins, but he got to play anyway during the extensive garbage time in the 4th quarter. When Karl thinks of garbage time, he thinks of J.R. Smith, and when he thinks of J.R. Smith, he thinks of garbage time. But objective analysis shows that Smith can not possibly be worse than the 6th best player on the Nuggets. Smith had that tragic and asinine traffic accident this past summer, and that bizarre and asinine incident in the Denver bar, but his biggest mistake career wise is thinking that he will ever get good playing time under George Karl. It just isn’t going to happen ever, no matter what.

One of the delights I will have sometime in the next few years will be to see Smith’s performances go up when he is on another team. Now that the Nuggets are winning all the games for which they have a large skills advantage, George Karl is probably not going to be fired even if, for the zillionth straight year, the Nuggets bow out quickly in the 1st round of the playoffs. So unless Smith wants to keep playing less than 20 minutes a game when he could be playing about 30 minutes a game elsewhere, he and his agent are going to have to find another team for the video game playing guy with the odd personality that makes Karl’s skin crawl.

The Nuggets had the luxury of Allen Iverson playing very well, but seemingly not needing him all that much to win this game. In a post game interview, Iverson was quoted: "My concern is never our offense because we can score with the best of them. If we get any type of defensive mentality, and we take it personally night in and night out, teams are not going to score big on us, and we can be dangerous." And I’m thinking, I’d be happy if Camby, Nene, Martin and Anthony are completely free of physical ailments come playoff time. Because you don’t have to worry too much about the brains working durng an athletic contest, whereas a bad hamstring means the player will not be on the court.

And there is no injury list for brains that are not thinking straight, though if there were one, I know for a fact that George Karl thinks that J.R. Smith would be on it most of the season.

ALERT STATUS PROBLEMS
As of December 27, 2007

The Nuggets are under an unusually dangerous and damaging alert status, so the following update is provided.

INJURIES & SUSPENSIONS
1. Steven Hunter injury 3 Points

UNEXPECTED AND SEVERE 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 9 points.

2. Lack of adequate offensive schemes: 10 Points. This would be up to 20 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: 22, which constitutes GREEN ALERT.

GREEN ALERT (20-29): A set of minor problems whose total impact is very small. There is very little effect on the team’s ability to win games against teams from any level.

Man, the first ever green alert, but it’s probably a fly by night one because Kenyon Martin is probably more or less injured again for at least another win, which will push it very close to yellow alert.
RESERVE WATCH

Number of Players Who Played at Least 6 Minutes: Nuggets 11 Bucks 11
Number of Players Who Played at Least 10 Minutes: Nuggets 10 Bucks 9

Nuggets Non-Starters Points: 49
Bucks Non-Starters Points: 52

Nuggets Non-Starters Rebounds: 18
Bucks Non-Starters Rebounds: 14

Nuggets Non-Starters Assists: 14
Bucks Non-Starters Assists: 11

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)
3.0- He’s hiding under his seat and he’s thinking seriously of and getting ready to make a break 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 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 50.4 Season 38.0
Marcus Camby: Game 42.6 Season 32.8
Allen Iverson: Game 36.7 Season 41.6
Anthony Carter: Game 35.4 Season 20.5
Linas Kleiza: Game 24.9 Season 17.6
Nene Hilario: Game 20.8 Season 13.7
J.R. Smith: Game 18.1 Season 15.0
Chucky Atkins: Game 16.2 Season 10.3
Eduardo Najera: Game 6.9 Season 13.8
Yakhouba Diawara: Game -1.2 Season 6.0
Kenyon Martin: Game -1.9 Season 19.4

Bobby Jones: Did Not Play-Coach’s Decision
Jelani McCoy: Did Not Play-Coach’s Decision
Von Wafer: Did Not Play-Coach's Decision

Steven Hunter: Did Not Play-Injury

BUCKS
Mo Williams: Game 47.2 Season 30.3
Charlie Villanueva: Game 25.6 Season 14.7
Royal Ivey: Game 22.5 Season 8.0
Charlie Bell: Game 18.3 Season 9.2
Andrew Bogut: Game 16.1 Season 25.7
Michael Redd: Game 13.3 Season 35.9
Dan Gadzuric: Game 11.8 Season 6.5
Jake Voskuhl: Game 11.0 Season 7.0
Yi Jianlian: Game 10.2 Season 19.9
Awvee Storey: Game 5.2 Season 4.3
Bobby Simmons: Game 1.4 Season 10.0

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:
LeBron James and Kobe Bryant get a substantial number of 50+ games, but Carmelo Anthony has been content with very few of them. Could this be the start of Melo finally bringing his Team USA mentality to the lowly Nuggets? Time will tell.

Anthony Carter had a superb game and Linas Kleiza was outstanding yet again.

For the Bucks, only Mo Williams was huge, and Michael Redd should have stayed in Milwaukee.

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 Mediocre Game
0.50 0.60 Poor Game
0.40 0.50 Very Poor Game
0.25 0.40 Near Disaster
Less 0.25 Total Disaster

NUGGETS-BUCKS REAL PLAYER RATINGS
All players who played 5 minutes or more are included. Any player who played only 5-9 minutes is noted

1. Dan Gadzuric, Mil 1.686…Played only 7 minutes
2. J.R. Smith, Den 1.645
3. Carmelo Anthony, Den 1.626
4. Anthony Carter, Den 1.475
5. Marcus Camby, Den 1.420
6. Mo Williams, Mil 1.388
7. Linas Kleiza, Den 1.311
8. Royal Ivey, Mil 1.250
9. Nene Hilario, Den 1.224
10. Jake Voskuhl, Mil 1.222…Played only 9 minutes
11. Allen Iverson, Den 1.019
12. Charlie Villanueva, Mil 0.948
13. Charlie Bell, Mil 0.796
14. Chucky Atkins, Den 0.771
15. Andrew Bogut, Mil 0.596
16. Awvee Storey, Mil 0.520
17. Michael Redd, Mil 0.475
18. Yi Jianlian, Mil 0.352
19. Eduardo Najera, Den 0.300
20. Bobby Simmons, Mil 0.052
21. Yakhouba Diawara, Den -0.150…Played only 8 minutes
22. Kenyon Martin, Den -0.127

OBSERVATIONS ON THE NUGGETS-TRAILBLAZERS REAL PLAYER RATINGS
With the fast pace and the lack of lock down defenders in the game, it was everyone can be like Mike day at the Pepsi Center. That is, a lot of players could put out the performance of a Michael Jordan if they really had the right stuff and the right effort. There were essentially 5 players who played at Michael Jordan’s level, if only for a night, and 4 of them were Nuggets: J.R. Smith, Carmelo Anthony, Anthony Carter, and Marcus Camby. For the Bucks, Mo Williams was the Michael Jordan designate for the night after Christmas offensive fireworks.

Aside from the Jordans, for the Nuggets, Kleiza played lights out and Nene was huge, especially considering this was his first game back after 7 weeks out of action due to a thumb injury. For the Bucks, Royal Ivey played extremely well, but not quite up to the Michael Jordan level. Oh well, he can go for it again when the Bucks play the Timberwolves or the Knicks.

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.

Carmelo Anthony: +26
Allen Iverson: +22
Eduardo Najera: +19
Kenyon Martin: +17
Marcus Camby: +16
Anthony Carter: +16
Linas Kleiza: +3
Chucky Atkins: +2
Nene: -2
Yakhouba Diawara: -7
J.R. Smith: -10


OBSERVATIONS ON PLUS—MINUS
The Bucks were so depleted that, for a change, neither Linas Kleiza nor Eduardo Najera led the plus-minus. It was Anthony and Iverson on top, simply because they played the most minutes in the three quarter rout leading up to garbage time. .

NUGGETS MADE WHAT?
All Nuggets who played at least 6 minutes are shown.

Yakhouba Diawara played 8 minutes and was 0/1 for 0 points, and he made 1 rebound.

Eduardo Najera played 23 minutes and was 1/5 and 0/1 on 3’s for 2 points, and he made 4 rebounds, 2 assists, and 1 steal.

Nene played 17 minutes and was 3/4 and 5/8 from the line for 11 points, and he made 7 rebounds, 1 assist, and 1 steal.

Chucky Atkins played 21 minutes and was 2/6 and 2/5 on 3’s for 6 points, and he made 6 assists, 1 steal, and 1 rebound.

Anthony Carter played 24 minutes and was 6/7 and 1/2 from the line for 13 points, and he made 6 assists, 6 rebounds, and 4 steals.

Kenyon Martin played 15 minutes and was 0/4 for 0 points, and he made 2 rebounds.

J.R. Smith played 11 minutes and was 3/6, 2/4 on 3’s, and 4/4 from the line for 12 points, and he made 2 assists and 1 block.

Linas Kleiza played 19 minutes and was 4/6, 2/4 on 3’s, and 3/4 from the line for 13 points, and he made 5 rebounds and 3 assists

Marcus Camby played 30 minutes and was 4/7, 1/1 on 3’s, and 1/4 from the line for 10 points, and he made 11 rebounds, 10 blocks, 5 assists, and 2 steals.

Carmelo Anthony played 31 minutes and was 11/16 and 7/8 from the line for 29 points, and he made 10 rebounds, 3 assists, and 2 steals.

Allen Iverson played 36 minuets and was 11/21, 0/1 on 3’s, and 2/3 from the line for 24 points, and he made 6 assists, 2 steals, and 1 rebound.

NEXT UP
The next game will be Friday, December 28 in Oakland to play the Warriors at 8 pm mountain time. Neither the Nuggets nor the Warriors will be playing on back to back nights.