The Nuggets are one big step away from something bigger

“Success isn’t always about greatness. It’s about consistency. Consistent hard work leads to success. Greatness will come.”

– Dwayne Johnson

 

“Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.”

– Aldous Huxley

At my first corporate gig, I arrived at the company just as they were signing their first trial contract with their first big partner. To say what we were offering was a “proof of concept” would be an understatement. The hours were crazy, and those first six months there were several times that a payment came in just in time to fill in the blanks around everyone’s payroll. It was a stressful way to live.

First, we had to find a way to make things work. Then, once we’d proven what we were doing actually worked koff-most-of-the-time-koff, we got that trial contract turned into a permanent one. Then we found a few more businesses just like it to show off our new capabilities. We had trials and errors that forced us to adapt at each step with each new partner, but every time we got better. By the time we had built it into a several-hundred-million dollar per-year business, we had three pieces we knew were crucial to our long-term success:

Flexibility: Every business we worked with was different in some fundamental way. We needed to be able to translate our offering to their needs to be able to make it work for them.

Dependability: The nature of the business involved life-and-death situations and accuracy. Our stuff had to be there and correct, 24/7/365.

Consistency: The nature of the work was not about doing huge flashy things time and again, it was about doing things the right way over and over and over again. And over again. It was boring as hell. But being boring-but-consistent was the thing that made us the very best at what we did.

It reminds me very much of the path your Denver Nuggets have taken since Michael Malone took over as head coach.

In the early going, the team was simply looking for a recipe that worked. They cycled through lineup after lineup looking for combinations that could help them win more often than they lost. That came slowly, but surely. Once they found that, they looked for ways to make those changes more permanent. To be able to flex to the team they were playing. To remake themselves in a way they could use that same model dependably from top to bottom.

But the consistency…

Even as one of the best teams currently playing in the NBA, consistency is still a question mark for this still-young Nuggets squad. For some of the players, it’s inconsistency of output. For others, it’s inconsistency of effort. For a very few, it can even be both. But when enough of those consistency issues arise simultaneously, they can lead to losses like the Nuggets have experienced against the lowly Pelicans on national television. On a holiday, to make sure everyone at home gets to see. Twice.

Being a team that is still on the rise, it’s to be expected that there are still bumps in the road for this Nuggets squad. They will have their “Achilles Heel” team just as the Jordan Bulls had the lowly Nuggets or the Kobe-Shaq Lakers had the Charlotte Hornets. Maybe New Orleans is simply the team that has the powerhouse Nuggets number… or maybe…

Just maybe this basketball team would look for a couple moments respite in a grueling 82-game season. A spot where they could take their foot off the gas and not try quite so hard. But in today’s NBA, with the differential between the haves and have-nots as narrow as it is, there’s very little room for this tightly-knit Nuggets squad to come even the slightest bit unwound. But watching this team as they stood watching the other team hustle was far and away my least-favorite Christmas gift.

Even as gifted a talent as Nikola Jokic is, as Jamal Murray is, as many of the Nuggets best players are, the magic of this squad comes from a “sum-is-greater-than-the-whole” approach to basketball. Some of the great benefits of that model come from depth and options that most teams simply cannot match. But one of the great costs of that model is that it requires a consistency of focus that can be very demanding, and for every last person to have bought in. It’s taxing and exhausting, I’m sure.

To succeed, this Nuggets team needs to stay focused and consistent for as many of the 3,936 minutes of the regular season as they possibly can. When the end of this campaign comes, and the national media and bandwagon followers are looking at this team with a degree of circumspection, know that some part of that will come from being wildly inconsistent enough to cough up a couple of gimmes in front of your biggest audiences.

Even tougher, who knows what two more notches in the win column will mean when playoff seedings start? Last year, it meant the difference between two or three slots in the Western Conference. Those two or three slots are a great reminder of how much it pays to simply be consistent. Wednesday night might have been very different with some consistency. Consistent defense, consistent rebounding, consistent effort. As silly and repetitive as it sounds, consistency is simply a matter of being consistent. See?