Golden Nuggets: We've seen this movie before

Five nuggets for every 3-point make the Nuggets could muster in a 112-110 loss the Brooklyn Nets on Friday at Pepsi Center.

1. We’ve seen this movie before. Remember last season when everybody was clamoring for Nikola Jokic to shoot the ball? During a five-game stretch in late February and early March, Jokic attempted an average of 5.4 shots per game. Everything came to a head in a road loss to the tanking Dallas Mavericks, when Jokic got benched in the fourth quarter. Jokic came out firing Denver’s next time out, scoring 36 points on 12-of-14 shooting in a narrow loss to Cavaliers. The Nuggets’ offense didn’t pop, but Jokic got his by scoring grimy buckets on the block.

Apparently, Rust Cole was right: Time is a flat circle. Ten months later, Jokic, coming off a four-game stretch where he averaged 5.75 shots per game, poured in a season-high 37 points on 14-of-22 shooting against the Brooklyn Nets. He bounced back after attempting one field goal in Memphis with a brilliant individual effort. Jokic scored in a similar manner Friday to the way he did against the Cavs: by wrestling with the opposing team’s bigs down low.

“He was just aggressive,” Nuggets coach Michael Malone said. “We knew with their bigs playing the way the way down the floor, he’d have a chance to get good looks, and he took advantage of it.”

Is it as simple as Jokic being aggressive? Is he just prone to going through stretches where teammates and coaches have to beg him to shoot? Or was that mini-malaise a symptom of other problems? There’s not one right answer.

2. Slow starts are becoming a pattern. The Nuggets fell behind 34-24 after one quarter and spent all game trying to dig out of that hole. The Nets drilled seven 3s in the first quarter and just five the rest of the way. Denver didn’t do itself any favors either by turning the ball over seven times.

“Lack of mental focus,” Malone said. “Turning the ball over. Not running guys off who we were supposed to be running off. Seven 3s is a lot. Seven turnovers in a quarter is a lot. It was beating ourselves on offense and not having any discipline with our 3-point defense.”

Friday marked the 10th time Denver rolled out its Jamal Murray-Gary Harris-Torrey Craig-Paul Millsap-Nikola Jokic starting five. That unit has gotten outscored by 11.1 points per 100 possessions in 134 minutes together. It’s averaging just 92.4 points per 100 possessions. Defenses are ignoring Craig, who’s 4 of 25 on 3-pointers this season.

Even though the data didn’t look good, Malone resisted making any changes to his starting lineup because the Nuggets were winning. That’s no longer the case. Denver has lost two in a row for the first time this season. Could we see Malone finally give Juancho Hernangomez or Malik Beasley a chance Sunday against Milwaukee?

3. Something else that’s becoming more difficult to dismiss as just a blip: the Nuggets’ outside shooting. They made 5 of 18 long-range looks against Brooklyn. They’re shooting just 30.7 percent on 3s over their first 12 games — the second-worst mark in the league —and a far cry from the 37.1 percent rate at which they converted 3s last season.

Jamal Murray (29.5 percent) and Gary Harris (26.8 percent) are both struggling to make them consistently. So is Trey Lyles, who’s just 8 for 39 from 3 on the year.

“We didn’t generate a lot of 3-point attempts, and we didn’t make them when we did,” Malone said. “That’s been the story of our season so far, having a really hard time ball shooting the ball and making shots. We’ve just got to stay with it.”

4. “Grit and toughness have much less place in the game now than they ever have,” David Griffin, the general manager of the Cavaliers during their championship run in 2016, said in a story The Ringer published last month. Griffin was reacting to the fact that offenses league-wide are up, in part, to the NBA’s re-emphasis on freedom of movement.

There were a combined 76 free throw attempts in Friday’s game. Brooklyn attempted 42 and Denver 34. All the whistle blowing made the game hard to watch at times. The action was choppy.

“You’ve got to be smart enough to adjust,” Malone said. “That was my frustration. In the third quarter, we gave them 18 free throw attempts. We kept putting our hands in there. Whether you think it’s a foul or not, stop putting your hand in there and giving them a chance to make that call. We did a poor job of adjusting to the whistle tonight.”

Malone is right: His team did need to do a better job of adjusting to the new rules Friday. That doesn’t make those rules a good thing, though.

“I don’t know if the goal is to have 211–185 scores, but we’ve really legislated a lot of the competitiveness out of the game,” Griffin told The Ringer.

5. Always chuck up a heave at the buzzer. Always.

Spencer Dinwiddie’s 48-foot prayer at the end of the third quarter mattered in the end. Always chunk it up.