DENVER – By the end of the most embarrassing loss of the season for the Denver Nuggets, New York Knicks fans had taken over Ball Arena. The chants were loud and noticeable. You could hear everything from “OG Anunoby!” against “Deuce,” every time reserve guard Miles McBride splashed home another three-pointer.

It wasn’t so much that the Nuggets fell to New York 145-118, or that the Nuggets were never really in this. It was the lack of effort that had Denver head coach Michael Malone shivering. It was the lack of energy. It was the lack of fight as the Knicks made their first run of the night. It was a lack of passion that showed in the third quarter.

Just under 48 hours after their best performance of the season by beating the Los Angeles Lakers, the Nuggets pulled off a 180 on Monday night, no-showing and allowing a hungry and aggressive Knicks team to drive them out of their own gym.

“F– that, I’m not blushing,” Malone said angrily when asked how he would deal with the loss. ‘You don’t blush when you’re ashamed. You don’t advance if you don’t play hard or play with any physicality. Tonight we were ashamed. We are sixteen games in and we are talking about effort. We have to ask ourselves this question: who do we want to be as a team?

“Playing like you actually care would be great.”

This wasn’t so much about Monday night’s loss to Malone. This is indeed a culmination of events built up over time. In the preseason there were four defeats in five games. Denver’s regular season started with home losses to the Oklahoma City Thunder and Los Angeles Clippers. When Nikola Jokić missed time due to the birth of his second child, it was a road loss for a New Orleans Pelicans team missing almost all of their key rotation players. That was followed by a loss to the Memphis Grizzlies, where the Nuggets looked slow, sluggish and hapless offensively.

And yet there have been moments of brilliance. A home win over the Thunder. The Lakers cheer on Saturday night. After that 0-2 start by winning seven of the eight games. The peaks have been there. But the valleys have been low. Dismantling the Lakers along the way seemed like the Nuggets were finally starting to turn a corner, even after that home loss to the Dallas Mavericks.

That’s what Malone and the Nuggets in general found so frustrating. An 82-game season will obviously include some periods where a team isn’t playing great basketball. That’s the nature of an NBA schedule being so demanding. Sometimes what happens on the floor has very little to do with what happens on the floor. An NBA coach knows this and knows that some things are out of his control. But Monday night was a turning point for Malone. When the Knicks forged a lead, the Nuggets folded. When the Knicks played physical, the Nuggets didn’t match the physicality.

“Russell Westbrook played with a lot of effort and he’s 36 years old,” Malone said. ‘But I need Nikola Jokić. I need the guys who were in the starting lineup here to be vocal.

What Malone doesn’t want is Monday night or last Sunday night in Memphis to become the norm. He doesn’t want inconsistency to become the norm. And what have the Nuggets been through 16 games? They were a team with their typical nice attack, that did not defend particularly well. In 2023, when they won an NBA title, they were arguably the best offensive and defensive team in the league.

The Basketball 100

The story of the greatest players in NBA history. In 100 compelling profiles, top basketball writers justify their selections and reveal the history of the NBA in the process.

The story of the greatest plays in NBA history.

Buy

So far they are 17th in the league with a defensive rating of 114. That number won’t be good enough to win another title. Malone knows that. His players know that. These Denver Nuggets can score very well. But can they stop someone? Saturday night’s 127-102 victory over the Lakers was one of Denver’s best efforts of the season on both ends of the floor. To go from such a complete team to such a discombobulation in one evening created a big contrast.

That explains why Malone was so excited Monday night. The Nuggets are 9-7. They currently sit in eighth place in the Western Conference. Malone doesn’t want this to be who the Nuggets are. And once you get to that 25 or 30 game mark, the teams start to settle into what they’re going to become. Is it impossible to change streaks once you’ve established them? Of course not. But changing those stripes takes a lot of work.

“It’s energy,” guard Jamal Murray said. “It’s effort. It’s discipline. It just depends on how much you want it and how much you care about it. And we didn’t have that tonight.”

Denver’s defense was awful against the Knicks. The Nuggets allowed New York to shoot 60 percent from the field. The Knicks made 19 of their 36 three-pointers. Anunoby set a career-high with 40 points. The Nuggets didn’t defend at the point of attack. They didn’t defend the edge. They let New York point guard Jalen Brunson go anywhere he wanted off the dribble, and once he did, Denver’s defense mostly fell apart.

But Monday evening was not schematic. If the Nuggets want to get where they want to go, Malone is right. They must show more fighting spirit and more resilience. They need to be more willing to get into the proverbial mud with teams, and they need to play with more energy. This won’t always be the case, but it should be the case more often than not. Right now, the Nuggets are starting the wrong trend, and Malone and Jokić want to put a stop to it right away.

“We didn’t show up tonight,” Jokić said. “I think it’s important to learn from these kinds of games because other teams are going to look at what they did to us. I think we can learn. But it’s always good to get a slap in the face so we can wake up.”

(Photo of Nikola Jokić and Karl-Anthony Towns: Justin Tafoya / Getty Images)