Brian Shaw's seat isn't getting any cooler
When it comes to head coach Brian Shaw, the Denver Nuggets' front office has said all the right things, throwing their support behind their coach and trying to keep the runaway train of speculation from going off the rails.
But there's a whole lot of smoke billowing out of the Mile High City, and it stands to reason that the flaming wreckage isn't far off. After the Nuggets dropped their fifth consecutive game - and 11th in their last 12 - Friday night against the Detroit Pistons, Shaw sounded like a man who has lost his players and run out of ideas.
"We’re not in a good place right now," he said. "We have to try to find whatever it is going to take to get out of this rut that we’re in."
Considering Shaw has already accused his charges of turning him into a scapegoat, and even purposely losing games in an effort to get him fired, his continued inability to wring success out of the roster seems to point to an increasingly fractured relationship between coach and players.
Shaw has been trumpeting effort as the catch-all solution to the team's woes, but his players aren't buying it.
Afflalo: Effort is cool but at some point have to change game plan to play to our advantages b/c what we are doing isn't working. #Nuggets
— Mark Haas (@markhaastv) February 7, 2015
"We’re playing three-and-a-half quarters pretty well, but the half-a-quarter we don’t play well really does us in," Shaw said Friday, after the Nuggets were outscored by the Pistons in each of the first three quarters and trailed by 18 before a futile fourth-quarter run made the final count look respectable.
"That’s not to point fingers at anybody; I have to do better, we have to play better as a group. We have to play hard. It hasn’t always been the case, having a consistent level of effort. That’s what we’re trying to figure out."