Is Charles Barkley right about the Denver Nuggets?
Another up-and-coming team this season is Denver Nuggets, a team which the analysts around the league thought that will battle for a play off spot, but not one, except Charles Barkley, thought that they will be at the top of the standings in the “wild, wild” West at the mid-time of the season.
With a young and ambitious core, the Nuggets are currently holding on a 27-12 record, being a force especially at home, having 16-3 and 11-9 on the road. Pretty good for now, considering how stacked the West is at the moment. They even beat the team’s best point winning margin, which was at 29 points, by going past LeBron and the Lakers 117-85 in Week 7.
Nikola Jokic, one of the most underrated players in the NBA right now, is currently averaging 19.2 PPG on 50,3 FG%, 10.1 Rebounds and 7.5 Assists, all of them being career high numbers. He is playing well in the paint, but he can space the floor, play with the pick-and-pop, shooting the three too, a thing that is vital for the life of a center in today’s modern basketball. All of these combined, but his masterful passing ability is what makes him a strong MVP candidate, because he is averaging 7.5 Assists as a center, and this is something very special, a thing that no other center can do, for sure. He won the Player of the Week award 2 times, to go along with Paul Millsap at the beginning of December. No other player from the west has more than 2, being tied with Steph Curry and James Harden.
Another interesting fact is that two different players from the Denver Nuggets won the award, a feature that only OKC Thunder has until now. Jamal Murray and Garry Harris are both playing a solid role in the teams’ success, currently averaging 18,4 PPG, respectively 16 PPG. Murray almost had a 50-point game versus Boston Celtics earlier this year, scoring 48 and having the game ball threw in the stands by Kyrie Irving in an incident that didn’t felt “fair-play” for the Boston Celtics star. Paul Millsap, the veteran of the team, is playing solid minutes and brings the experience in the locker room, being in his 13th year of his career.
Despite of being on the first place at the half-point mark of the season, they are still being slept on by the people around the league, and many of them are asking themselves if they are going to continue at this rate for the entire season. At least one is knowing “for sure”, that they are going to the Conference Finals, and that one is no one else, but Charles Barkley.
Andrei Dilean, info@brainbasketball.net
