The Nuggets have a plan to improve their defense

Tim Connelly didn’t get much sleep the same night his team came up an inch short. After the Nuggets fell to the Timberwolves Wednesday in overtime of a do-or-die game, Connelly spent the return flight home thinking about the what-ifs.

“That flight home was tough,” the Nuggets president of basketball operations said. “Had a sleepless night last night. I rewatched the game several times.”

The Nuggets had three shots to go ahead in the final 72 seconds of regulation, but their offense stalled and they misfired on all of them. They also had an opportunity to tie the game late in overtime. Will Barton’s floater went left.

When you’re still close to it, those are the sequences that made the difference. When you have a chance to zoom out, those plays are specks in the bigger picture.

The Nuggets were once again one of the worst defensive teams in basketball. They finished the season ranked 26th in defensive efficiency. It was the fourth year in a row they were a bottom-seven defense or worse. Entering a pivotal offseason, one of Connelly’s primary tasks is to figure out the right pieces to put in place so Denver can be something other than awful on the defensive end in 2018-19.

“We’re looking for toughness, two-way players and versatility,” Connelly said. “When you look at Jamal, Gary and Nikola, how do you complement them? How do you augment their skillsets, but also how do you kind of protect them as well?”

Give Connelly and the front office credit for finding three pieces worth building around in Nikola Jokic, Jamal Murray and Gary Harris. That 23-and-under three-man group lit opponents up for 114.8 points per 100 possessions in more than 1,300 minutes together. It also surrendered 108.9 points per 100 possessions.

If Denver wants to break through in a brutal Western Conference, it needs to improve on the defensive end without taking away from what makes it so good offensively. Signing Paul Millsap to an enormous contract last summer was an attempt to accomplish that. The Nuggets showed flashes of being a more complete team with Millsap in the lineup, but they were dealt a serious blow when Millsap underwent wrist surgery in November that caused him to more than three months.

“I was hoping to be the guy to change that and help change that, but I was out for 44 games,” Millsap said. “We’ve seen glimpses of that before I went out that we were on our way to being a pretty good defensive team. To be a playoff team and a good team, you’ve got to have that balance. We want to have that balance offensively and defensively. We want to be good on both ends. We showed some flashes of that this year. With the talented guys we have, we still feel like we can do that.”

Those glimpses were most apparent during a six-game win streak that helped Denver stay in the hunt for a playoff spot until the final day of the regular season. The Nuggets allowed 105.9 points per 100 possessions during that stretch of games, a middle-of-the-pack mark. They showed a new-found ability to win games on nights when their offense wasn’t firing on all cylinders.

Denver’s hope is that having a healthy Millsap back in the lineup, another year of experience for its young players and adding some new pieces will help it finally improve on the defensive end.

“Some of it is just young players,” Connelly said. “You’re not going to find very many good young defensive players. I thought Jamal took great strides defensively. I thought Nikola was much more active and engaged on the defensive end. I thought Gary was a pretty good defender last year. I thought Gary was a very good defender this year. A lot of it is just teaching these guys the importance of defense and understanding that we’re not going to get where we want to be without defending. I though on our late streak to the playoffs, you saw a more engaged and aggressive defensive team.”