Jared Dudley’s goal as the Nuggets’ first-year defensive coordinator has been to restore the team, at minimum, to its mid-tier status that was enough to win a championship in 2023.
He’s not naive to the fact that Nikola Jokic and the offense are what make them a high-functioning team. Denver has already proven that it can go all the way with a 15th-ranked defense. The top half of the league will suffice.
But Dudley couldn’t have predicted that he would be fending without his two best defenders for a month at the outset of his tenure as David Adelman’s top assistant coach.
The Nuggets (19-6) ranked 17th at the 25-game mark this week after playing their 10th consecutive contest with Peyton Watson and Spencer Jones replacing injured starters Aaron Gordon and Christian Braun.
“It’s been up and down. … Sometimes we’ve had to outscore (opponents),” Dudley said. “But it’s been (about getting) key stops. … Once CB and AG come back to go with Spencer and P-Wat, our depth and our length is going to cause a lot of problems.”
Seventeenth is still an improvement on Denver’s 21st-place finish last season, an encouraging sign for a roster that has been so injury-hampered at its weaker end of the floor.
Most of the Nuggets’ problems this year have occurred without Gordon and Braun. Over the most recent 10-game stretch entering Thursday’s slate, their 121.5 defensive rating was the second-worst in the NBA. Yet they were 7-3 in those games anyway, buoyed by a historically efficient offense.
Dudley spoke to reporters on Wednesday in place of Adelman, who missed practice for a family matter, according to a team spokesperson. Adelman has long been one of the key masterminds behind Denver’s offense, even before he succeeded Michael Malone as head coach. He has been more involved in collaborating on defensive schemes since accepting the promotion, but he also hired Dudley away from the Dallas Mavericks to take charge in that department.
“Sometimes, just like how it’s hard to stop us, it’s going to be hard to stop some of these teams,” the 40-year-old former player said. “So I’m just trying to (put in) a wrinkle (so that) maybe instead of shooting 60%, they’re shooting 50% until we get everyone back here and we can be super-aggressive.”
He was exaggerating about 60%, a lofty number for any team to achieve over the course of a full game. (Even the Nuggets have only exceeded that 11 times since winning the title in 2023.)
But Denver has been struggling lately to make opposing offenses feel uncomfortable with their shot selection. Dudley’s ambition has been to mix up coverages and introduce as much variety as possible while protecting Jokic from exerting too much energy as a defender.
Zones, cross-matches, double-teams from numerous areas of the court — the Nuggets have tried a little bit of everything schematically. Dudley estimated on Wednesday that 80% of what they’re doing has been new to the players.
“Last year, they were a big trapping team (with Jokic), with the low man in (toward the paint),” he said. “We’ve done that. We’ve had Jokic up. We’ve had Jokic in a drop, like Rudy Gobert. I’ve had him guarding wings. Our 2-3 zone is different than their zone they had before. How we rotate on pick-and-pop 5s is different, because I don’t want Jokic in rotation going to the corner.
“So different schemes, and some are better than others,” he said. “(There are) some that we don’t practice that much, so you use some of the games as a practice. So you see some of the mistakes that we might have to work on. But we’re trying to get ready for that April, May and June run. … We have to work out the kinks now.”
That’s a mindset shared by Dudley and Adelman: that when the offense is so dominant, regular-season games can be used as a laboratory to some extent, an opportunity to put certain defensive experiments on film and see how opponents react. Every possession provides new data that can “help us prepare once we get to the playoffs,” as Dudley put it.
He’s not shy about acknowledging Denver’s confidence.
He also believes it should take about 30 to 35 games for players to start to master some of the new defensive concepts. That point of the season is arriving soon, in January. Gordon and Braun will be back around that time as well.
In the meantime, “right now,” Dudley said, “we’re just trying to hold down the fort and win games by any means necessary.”
Want more Nuggets news? Sign up for the Nuggets Insider to get all our NBA analysis.
The post Jared Dudley: Nuggets’ defense ‘trying to hold down the fort’ without Aaron Gordon, Christian Braun appeared first on Denver Post