Denver Nuggets final report card: Kenneth Faried

Over the next few weeks, the BSN Nuggets staff will review the Nuggets season, player-by-player. We’ll look at their performance from 2015-16 and forecast what type of impact they’ll make next season.

Reflecting on 2015-16

No player on the Nuggets 2015-16 roster managed to delight the crowd and frustrate Denver’s fans as much as Kenneth Faried did this past season.

There’s no question that the Manimal is the current “face of the franchise” for those in the Mile High City that casually follow the team, and the only evidence needed to support that claim is the roar of the crowd when he’s introduced during the player introductions at the start of each game at Pepsi Center.

But look at a box score from this past season and you saw Faried’s minutes hovering around 25 per game – the least amount of minutes he’s averaged since he came into the league five years ago and not a typical minute allotment you pair with the individual who gets announced last at home games.

A crowded frontcourt was the most obvious reason for Faried’s low minutes this season. Nikola Jokic took whatever minutes Faried usually played as a small ball five and Darrell Arthur, who quickly gained the trust of first-year head coach Michael Malone, played over Faried in fourth quarters all year long. Couple those two with Danilo Gallinari, who slid to the four spot approximately 32.2 percent of the time this season, per Nylon Calculus, and Joffrey Lauvergne, who Malone also took a liking too, and suddenly Faried’s minutes were getting squeezed from all sides.

Faried is a fan favorite in Denver for his highlight-reel dunks, strong rebounding, and overall effort and hustle, and what he brings on a nightly basis are intangibles every championship team needs. However, if you look strictly at his per-36 minute counting stats, Faried’s game has largely stagnated.
On defense, Faried has his moments. His rebounding is needed in Denver and his hustle, like I stated earlier is in high demand on every quality team. But the Nuggets were 4.6 points per 100 possessions better defensively with Faried off the court this past season, and after a first half of the year where we saw some encouraging signs from the 26-year-old on that end of the floor, after the All-Star break those numbers reverted to where they ended up the past couple of years.

Faried is still effective on both offense and defense if the Nuggets stick to what he does well. He was top-12 in points per possessions as the roll man per NBA.com out of players with more than 100 possessions to their name. Same goes for PPP in transition where he was fifth in the league.

But the lack of an outside game and an ability to stretch the defense is what really handcuffs the Nuggets, especially with how the league values shooting today. The lack of shooting up and down the roster in Denver this past season brought that issue to the forefront even more.

Faried attempted a total of 626 field goals in 2015-16 and 455 of those came in the restricted area.

We found out this season that with Mudiay, you can’t really afford to have more than one other non-shooter playing with the point guard, and if that one guy is Faried, you don’t really have a lot of room to maneuver with your other three players.

Theoretically, if you pair Faried with Jokic, the Serbian can make up for the Manimal’s lack of an outside shot, but your defense suffers. Pairing him with Nurkic makes spacing the floor a bit harder, but doable and the Bosnian could hold your backline together. Pairing Faried with Arthur or Gallinari or next year with Wilson Chandler with the Manimal at the five sounds good in theory, but Malone scrapped those lineups for the most part as the season wore on. Maybe that’s worth revisiting this offseason.

Overall, this year Faried flatlined, and while he still brings the intangibles to the court that are valued by every team in the league, he often was left on the outside looking in this past season.

Final Report Card Grade: C+

Looking Ahead to 2016-17

The Nuggets three longest tenured players are unsurprisingly also their three highest paid.

Faried’s $12 million salary ranks second behind Gallinari at $15 million and Wilson Chandler at $11.2 million and with the expected increase in the NBA’s salary cap over the next couple of years, all of these salaries are reasonably matched to the production of the players.

Gallinari has clearly been Denver’s most talented player over the past few years but injuries have limited him to 59 and 53 games over the past two seasons. Chandler wasn’t even able to see the court in the 2015-16 season due to offseason hip surgery, so Faried is the only one of the Nuggets’ three mainstays who’s proved durable.

Because of his durability, the role he fills and his skill-set Faried may be suited to come off the bench. Imagine Faried skying for rebounds against overmatched bench units or rim-running ahead of slower backup bigs. Faried in a sixth man role would not only fortify his actual role, which was in flux this season, but also give him expectations of how much he’ll play as long as he’s giving Malone what he wants on the defensive end.

The three names that have come up most often as trade targets for the Nuggets this offseason are Kevin Love, Blake Griffin, and DeMarcus Cousins, and while Faried would fit nicely alongside Cousins, he’s wouldn’t as much alongside Love or Griffin. Additionally, it’s likely that Faried would have to be included in any such deal for salary matching reason.

Building a contender in today’s NBA is extremely difficult and so much comes down to fit and flexibility. Can Faried change his role to someone who comes off the bench and provides that spark that the Denver second-unit drastically needed this season?

That’s a question that will be answered shortly, maybe as soon as this offseason.