The Nuggets’ bottom-of-the-league offseason grade is warranted

The NBA’s offseason report cards are in. And the Denver Nuggets did not finish anywhere near the honor roll.

The Athletic recently released its evaluations of every NBA team’s offseason performance, and Denver came in dead last with a grade of D-. That’s not a bottom-five ranking. That’s not a mid-tier disappointment. That’s the lowest grade handed out to any franchise in the entire league.

The reasoning behind the ranking is straightforward.

The Nuggets failed to retain Jonas Valanciunas, who signed elsewhere. They lost Tim Hardaway Jr. in free agency. Their most notable addition was Marvin Bagley III, brought in to fill the backup center hole left by Valanciunas’ departure. Peyton Watson remains unsigned, hanging in restricted free agency limbo. And the widely anticipated pursuit of Jaylen Brown from the Boston Celtics never resulted in a completed deal.

On paper, the Nuggets got worse, while other Western Conference contenders continued to strengthen their rosters.

On a recent edition of “Stokley and Evans with Mark Schlereth” on 104.3 The Fan, Schlereth was asked whether the grade was justified. His answer didn’t leave much room for interpretation.

“I think it’s completely fair,” Schlereth said.

That’s a striking assessment from someone who tends to give benefit of the doubt to Colorado franchises. But the facts on the ground are difficult to spin. The Nuggets entered the offseason with clear areas to address, and they exited it without meaningfully addressing them.

Schlereth acknowledged the expectations that surrounded the offseason as well.

“There was a lot of hype about Jaylen Brown. There was a lot of hype about a potential trade there,” he said.

For weeks, the national conversation had Denver as one of the frontrunners to land Brown. The reporting suggested a deal could realistically happen. The framework was discussed at length across the league. And then the summer moved on without a transaction. Whether the Nuggets chose not to pursue it aggressively enough or whether the Celtics simply weren’t ready to make the deal, the end result is the same. The biggest potential move of the summer never materialized.

Schlereth then pointed to the deeper issue behind the offseason.

“Listen, if your theory is ‘Run it back,’ the regular season doesn’t matter. The way you guys are currently constructed, there’s issues with athleticism – but the one thing we saw in the playoffs, in the Minnesota series – was we lacked toughness,” Schlereth said.

The Nuggets ran it back in spirit, but they didn’t just fail to add, they subtracted, losing veteran depth and toughness pieces without replacing them with players of similar caliber. The regular season may not matter to a team confident in its playoff ceiling, but the playoff losses this team has suffered weren’t strategic breakdowns. They were physical ones. And a summer that didn’t add athleticism or toughness didn’t fix the problem that ended the last two seasons.

The grade can improve if Peyton Watson signs a favorable deal. Retaining a young, ascending two-way wing would give the front office some ground to stand on. But even in the best-case scenario, the offseason will still fall well short of what the moment demanded.

The Nuggets have Nikola Jokic. The rest of the West kept getting better. Denver stood in place, and the report cards reflect that fact.

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