My Early Look at the 2017 Denver Nuggets
Alright, so let’s talk about the Denver Nuggets, specifically that 2017 team. It’s funny, looking back, because most folks probably weren’t paying them a whole lot of mind. They weren’t exactly lighting the league on fire, you know? But for me, that year was when I really started to dig in, not as some pro analyst, but just as a guy super curious about how teams actually get good.
I had this idea back then, this little project I gave myself. Could I spot a team that was about to be something special, before everyone else jumped on the bandwagon? So, I picked the 2017 Nuggets. Why them? Well, they had this young Serbian fella, Nikola Jokic, who was already doing some pretty wild stuff with the ball, even if he wasn’t a household name yet. And Jamal Murray was there too, just a youngster.
My Process: More Sweat than Stats Sheets
So, what did I actually do? Well, first off, I watched a ton of their games. And I mean full games, not just the flashy YouTube highlights. Sometimes it was a slog, honestly. They weren’t always pretty to watch back then. Lost a fair few, as I recall.
Then I’d pull up the box scores. Standard stuff, right? Who scored, who got boards, who dished out assists. But I tried to go a bit beyond that. I remember trying to manually track plus-minus for certain lineups. Talk about tedious! I’d be pausing the game, scribbling notes, trying to figure out who was on the court when they made a run. It was messy, but I felt like I was getting a feel for things the basic stats didn’t show.
- I focused a lot on Jokic. His passing was just nuts. I’d rewind plays just to see how he saw some of those angles. It wasn’t always about him scoring big points back then, but his impact was undeniable if you really looked.
- I kept an eye on Murray too. He was streaky, as young guards often are. But you could see flashes of that killer instinct, that ability to get hot. I’d make little notes, “Murray aggressive tonight,” or “Murray seemed hesitant.”
- I even dove into some local Denver sports forums and blogs. Just to see what the people closest to the team were saying. Sometimes you pick up little nuggets of info, no pun intended, that you wouldn’t get from the national media.
The Big Takeaway: Patience and Potential
And what did I learn from all this obsessive tracking of a pretty middling team? A lot, actually. It really hammered home that team building is a marathon, not a sprint. You gotta have patience. You gotta let young guys make mistakes and grow. The 2017 Nuggets weren’t contenders yet, not by a long shot. But the blueprint, the potential, it was there. You could see it if you squinted hard enough and put in the time.
It wasn’t about me being some genius scout, far from it. But following them so closely that year, and then seeing them blossom into a championship team later on? Man, that was satisfying. It kind of changed how I watch the game. I stopped just looking at the standings or the star players’ point totals. I started looking for the little things, the chemistry, the player development arcs. It made being a fan a whole lot richer, I tell ya. It’s like, I saw the foundation being laid, brick by brick, back in 2017, even if the final shiny building wasn’t visible to everyone yet.
