Nikola Jokic Is A Mountain Of Angst

Nikola Jokic had a rough time Monday night. The Nuggets rolled out a new starting lineup, one featuring Jonas Valanciunas as Jokic's front-court partner. Denver's opponent, the Utah Jazz, responded by sticking their own pasty big guy, Kyle Filipowski, onto Valanciunas, and leaving Jokic to be guarded by second-year man Elijah Harkless, who is on a two-way contract for a team trying very hard to lose basketball games. Harkless, generously listed at 6-foot-3, should be a light meal for Jokic; instead, Jokic spent most of his 36 minutes of floor time having what appeared to be a nervous breakdown. We cannot simply fly past the Valanciunas thing. Nuggets head coach David Adelman is drowning. Injuries have warped his rotation to hell—all four of his top forwards were unavailable Monday—and his bench is a disaster. They got nuked again Sunday by the reserves of the Minnesota Timberwolves, leaving Adelman determined to shuffle the putrid hand he's been dealt. "I have to find a unit that will actually do it, compete at a higher level," he said after Sunday's 117-108 loss, in which Denver's bench lineup turned a nine-point lead into a seven-point deficit in one calamitous second-quarter run. "To me, that was the game. We let struggles offensively, missed shots, turn into horrendous defense. I told them after the game that’s just inexcusable." Valanciunas was a large part of what went wrong Sunday, posting a 152 defensive rating and finishing minus-15 in less than 10 minutes of action. It's very funny to me that Adelman's solution, 30 hours later, was to remove Valanciunas from the bench unit not by packing him into a large box and shipping him to Kamchatka, but by ramming him into the starting lineup. It speaks to Utah's proficiency in the tanking arts that the Nuggets, who are one of four 38-win teams in the West and are only three games above the dreaded play-in, would try such a thing in a by-God regular-season contest.