"I don't know what the hell they were surprised about": You thought the Nuggets were over nights like this

You really thought the Nuggets were over having nights like this.

Nights when Denver plays down to its competition. Nights when the Nuggets revert back to the defensive team they were for the first couple years of the Michael Malone era, not the top-10 defense Denver was last season. Nights when the Nuggets fall victim to the the scouting report that they supposedly reviewed ahead of their matchup with Trae Young and the Hawks.

“He did exactly what we knew he was going to do, and we let him do it,” Malone said speaking about Young who’s 42 points and eight 3s paced the Hawks to a 125-121 win. “That’s the frustrating thing about it. Hes hitting 3s and our guys are looking at us like, ‘We didn’t tell them that he shoots 3s.’ But I have to do a better job of making in-game adjustments. He dominated the game from beginning to end and I didn’t make any adjustments to help our guys out.”

“The shots he made tonight he makes. Tonight wasn’t an aberration. This is Trae Young. This is the Trae young we showed on film. He’s Damian Lillard part two. He’s going to shoot those 35-foot shots. And those are good shots for him. He hit a couple of shots tonight and our guys were surprised. And I don’t know what the hell they were surprised about.”

But inside the Nuggets’ locker room, players said they weren’t caught off guard by Young stepping back well beyond the 3-point line to hoist 30-foot triples, which more often than not hit nothing but net Tuesday. They shouldn’t have been.

“We all know he’s going to shoot,” Jamal Murray said. “We’ve just got to be up more.”

“We’re not surprised by that,” Paul Millsap added. “He’s been doing that all year.”

Young was incredible Tuesday. He made one breathtaking jump shot after another, bending Denver’s defense to its breaking point on every attempt. Yet there was a consensus, from Malone to every Nuggets’ player that spoke postgame, that Denver should have done more to contain him.

It wasn’t just on Young where the Nuggets failed defensively in their worst performance on that end of the floor this season. Atlanta shot 29 of 49 (59%) on twos and 23 of 52 (71.9%) from the restricted area. Hawks starting center Damian Jones sunk four of his five field goal attempts and backup Alex Len went 6 of 8 from the floor.

The Nuggets are 7-3 and their defensive numbers are strong. Denver didn’t show it against Atlanta, but the Nuggets still rank as a top-10 defense, per NBA.com even after giving up 125 points, the most they’ve allowed this season, to a Hawks team who came into the night as the fourth-worst offense in the league. The sentiment inside the Nuggets’ locker room was that this was an outlier of a defensive performance.

But something still seems off offensively. Part of it is the Nuggets are still missing tons of wide-open 3s, which has been a storyline all season. Before Tuesday’s loss where the Nuggets missed a handful of open looks where the closest defender was nowhere to be found, Denver was only hitting 35.2% of its wide-open 3s, per NBA.com (when the closest defender was at least six feet away). Jerami Grant, who hit 39% of his triples last season but is shooting just 8 of 32 on triples this season, missed five of his six attempts from distance tonight. Gary Harris continued his up-and-down shooting season from 3 going 2 of 10 from deep in the loss.

Defenses are also taking note of how much Nikola Jokic, who slipped out of the arena before the media was allowed into the Nuggets’ locker room, is struggling from 3-point range this season. Opposing big men from Joel Embiid to Karl-Anthony Town, and now Jones and Len sagged way off Jokic, mucking up Denver’s paint, and daring the Nuggets’ big man to beat them from beyond the arc. It’s becoming an all too familiar gameplan. Jokic shot 1 of 8 from deep and is converting on under 25% of his triples this season. Most if not all of Jokic’s long-range attempts against Atlanta were wide open.

Here’s how Len and Atlanta’s bigs played Jokic all night. After defending a Murray-Jokic pick-and-roll where Murray rejects the screen, Len closes down Murray’s path the hoop and pays no mind to Jokic who’s standing alone at the top of the arc.

“Some of those he was obviously wide open, they were baiting him into it,” Malone said. “He was 1 of 8 from 3. And he’s a guy that he can miss a couple in a row and all of a sudden hit 3 in a row. Their bigs were so far down the floor. It’s one of those where it’s tough to say ‘Don’t shoot it.’ But after a while you don’t always have to pop to the 3-point line. Maybe step in a little bit closer, get to the free-throw line, short roll a little bit. But again, all the shots he took tonight were almost I think completely wide open, most of them.”

It’s more than just missing open shots. Something still seems off with the Nuggets’ offense. Their attack looks and feels more mechanical than in year’s past especially in the half-court where Denver was only scoring 104.3 points per possession before tonight, a mark which per Cleaning The Glass slots the Nuggets’ half-court attack as the sixth-worst in the league. Over the last three years, the Nuggets’ half-court offense ranked seventh, sixth and fourth.

This season there’s too much standing and watching while Murray or Will Barton, who posted another strong game offensive game finishing with 21 points, nine rebounds, and four assists, goes to work. Few and far between are the five or six pass possessions that the Nuggets’ democratic offense was built on.

But offense wasn’t why Denver fell Tuesday. It was mainly because the Nuggets’ lack of defense, an embarrassing display for a team that’s talked so much about bringing a “championship mentality” to the floor every night.

Monte Morris, who was one of the few bright sports for the Nuggets tallying 14 points, three rebounds and four assists off the bench, summed it up well.

“A piss poor effort,” he said.