iserp: Denver’s proble isn’t that his team is worse in the playoffs… but that other teams can play his starters more time. Nowitzki played 34 minutes per game during the season, but almost 40 during the playoffs. Durant averaged 42 minutes against the nuggets in the playoffs. How many minutes were averaging D-Wade, Bosh and Lebron James last year in the playoffs?What i am saying is not that Denver is not built for the playoffs, but that in the regular season, they have the advantage of depth, but that isn’t a real advantage during the playoffs. In the playoffs, team play with their 7-8 best players for the most time. Denver has some really nice players, but what use is to have such a large bench except to eat cap space once playoffs arrive?

correct…. The game slows down in the playoffs for myriad reasons… That’s why Denver won’t be as good in such a setting. It’s a diminishing returns deal with possessions, too.

Denver plays perfectly to its depth by playing a ton of possessions.

It’s much easier to slow the game down in the playoffs.

Top-heavy teams are better able to produce max effort games in the playoffs, negating the advantages of deeper teams.

Ben R: I don’t buy the argument that Denver losing in the first round last year was proof that their team isn’t built to win in the playoffs. The Nuggets had a great record after the trade deadline last year but the Thunder had an even better record. The Thunder were the hottest team in the NBA going into last years playoffs and made it into the finals where they lost to the eventual NBA champions. Denver didn’t lose to a bad team they lost to a better team a team that is still better and possibly the best team in the NBA. It is the same as the argument about D’Antoni’s Suns being “not built for the playoffs” it is bogus. The Suns, like the Nuggets, were a good team who lost to better teams not because they “weren’t built for the playoffs” but because they were simply not as good as the teams that beat them.As for the Nuggets future I think they are as good moving forward as any team without a top 5 player (LeBron, Howard, Paul, Wade, Durant/Rose). Denver has never had the opportunity to get a top 5 player so instead they built a great team. Top 5 players usually win but the Nuggets are built to challenge the best teams as well as anybody else.

Perhaps… But if you actually watched the games you’d understand that a lack of an individual offensive talent did them in three of their losses in the 4th quarter, and was clearly apparent throughout the series as the team had a very difficult time creating good looks in the half-court… even with great ball-handling, spacing and shooters.

What i am saying is not that Denver is not built for the playoffs, but that in the regular season, they have the advantage of depth, but that isn’t a real advantage during the playoffs. In the playoffs, team play with their 7-8 best players for the most time. Denver has some really nice players, but what use is to have such a large bench except to eat cap space once playoffs arrive?

It is the same as the argument about D’Antoni’s Suns being “not built for the playoffs” it is bogus. The Suns, like the Nuggets, were a good team who lost to better teams not because they “weren’t built for the playoffs” but because they were simply not as good as the teams that beat them.

As for the Nuggets future I think they are as good moving forward as any team without a top 5 player (LeBron, Howard, Paul, Wade, Durant/Rose). Denver has never had the opportunity to get a top 5 player so instead they built a great team. Top 5 players usually win but the Nuggets are built to challenge the best teams as well as anybody else.

I have to point out that the other team adding payroll systematically was NY under Isiah Thomas, the main difference is that Dallas always care of getting contracts that would be tradable in the future (all this contracts with a non guaranteed final year… Erick Dampier, for example)

Going back to the current situation. Denver is in a good position… but since in playoffs starters count much more than bench players, they will have to trade for talent if they want to go deep in the playoffs. The Knicks need time of playing together and some balance of the team; hopefully Baron Davis will make the Knicks look more respectable towards the end of the season, but i wouldn’t put my hopes too high. We’re very well set going to the future, we just need to build around our core …. perhaps we will need 2 or 3 years to be a real contender, just don’t trade Amare now for peanuts! This team is always going to be a very dangerous playoff team, even if we fall to the 8th seed.

Brian Cronin (@Brian_Cronin): For every Lebron James, there’s an Andrea Bargnani. For every Kevin Durant, there’s a Greg Oden. For every Dwyane Wade, there’s a Darko Milicic. For every Chris Paul, there’s a Marvin Williams. For every Tim Duncan, there’s a Michael Olowokandi.

I think that wasn’t the point.

As NBA salaries are structured… rookie scale salaries are much more favorable to a NBA team. And since the point is to accumulate as much talent as possible to win it all; the best you can do is to draft rookies for 2 or 3 years, let them play together, to know themselves… and then add veteran players with all the cap space of all the contracts that ended during those 2 or 3 years.

Denver Nuggets traded talent for depth, and it is working for them. Also, i believe that their players have a good personality and are very coachable by Karl, that has done a really good job of having the team working in such a little time (they kept Ty Lawson, Harrington, Nene, and Afflalo, but the rest of the roster seems really different from previous years). So most analysts had the going very high.

NY traded depth for talent. And in the short run is not working… but that was kind of expected. D’Antoni can’t work as good as Karl since he has glaring holes in the lineup (namely the guard position), and has always to hide that fact (Melo playing point forward, putting SGs at the PG position, forgetting about team play and going all the time to ISOs). It’s not only that D’Antoni “needs Nash” to make his teams work, but that every coach needs someone semi-competent in every position so the team (as a whole) works. All this “the wole is more than the sum of its parts”

Did Cleveland really come out that badly? And is Denver coming out as well as we imagine? Denver is going to go forward with a core of Lawson, Afflalo, Gallinari, and Nene. That will be a nice, entertaining line up capable of winning a fair amount of games for a long time. Realistically, they’re nowhere close to the star studded lineups the Clippers and Thunder have going forward, and this season the Nuggets might not be capable of beating out the veteran teams in the west this year. They’re basically going to be a worse version of the Suns when they still had Amar’e, a team that will have to scrape and fight just to be able to lose in the second round.

Cleveland on the other hand, totally bottomed out, got 2 top 4 picks, and have several more lottery picks in the coming years. Although there’s no guarantee that those picks will pan out, they’re going to be able to build around rookie contracts while being able to easily add more expensive veteran since they’ll have cap space. Basically they went all out on the Sam Presti rebuilding strategy and have a pretty nice outlook going forward. The Nuggets will definitely be better the next 3-4 years, but if the ultimate goal is a championship, those 3-4 years will be wasted for the Nuggets while the Cavs have the blank slate needed to build something lasting.

Of course you’d take Denver’s team going forward. Did anyone predict the Mavericks to win the NBA title last year? Of course not. They said the same things about the Mavericks that you’re saying about the Nuggets – that they were a team that will have a good regular season and then scrape and fight to lose in the second round. However, as the Mavericks (and the Suns the year before) show us is that all you need to do is get into the playoffs (preferably at a high seed in the first round) and then who knows what will happen? Heck, the Melo Nuggets are even a good example! Perennial one and done for years until one year they almost made it to the Finals. The Jazz in 2007 is another example. Look at all the different teams that have made the Western Conference FInals these past few years!

Meanwhile, what’s the success rate of teams bottoming out to get high draft picks? The Clippers did it for close to 20 years and it just recently finally paid off because they had the good fortune to pick #1 in a year with a real #1 (and even then, it also required the NBA vetoing an agreed-upon trade!). The Cavs just picked #1 in a year without a real #1. They also picked 4th in a year without much of a #4, either. For every Derrick Rose, there’s a John Wall. For every Dwight Howard, there’s an Andrew Bogut (who is a lot better than the other examples i’m giving for bad #1′s, but still, you know what I mean). For every Lebron James, there’s an Andrea Bargnani. For every Kevin Durant, there’s a Greg Oden. For every Dwyane Wade, there’s a Darko Milicic. For every Chris Paul, there’s a Marvin Williams. For every Tim Duncan, there’s a Michael Olowokandi. For every Blake Griffin, there’s a Kwame Brown. There’s certainly great things to be had in bottoming out to draft a superstar, but the odds are pretty poor in return for being a terrible team for years.

So no, I would much much rather have a team playing .667 ball and getting a, what, a #3 seed? A #4 seed? than having a team bottom out when there’s no clear game-changing player on the horizon (and even if there were, the odds would be against you getting that player). Heck, Cleveland is not even bad enough to be an odds-on favorite for a top 3 pick this upcoming draft!

So what you have is two approaches that both require some good luck. One approach, though, allows you to watch a really good team for years and the other forces you to watch a shitty team for years. I’m taking the former every day of the week and twice on Sundays. And that’s not even counting the possibility of Denver trading multiple players for a single “star” player in the upcoming years.

Juany8: Did Cleveland really come out that badly? And is Denver coming out as well as we imagine? Denver is going to go forward with a core of Lawson, Afflalo, Gallinari, and Nene. That will be a nice, entertaining line up capable of winning a fair amount of games for a long time. Realistically, they’re nowhere close to the star studded lineups the Clippers and Thunder have going forward, and this season the Nuggets might not be capable of beating out the veteran teams in the west this year. They’re basically going to be a worse version of the Suns when they still had Amar’e, a team that will have to scrape and fight just to be able to lose in the second round.Cleveland on the other hand, totally bottomed out, got 2 top 4 picks, and have several more lottery picks in the coming years. Although there’s no guarantee that those picks will pan out, they’re going to be able to build around rookie contracts while being able to easily add more expensive veteran since they’ll have cap space. Basically they went all out on the Sam Presti rebuilding strategy and have a pretty nice outlook going forward. The Nuggets will definitely be better the next 3-4 years, but if the ultimate goal is a championship, those 3-4 years will be wasted for the Nuggets while the Cavs have the blank slate needed to build something lasting.

excellent post