With All-Star Paul Millsap and emerging star Nikola Jokic both sidelined due to injuries, the Denver Nuggets are going to have to get crafty with their starting lineup and rotations moving forward.
“We can go different ways,” Nuggets’ head coach Michael Malone said about how he will handle the frontcourt rotations moving forward. “We can go small. Obviously, we can slide Kenneth (Faried) to the five and play whether it’s Trey (Lyles), Juancho (Hernangomez), or Richard Jefferson. We can play big. We haven’t really made a decision on that yet. [We] kind of see what the best case is for us tonight — what’s going to give us the best chance to win — but we do have options. ”
When healthy, the Nuggets run their offense through Jokic and Millsap with Millsap also serving as the anchor on defense as well as the leader on the court. The Nuggets are now tasked with the challenge of sustaining their current schemes despite being without their two best players.
Between Faried, Lyles, Hernangomez, Jefferson, and Mason Plumlee the Nuggets have plenty of options to mix and match with their frontcourt. Once an issue, it now seems that the glut of forwards that the Nuggets’ possess will now serve as a saving grace with their two best players sidelined for the time being.
With that being said, Malone believes the Nuggets can sustain their style of play by running the offense through Plumlee.
“Mason was a playmaking big in Portland,” Malone said at shootaround before taking on the Los Angeles Lakers on Saturday morning. “A lot of our offense that we have in was with the mindset of having Paul Millsap and Nikola Jokic — and now they are out — but I do think we can still run a lot of our offense through Mason as a facilitator. I still think we have that ability within the offense and I think Mason’s more than capable of doing that.”
The frontcourt will demand the most attention moving forward, but the backcourt also has the potential to be tinkered with as point guards Jamal Murray and Emmanuel Mudiay have struggled immensely in recent time.
Murray has an effective field goal percentage of just 47.2 with Mudiay holding steady at an even worse mark of 45.4. Both of those numbers sit significantly below the league average and when you add in their turnover woes, it is easy to see why the point guard production has suffered.
With that, Will Barton has done a phenomenal job in the wake of the poor play from the point guards by stepping up as both a leader and a closer for the Nuggets. Barton’s effective field goal percentage sits at 56.9 percent on the season and he has been a much more effective playmaker for the Nuggets thanks to his assist to turnover ratio being better than both Mudiay and Murray while also averaging more assists per game than Murray does.
“Will Barton is kind of our defacto playmaker,” Malone said.
One thing is for sure: it will be all hands on deck for the Nuggets moving forward. With Jokic and Millsap out for an extended amount of time, Chandler dealing with low back pain, and Plumlee playing through a core strain, it seems the Nuggets will have a lot of questions to find answers for over the upcoming couple weeks.
“When you have the injuries that we have right now, everybody’s got to step up,” Malone said.