October 31st - New Orleans Pelicans VS Denver Nuggets - 0-4
Today is Halloween, and with any luck, it will also be the night that we finally end our horror-show opening to the year. So far, we are 0-4: some of those losses are expected, some of them not. Some of them were just normal losses for a young team that's struggling to find itself, others have been... painful.
But tonight we welcome the Denver Nuggets to the Smoothie King Centre in an attempt to finally get rid of our 0 and enter the W column.
The Nuggets are currently 3-1, and have the following statistics to show for themselves [Warning: small sample size applies]:
Offensive Rating: 12th
Defensive Rating: 11th
Rebounds/game: 16th (48.5)
Assists/game: 25th (22)
Steals/game: 20th (8.0)
Blocks/game: 13th (5.5)
Pace: 30th
3pt shooting: 13th (36.2%)
Just for comparison, our current Offensive Rating ranks 6th in the entire NBA, and our defensive rating is 28th. So, a night and day different for us, compared to the Nuggets who are slightly above average in both categories, without having cracked the top 10 in either.
There is one major encouraging factor for us to consider: the Nuggets, of course, have Nikola Jokic as their primary distributor in the half-court, and he is incredible. He's the best 7 foot passer of all time, already. He is not, however, a massively agile and speedy centre, and as a result of running the offense through him they are not a massively quick team: we will have the pace advantage by a fair margin. Jokic isn't nearly as unfit as some people like to argue (remember that game last year where he played 50+ minutes and seemed fine still?) but he's no sprinter, and there will be times we can take advantage of that.
Similarly, running the offense primarily through a single guy has a large downside, in that there isn't as much dynamism as there could be. The Nuggets currently rank fairly low on the assists per game category, and outside of Jokic, they have nobody averaging more than 4 assists a night. That's something that can be exploited on defense, since offense will be primarily coming from a single motor.
This is a game that we can win, shockingly enough. However, it is far from a gimme: Denver are a very good team who are likely to finish top 4 in the West this year, and we're still hobbled in places. Jrue Holiday is expected to make his return tonight, although Favors is still listed as questionable, and we hope that Jrue will return in good form and have a good game to make up for his opening game woes.
That's all there really is to say. Let's go out there and fight for the W, and hope to get it. #WBD
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Originally Posted by Taker597
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