Malone Expects ‘Growing Pains’ In Nuggets’ Playoff Preparation Amidst Delayed Arrivals And Injuries

Would the Denver Nuggets have been better off if Colorado were a province in Canada rather than an American state?

Consider the Toronto Raptors, whose seemingly disadvantageous circumstances leading up to the return of the 2019-20 NBA season may ultimately have proven beneficial. Due to a Canada-U.S. coronavirus border closure agreement in which Canada required a 14-day self-quarantine for entrants, the Raptors skipped a Toronto return and on June 22 headed instead straight to Naples, Florida – a three-hour drive from the NBA bubble located at Disney World in Orlando – as the other 21 restart participant teams headed back to their respective home markets.

Starting Phase 1 of the NBA return in Florida rather than Toronto initially appeared to be an exacting burden for the Raptors, as it would extend the time their players would be spending away from their families and homes. But because they would stay in a hotel which the team occupied exclusively and, as head coach Nick Nurse explained it to Naples News, “go to the gym and pretty much return to the hotel, and limit or really not have any other activities,” the extra leg of the Raptors’ restart journey just might have safeguarded the health of the players and staff. Having started two weeks earlier than other teams on more stringent coronavirus safety protocols, the team arrived in Orlando on July 9 with their entire roster intact.

By contrast, the Denver Nuggets have gotten off to a frustrating start in the bubble. Most notably, this began with All-Star center Nikola Jokic testing positive for COVID-19 in his home country of Serbia, and then being unable to reach the Disney World campus until July 14, a week after the first Nuggets contingent had arrived.

But that turned out to be just the tip of the iceberg, as it was quickly deduced – despite the Nuggets organization staying tight-lipped about the status of any of their players, including whether they had even joined the team in Orlando – that a large portion of their roster had yet to enter the bubble.

In fact, the Nuggets have had so few players available in Orlando due to a combination of positive COVID-19 diagnoses and other injuries that, according to the Denver Post’s Mike Singer, it was not until Thursday, July 30, that they were able to assemble enough players in practice to run five-on-fives.

With four regular Denver starters unavailable for their first scrimmage game on July 22, head coach Michael Malone deployed the now-infamous starting lineup which was one of the tallest in NBA history, featuring three players six-foot-eleven or taller – Nikola Jokic at point guard, Mason Plumlee at center and rookie Bol Bol in his Nuggets debut at “small” forward – along with the “shorter” six-foot-eight Jerami Grant at shooting guard and six-foot-seven Paul Millsap at power forward, and no true guards.

While the lineup was a delightful novelty for fans, who especially delighted at seven-foot-two Bol’s impressive display of shot blocking, three-point shooting and ball handling skills, it was far less fun for Malone, who would soon reveal that he was already over it.

On a Zoom conference call following Denver’s second scrimmage game against the New Orleans Pelicans, I asked Malone how important the seeding games would be in determining the playoff bench rotation, but what was clearly most urgently on his mind was getting the team whole again.

“I’m just worried about getting a healthy team,” Malone replied. “We’ve had eight players for our last two scrimmages. So obviously you want to develop some continuity, some chemistry, a rotation, but my number one objective right now is to get healthy, to get guys back in the lineup, and to get them out there playing.”

Malone conceded that day that he couldn’t glean much about where the Nuggets were at as a team from the practices and scrimmage play up to that point. “I have no idea,” he said, “because we haven’t been a collective group, we haven’t been a full team yet.”

“It’s really hard to judge and analyze where we’re at when you don’t have four of your five starters playing,” Malone added. “We’ve been very limited with the amount of bodies we’ve had.”

In the same media session, Jokic echoed Malone’s sentiment in reply to a question about whether the Nuggets could assess where the team was at based on the first scrimmage games. “Maybe condition-wise but…today we didn’t have basically four starting players,” Jokic said. “We are not playing the guys who we usually play, so I think we cannot be sure where we are at right now.”

Information about players’ health and whereabouts was not forthcoming, but to at least partially recap the saga of the delayed arrival of Nuggets players:

• Nikola Jokic was able to join the Nuggets for his first practice in Orlando on July 15 after arriving several days earlier.
• Gary Harris and Torrey Craig arrived in Orlando on July 19 and cleared quarantine on July 22.
• Michael Porter Jr. arrived in Orlando on July 22 and cleared quarantine on July 24.
• Keita Bates-Diop arrived in Orlando on July 24 and cleared quarantine on July 26.
• Monte Morris arrived in Orlando on July 25 and cleared quarantine on July 27.
• P.J. Dozier cleared quarantine on July 30.
• Jamal Murray (hamstring), Gary Harris (hip) and Will Barton III (knee) have all had bouts with injuries, and other players may have as well, with Malone saying his team is “pretty banged up.” Harris sat out all three scrimmage games, and Barton played in only the first half of one.
• Vlatko Cancar is the only player remaining who has not yet joined the team.

Despite Malone’s evident frustration with the Nuggets’ challenges in assembling their team, his tone has turned more optimistic in the last couple of days as they have moved closer to having all players available.

When asked how he was doing following the aforementioned practice in which Denver finally was able to do five-on-five actions, Malone bluntly replied though his rainbow skyline mask, “Fucking great!”

And while he went on to acknowledge Denver’s difficulties, saying that “we have our hands full. It’s a tough situation in terms of bodies and who we have,” he emphasized that the Nuggets are “trying to make the best of it.”

Just before Malone had spoken, Monte Morris, who had just completed his first practice with the team after clearing quarantine, was presented a very positive outlook, and did not seem overly concerned when I asked him if the delay in getting the whole team together would be a setback.

“No, I mean I feel like the core of guys that was here already… were already in shape,” Morris said. “The guys that were left behind at the time, including myself,… we’ve been ready, staying ready. So how close we are as a knit group, our team unity, that’ll carry us as far as we can go.”

“I don’t think it’s been a setback because we’re not a group of guys who don’t like working, and we’ve all been working,” Morris added. “So when we got back today and played, it was like we never missed a beat.”

Both Malone and Denver’s players appear far less concerned with the team’s postseason seeding situation than with using the two weeks of seeding games to get the team healthy and on the same page in time for the playoffs.

Focusing on August 17, the date of the first playoff games in the bubble, Malone said on a Zoom call today that he is hopeful Denver’s core group of rotation players, including their five-man starting lineup which has played the most minutes together of any team’s in the league, “will come back fairly quickly from all the minutes they’ve had together.”  

“But,” he added, “it’s definitely going to be some growing pains with that.”

Despite all the challenges the Nuggets have faced in the Orlando bubble, Malone has confidence in his team’s ability to recapture the cohesiveness they established earlier this season, saying that they “have ample opportunity to get them back to playing at that level,” and that the players “are getting more and more excited as we get healthier, get guys back, and prepare to start playing those meaningful games.”

And with the Nuggets’ first of their eight remaining seeding games scheduled for August first against the Miami Heat, they will get the opportunity very soon to see just how quickly they can reestablish their chemistry and a playoff-caliber level of basketball.