Well, crap. This isn’t the news I was looking for.

If you’ve read anything of mine over the last few weeks, then you know I had a lot of faith in Wilson Chandler heading into this season. So, yeah, this one hurts.

What’s worse, though, is that this news came completely out of the blue. It was only a few weeks ago that the Denver Nuggets and Chandler were telling us it was only a minor injury.

“Not really serious, but something that you want to take your time with,” Chandler said, via the Denver Post. “No surgery needed, not a long period of the season missed. Just kind of like a day-to-day thing, couple of weeks. Like a strain in the hamstring.”

Apparently, whatever doctor Chandler was seeing had no idea what he was talking about.

But let’s get down to it. What does the loss of Wilson Chandler mean for the Denver Nuggets?

First things first, the team’s ceiling is obviously lower. The question, though, is by how much.

If you had asked me a few days ago, I probably would have said that this dooms any chance the Nuggets had at a .500 record, let alone a playoff spot. Today, though, I’m not so sure.

Here’s the big variable in the equation: Is there an All Star on this team?

That may sound absurd — extremely premature, at least — but is it really that far out of the question?

Danilo Gallinari is averaging nearly 18 points per game, he’s scored at least 20 points in four out of the Nuggets’ eight matchups and if you just eliminated his disastrous 2-10, six-point performance against the Trailblazers, he’d be averaging 19.5 points on 42 percent shooting. Those are already borderline All-Star numbers.

And Kenneth Faried isn’t far off, either. His 14.5 points and 9.9 rebounds a game are both career highs, and his 23.82 PER (Player Efficiency Rating) is 19th best in the league, just behind Chris Bosh and Anthony Davis.

It would take an awful lot of campaigning to get either of those guys into the All-Star game — honestly, if Emmanuel Mudiay keeps improving the way he has, the name recognition may make him the Nuggets’ most likely candidate — but they’re definitely in the mix. And on the court, that’s all that matters.

But here’s the other factor that’s on the Nuggets’ side: The West is not as good as it once was.

In the past, you need 48, 49 sometimes even 50 wins just to sniff a playoff spot in the West. That’s not the case this year. Yes, the top of the conference — Warriors, Spurs, Thunder, Clippers — is still as dangerous as it’s ever been, but those final four spots are up for grabs.

Before the season, most everybody had the Grizzlies, Rockets and Pelicans locked into the playoffs, leaving just that final eighth seed to be decided, but none of those teams have looked impressive to start the season. The Grizzlies and Rockets have enough talent that they’ll undoubtedly work their way back into the playoff mix, but the Pelicans (1-7) are limping back towards the lottery.

In reality, for all the criticism the Nuggets received in just a couple weeks worth of action, they’re currently sitting in the seventh seed, just one game out of the third seed.

That’ll mean nothing in March or April, but right now, it means that Michael Malone and the Nuggets are exactly where they need to be. If I told you that the Nuggets would be 4-4 after eight games in which they played five playoff teams from last season, would you haven taken it? I sure would have, and that’s exactly what they’ve done.

More importantly, they’ve done it without Wilson Chandler.

When it comes down to it, the Nuggets won’t be as good as they could have been with Chandler in the lineup, but they’re still very much a part of the playoff conversation. There are four elite teams in the Western conference, and then there are the rest. If Denver’s core players can continue to improve, and if Malone’s philosophy begins to take a greater hold on the franchise as a whole, we’ll still be talking about the Denver Nuggets in April.