Nuggets ’embarrassed’ by Knicks at home: ‘Who do we want to be as a team?’

DENVER — By the end of the most embarrassing loss of the season for the Denver Nuggets, New York Knicks fans had taken over the Ball Arena. The chants were loud and noticeable. You could hear everything from “OG Anunoby!” to the “Deuce” every time backup guard Miles McBride splashed home another 3-pointer.

It wasn’t so much that the Nuggets fell 145-118 to New York, or that the Nuggets were never really in this one. It was the lack of effort that drew the steam out of Denver head coach Michael Malone. It was the lack of energy. It was the missing game as the Knicks made their first run of the night. It was a lack of passion that came out in the third quarter.

A little less than 48 hours after their best performance of the season in beating the Los Angeles Lakers, the Nuggets did a 180 on Monday night. They didn’t show up and they let a hungry and aggressive Knicks team run them out of their own gym.

“F— that, I’m not blushing,” Malone said angrily when asked how he would handle the loss. “You don’t blush when you’re embarrassed. You don’t flush when you don’t play hard or play with any kind of physicality. Tonight we were embarrassed. We have 16 games left and we are talking about effort. We need to ask ourselves this question: Who do we want to be as a team?

“Playing like you actually care would be great.”

This wasn’t so much about Monday night’s loss for Malone. This is actually a culmination of events built over time. The pre-season featured four losses in five games. Denver’s regular season opened with home losses to the Oklahoma City Thunder and Los Angeles Clippers. With Nikola Jokić missing time due to the birth of his second child, there was a road loss to a New Orleans Pelicans team that was missing almost all of their key players. That was followed by a loss to the Memphis Grizzlies where the Nuggets looked slow, sluggish and hapless offensively.

And yet there have been moments of brilliance. A home win over the Thunder. Saturday night’s rumble by the Lakers. After that 0-2 start winning seven out of eight games. The tops have been there. But the valleys have been low. The dismantling of the Lakers on the road looked like the Nuggets had finally started to turn a corner, even with it coming on the heels of a home loss to the Dallas Mavericks.

That’s what has been so frustrating for Malone and the Nuggets in general. An 82-game season will naturally feature some pockets where a team doesn’t play great basketball. That’s the nature of an NBA schedule being so demanding. Sometimes what happens on the floor has very little to do with what happens on the floor. An NBA coach knows this and knows there are some things out of his control. But Monday night for Malone was a turning point. When the Knicks built a lead, the Nuggets folded. When the Knicks played physical, the Nuggets didn’t match the physicality.

“Russell Westbrook played with a ton of effort and he’s 36 years old,” Malone said. “But I need Nikola Jokić. I need the guys who have been here in the starting lineup to be vocal.”

What Malone doesn’t want is for Monday night or last Sunday night in Memphis to be the norm. He doesn’t want inconsistency to be the norm. And through 16 games, what have the Nuggets been? They have been a team with their typical beautiful offense that has not defended very well. In 2023, when they won an NBA title, they were arguably the best offensive and defensive team in the league.

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So far, they are 17th in the league with a defensive rating of 114. That number won’t be good enough to win another title. Malone knows that. His players know that. These Denver Nuggets are quite capable of scoring. But can they stop anyone? Saturday night’s 127-102 win over the Lakers was one of Denver’s best efforts of the season on both ends of the floor. Going from being the complete team in one night to being so discombobulated provided a great contrast.

That explains why Malone was so heated Monday night. The Nuggets are 9-7. They are currently in eighth place in the Western Conference. Malone doesn’t want that to be who the Nuggets are. And when you get to 25 or 30 games, teams start to settle into what they’re supposed to be. Is it impossible to change stripes once you establish them? Of course not. But changing those stripes takes a ton of work.

“It’s energy,” guard Jamal Murray said. “It’s effort. It’s discipline. It’s how much you want it and how much you care. And we didn’t have any of that tonight.”

Denver’s defense was horrendous against the Knicks. The Nuggets allowed New York to shoot 60 percent from the field. The Knicks made 19 of their 36 3-pointers. Anunoby set a career high with 40 points. The Nuggets did not defend at the point of attack. They did not defend the rim. They allowed New York point guard Jalen Brunson to get anywhere he wanted off the dribble, and once he did, Denver’s defense usually collapsed.

But Monday night was not schematic. If the Nuggets are going to get where they want to go, Malone is right. They need to show more fight and more resilience. They need to be more willing to get into the proverbial mud with teams and they need to play with more energy. This will not always be the case, but it should be the case more often than not. At this point, the Nuggets are setting the wrong trend, and Malone and Jokić want to put an end to it immediately.

“We didn’t show up tonight,” Jokić said. “I think it’s important to learn from games like this because other teams will look at what they did to us. I think we can learn. But it’s always good to get a slap in the face so we can wake up.”

(Photo of Nikola Jokić and Karl-Anthony Towns: Justin Tafoya/Getty Images)