Nuggets Have Given Up

BleedRocketsRed · Mar 1, 2015

http://www.denverpost.com/dempsey/ci_27618378/hey-cancun-here-come-nuggets

Stop me when this starts to sound familiar.

A fourth-quarter huddle late in the Nuggets' 104-82 loss to the Utah Jazz on Friday broke with this phrase: "1-2-3 ... six weeks!"

As in six weeks to go until the end of the season. That's 24 games, 46 days and 1,152 minutes away.

Tax day, April 15, is getaway day: the last day of the Nuggets' season. Rest assured, there are players who are already counting.

And if by now you've already connected the dots to the similarity with Nick Van Exel's infamous "1-2-3 ... Cancun!" in 1998, you win the Showcase Showdown.

Hey, no one said the Nuggets who uttered the new millennium version of that were original.

Van Exel, who yelled his chant at the end of a practice during a Western Conference finals in which the Los Angeles Lakers were being swept by Utah, insisted it was a joke.

"Everyone who was in that locker room with me knows I'd never give up on the team," Van Exel later told reporters. "But finger pointing happens. I never meant anything wrong."

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The Lakers found it so funny, one month after those words were uttered they shipped Van Exel to the Nuggets for Tyronn Lue and Tony Battie. So it was oddly fitting that at least a few of these Nuggets, in one very disrespectful moment, at the end of another blowout loss, against Utah, channeled their inner Van Exel.

Make no mistake, the last few weeks of this season are going to be difficult.

The Nuggets are careening to their worst record since before the Carmelo Anthony era. The Nuggets went 17-65 in the 2002-03 season, and that enabled them to draft Anthony. While the hope among many fans is that all the pain being endured this season leads to a similar result, there are still a lot of games to be played.

And for Nuggets coach Brian Shaw and his staff, that means there is a locker room to keep together and a team to cajole into putting more of an effort on the court. That is true even if there are players with one foot out the door and already in the sand of (insert any sunny beach here).

Shaw said watching lackluster performances game after game is frustrating, but he points the first finger of blame at himself.

"I'm frustrated in myself because I feel that I need to figure out a way to do a better job at trying to get that out of us, get that hustle and those kinds of plays and to play with more of a sense of urgency, play with more tenacity," he said.

Bridging that seemingly Grand Canyon-sized communication gap has been arguably the biggest issue Shaw has faced and has yet to figure out in his two seasons as a head coach. A lot of NBA players aren't self-starters; he has had to try to get them motivated. And his old-school tactics haven't worked.

Any success he eventually has in the NBA hinges on him getting that solved.

Shaw knows this about his Denver crew: "Our guys are frustrated, too. And so the weight of this all starts to come down. Some guys in those situations fight harder. Some guys give in."

And some just wish they were in Cancun.

Christopher Dempsey: cdempsey@denverpost.com or twitter.com/dempseypost
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IzakDavid13 · Mar 2, 2015

Wish Morey could've fleeced them for Lawson & Chandler...hopefully we get McGee from 76ers.

roflmcwaffles · Mar 2, 2015

IzakDavid13 said: ↑

Wish Morey could've fleeced them for Lawson & Chandler...hopefully we get McGee from 76ers.
Click to expand...

They weren't giving either of them up cheap.

I'm pretty sure Nuggets are content to finish this year and then fire Shaw. Then hoping their next coach + a top 10 draft pick can make this team decent again.

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