The Denver Nuggets Have Given Up

Watching the Denver Nuggets evokes a tween struggling to abstain from napping through a late-day math class. The NBA regular season is a grind for every team, but some suffer more acutely than others. I have a friend who, for a period of about two years, kept room temperature Tecates in his glove box and slammed one at the end of each workday in the time it took him to walk from his car to the front door of his apartment. Then he took a long shower while gassing a second. I consider this to be something like rock bottom in terms of job dissatisfaction. Ty Lawson has a familiar look in his eye.

Every season, at least one team heads into the year with modest expectations and hilariously disappoints. The Nuggets aspired to run a 5k and are currently laid up with two shattered ankles. Their 20 and 33 record doesn't quite explain the extent of their badness, but if you check in on their games and read the Denver papers, it's clear that they rank competitively in the NBA's depression index.

Brian Shaw is cutting the figure of a Martian boss, publicly accusing his players of sabotaging him while boning up on awful five-easy-steps-to-management-success tomes about how to get through to millennials. (As ever, if you think you need a self-help book, you need more help than any book can provide.) The team's entire roster is on the trading block at cut-rate prices, including Kenneth Faried, whom the Nuggets have publicly disparaged so adamantly and often that they've likely torpedoed his value. Come Buy the Stuff We Hate, the Nuggets front office seems to be saying.

The folks running the franchise need to blow it up and start fresh. That seems clear to everyone involved, except for Shaw, who either doesn't comprehend the extent to which his project is screwed or is putting on a brave face for the ages. The problem for the Nuggets—and whatever unfortunate so-and-sos bother to show up to their games—is that it's mid-February, and there's only so much an organization can do to affect change in the middle of a season. Sure, fire the coach and ship a couple guys out for draft picks and cap relief—the team will require at least one summer to stamp out all the embers and get rid of the smell regardless. But there will be another two-and-a-half months of hell in Denver regardless.

That hell, depressingly, will resemble real life about as much as anything on an NBA court ever does. If we watch sports to escape the banality of our lives for a couple hours, taking in a Nuggets game is like gazing into a mirror. The team is listless and tired and not altogether sure what they're trying to accomplish on a day-to-day basis. They're in a running-out-the-clock situation and not fretting over who knows it. They have written "WORK SUCKS" on a desk napkin in ketchup and are lazily dragging french fries through it, thinking about maybe finally applying to law school.

This is not what we want out of our sports-viewing experience. You could be forgiven, after enduring your own difficult work day, for flipping from the Nuggets-Whoever game over to something less richly plaintive and more, y'know fun to enjoy. But there is also value in watching something that seems to commiserate with you. (After all, there is a whole movie festival for ennui-stricken people who like to watch movies about ennui-stricken people.)

The Nuggets will absolutely not make you feel better. They will point your anxieties back at you, jogging and half-jumping and just barely not giving in to an existential crisis while also playing basketball. This is not happy-making, but then neither is Kafka, or Real Housewives. Sometimes our entertainment appetites are perverse. If you're looking for low-octane tragedy, you could do worse than the Nuggets.