Inside Denver team meeting that set stakes for stretch run
Deandre Jordan has been in the NBA long enough to know what to divulge and what to keep behind closed doors.
In the aftermath of the Nuggets’ loss Tuesday at Toronto, extending what was then a season- long four- game losing streak, most, if not all, of Jordan, Jeff Green, Ish Smith and Kentavious CaldwellPope spoke up in the postgame locker room. Their decades- long experience gave them the gravitas to do so, especially in a locker room where its figurehead, Nikola Jokic, isn’t one for fiery speeches.
All four spoke to The Post, with varying levels of candor, about what was said.
“There’s always a time and place, and I just think that was the time,” Green said. “… The feeling was just there.”
Jordan, who’s fallen out of the rotation as the postseason nears but remains a pillar of the locker room, did disclose one of the motivations to raise their collective voice.
“We’re in a great position to do something special,” Jordan said. “It’s supposed to be hard.”
If the team’s elder statesmen didn’t care, if they weren’t invested in securing Jokic a championship or believed it wasn’t even a possibility, they wouldn’t have said anything.
But Thursday’s streak- snapping victory over Detroit set them right again, which was perhaps the reason Caldwell- Pope was so honest when asked about the tone of the meeting.
“Who do we want to be?’” Caldwell- Pope said. “We can’t keep losing like this, we didn’t start off
like that. It’s not the time to be losing games that we’re supposed to be winning. It’s crunch time. … It was all about just who we want to be at the end of the season. ‘ Do we want to be champions or we just wanna go home?’”
Caldwell- Pope, the only current Nugget with a ring, would know. Hailed as the consummate veteran, Caldwell- Pope carries a quiet weight among Denver’s roster. Despite Green’s uptick with the second unit, Caldwell- Pope is the only one among the four guaranteed to see postseason minutes. When he raises his voice, on the court and off, it commands attention.
The same goes for Smith, whose consistent energy and attitude, not
to mention his longevity, make him among the most beloved teammates in the NBA. While being respectful of the privacy of his teammates, he offered more details about the meeting.
“Just trying to get out the funk,” Smith began. “Even through AllStar break, if you watch it, teams are trying to be more physical, hit us, grab us, and we have to counteract that, obviously, by bringing more force offensively and defensively, bring some more force. It’s for sure a situation where guys are just trying to draw a line in the sand, like, ‘ enough is enough.’”
The Nuggets stayed over in Toronto before flying to Detroit, convening late Tuesday night for a planned team dinner at a steakhouse. They did it again Wednesday night at another steakhouse. No coaches or front office members were there, just players.
Smith said it was a byproduct of Denver’s ongoing five- game road swing, which continued throughout the weekend in New York. After a grueling road schedule to start the season, the Nuggets haven’t had many extended road trips. That it came as their first real adversity hit was fortuitous.
“It was just us being together,” Green said. “It wasn’t nothing that had to be said. It wasn’t like we had to sit each other down and really voice what was wrong. I think we understand what was wrong. We’re all pros. We’re all understanding of the moment. I think it was just a dinner for us to get together, break bread and let our hair down and relax a little bit.”
Nuggets coach Michael Malone said prior to Thursday’s game that unless you had been following the team, it wouldn’t have been apparent the group was on a losing skid. If this really was a team fraying at the seams, their actions suggested otherwise. That it manifested in a win could’ve been proof of concept.
Though the dinners were planned, Jordan said he’s always encouraged such gatherings.
“I’m a big supporter of that,” he said. “The more you hang out off the court, the better on- court situations become. If you yell at each other, cuss each other out, it’s not taken personally because you know I got a relationship with this guy.”
Did that mean there had been some choice words uttered in the postgame locker room in Toronto? Jordan started laughing.
“I mean, we’re adults,” he said.