Summary Evaluation of the Nuggets 2008 Off Season

Editorial Note: I'm very, very close to completing the importation of material that was posted elsewhere but was not posted until now on my own site! From now on everything gets posted here first, with no exceptions. The following was written in late August, 2008.

There are many mistakes the Nuggets have made on and off the basketball court, so many that it would be easy to get lost in the trees and not be aware any longer of the forest. How about mentioning just two whoppers? The Nuggets with just two big mistakes alone, namely, not owning up to their George Karl mistake, and giving away Camby for nothing while cutting and running from the luxury tax in panic mode, have proven that they are not a front line NBA organization. They are an organization that has hoisted the white flag with respect to any chance at all of winning the Championship for the foreseeable future. To a big extent, the Nuggets still have a "we are an inferior organization coming from the ABA, so we can't really compete with franchises such as the Celtics and the Lakers" mentality.

If Nuggets owner Stan Kroenke was subject to suddenly cutting and running from paying the luxury tax, then the Nuggets had no business paying a big luxury tax in the first place. That means that the Nuggets went about building their now dismantled 2007-08 squad in the wrong way. Instead of searching out opportunistic trades for and free agent acquisitions of expensive veterans, the Nuggets should have been much more into developing younger players via the draft. This could not have done with Karl as the coach, however, because he is hopelessly biased in favor of the “tried and true” expensive veterans.

But since the Nuggets did spend the big bucks, but then did not have the stomach to follow that strategy through, or even to make a graceful exit from it, and since the Nuggets have most definitely not been developing younger players into a coherent system, they are now one of the few franchises without any credible overall development and improvement strategy at all.

They have been reduced to acquisitions that are opportunistic but marginal, such as the Balkman acquisition. It’s almost as if the Nuggets are the hyenas of the NBA now, living off the scraps that the main organizations have no use for for some odd reason or another.

Kroenke went from one extreme to another: from paying a hefty luxury tax to demanding a sudden and total elimination of his luxury tax liability. Roughly 99 times out of 100, when you go from one extreme to another financially, you are either admitting you made a huge management mistake that you are now correcting, or you are making a huge mistake with the big financial change itself. Specifically, the Nuggets have pled guilty to at least two and probably to all three of the following:

1. They should not have spent the big bucks in the first place because spending big bucks on “tried and true” veterans and “stars and superstars in the making” while mostly ignoring the development of young, inexpensive players, is not a good strategy. It’s better to concentrate more on developing a critical mass of younger and far cheaper players and to, while not ignoring them, more or less allow the big money veteran pieces to fall into place without any gambles or ultra expensive wheeling and dealing.

To be specific, under this charge, the Nuggets were in the wrong for picking up the massive Iverson contract when they already had the huge Anthony, Martin, Nene, and Camby contracts on the books.

2. The Nuggets did not have the coaching staff, and/or they did not have the basketball system, with which to get a good return form their investment.

3. The Nuggets in general and Mr. Kroenke in particular panicked in the 2008 off season, and by cutting and running from the luxury tax, they abandoned managing their investment before it could earn a substantial return. For one thing, the return on spending big money for good and great veterans is supposed to be lasting respect for the franchise among the best players and managers of pro basketball. Such respect results in said players and managers gravitating to your franchise at reasonable salaries. With what the Nuggets have done, they are reaping the opposite of respect. Players such as Ron Artest will not be very interested in playing for the Nuggets at reasonable rates any time soon.

So how anyone can be sanguine in this situation is beyond me. Admitting defeat is the worst thing that can happen in sports. And that’s exactly what the Nuggets franchise did in the 2008 off season. They admitted they screwed up, admitted they were defeated in the quest for the ring, and then proceeded to make even more mistakes. There is a perverse logic to it: if you are admitting you don't know what you are doing and that you are defeated because of that, you are giving yourself a license to make new, fresh mistakes.

This whole sorry Nuggets episode has taught me the folly of watching and writing about just one NBA team. Now I am trying to figure out whether I should write about the entire NBA as a whole, switch to a big market franchise that will never have a financial or managerial panic, or compromise by picking 2-4 teams to cover at a time.