HOUSTON — After business hours on Black Friday, Denver Nuggets bench minutes went on sale.
The holiday season is here. The second-unit carousel has officially started spinning again. Nuggets coach Michael Malone made that clear to his locker room after a 105-86 loss to the Rockets completed a 1-4 road trip Friday night.
“I just told them,” Malone said. “Minutes, I’m gonna start playing different people. You just can’t go out there because you think you’re gonna play, and go out there and do nothing. You’ve gotta bring something to the party.”
This was a theme last season as well. The Nuggets struggled to find continuity on their bench throughout the regular season. They were able to shorten the rotation to eight players during their run to the NBA title. But it’s arguably even more important this regular season that they avoid over-working the starters who pushed through expanded minutes in those 20 playoff games then got a short offseason. Jamal Murray has already missed nine games from an injury that occurred in the second game of a back-to-back the day after he played 39 minutes.
Denver’s bench was outscored 16-0 by Houston’s in the first half Friday as the Nuggets buried themselves in a 26-point deficit. Christian Braun eventually scored seven in the final half of a mostly impressive road trip for him. After him? The seventh, eighth and ninth men in a non-Murray world are Peyton Watson, Zeke Nnaji and Julian Strawther. Watson was a minus-24 for the road trip. Nnaji was a minus-10 before Friday, when he got pulled from the game after one minute on the floor. Strawther was a minus-36.
All three are young players, and benching them outright could get into the crosshairs of Denver’s dueling priorities this season: contend for a repeat championship while also developing the next generation of talent. Malone understands the difficulty of that balance better than anyone as the individual tasked with managing games. The end of the road trip might have been an early breaking point.
“I thought Justin (Holiday) played pretty well,” Malone said, referring to the 34-year-old journeyman Denver signed during the offseason. “So we’ll see. We’re going home. Very disappointing road trip. … That’s the challenge when you have so many young, unproven players off the bench. But we also have games to win, and that delicate balance is a tightrope. But we need to win, and I’m gonna play the guys that are gonna help us get a win.”
If there’s any hint of what’s to come, the extreme outcome would be similar to the third quarter Friday, when only seven Nuggets appeared: Nikola Jokic, Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, Aaron Gordon, Michael Porter Jr., Reggie Jackson, Christian Braun and Holiday.
Malone described Gordon’s 0-for-12 shooting night as “very uncharacteristic” but was unconcerned about his ability to bounce back. He said Gordon should be trying to get to the foul line more, but added that when Gordon was playing the five with the bench unit, the Rockets were swarming him.
Malone also indicated he still trusts Jackson after a rough night for the point guard: Jackson was minus-23 with three turnovers in his first 10 minutes. That illuminates how much the Nuggets miss Murray in two ways: Jackson can’t replicate Murray’s impact on the starting unit, but the bench misses Jackson’s scoring just as much.
“We’re playing lineups out there with no point guard,” Malone said. “We probably had quite a few minutes of that tonight. … I know it’s easy to say because Jamal is not playing, but I think if Jamal Murray plays I think we win the game the last time we played here, a three-point loss. I think we win the game in New Orleans. I think maybe we win the game in Orlando, where we have five turnovers for eight points in the fourth quarter. But he’s not here. So we have to find a way.
“Reggie, I think, has done a really good job in place of Jamal. But just like if Nikola goes down, we don’t have another Nikola Jokic. We don’t have another Jamal Murray.”
Nuggets players also circled inconsistent effort as the common denominator in a bad road trip. Part of the trouble for younger players is adapting to the tightly packed nature of the NBA schedule, and the subsequent lack of practices on non-game days unlike in college.
“That’s the NBA. You never practice,” Nikola Jokic said. “You’ve just gotta deal with it and fix it in the meantime.”
“I think I’ve just gotta find some different guys to play that can give us something,” Malone said. “Some kind of life, some kind of energy, some kind of productivity. There’s just a lot of empty minutes being played right now by too many guys.”
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