Nuggets Getting Tougher & More Intense Finally, the Nuggets are getting frustrated from all the bad news and are starting to translate that into playing harder and tougher. George Karl and many fans are all in favor of this. A quality team can ignore bad news for only so long. Look for the defense to improve at least a little, as the Nuggets take more cues from Camby. <div class="quote_poster">Quote:</div><div class="quote_post"> By Travis Heath This is not exactly the way the Denver Nuggets wanted to bring in the month of February. Prior to Friday morning's shoot around, J.R. Smith and Carmelo Anthony were in a fender bender on the way to practice on one of Denver's icy and snow packed roads. Smith was reportedly behind the wheel of one of Anthony's cars with Anthony riding shotgun when the accident took place. Fortunately, both players were not injured and played Friday night against Portland. This of course followed the still lingering sting of the slap both Anthony and teammate Marcus Camby suffered last night when they learned they weren't voted in as All Star reserves by the coaches. As if that wasn't enough, the team was also unsure if Allen Iverson -- who was not in attendance for Friday's shoot around -- would play Friday night. Ultimately, he was ruled out about 90 minutes before tip-off. All of that on top of the fact the Nuggets had lost four games in a row heading into play Friday night at home against Portland, playing perhaps their worst basketball of the season during that stretch. It was clear the team was a little bit frustrated on Friday morning. When asked if the team was angry, Camby replied: "It should be. Losing four games in a row, I'm definitely upset. I don't like losing. We should be a whole lot better ball club than our record shows, but we are what we are." And what the Nuggets are right now is a team struggling to stay above .500. So what's the solution? Camby offered the following: "Find a way to get a win (Friday). Come out here and play aggressive, borderline playing angry. It starts tonight." Anger is just the emotion Karl was hoping his team's recent losing streak would foster. When asked before the game if he thought anger was a good thing for his team, Karl replied: "Yes, very much so. I wish a lot of people would be angry. I think it would be good. Anger, intensity, and passion usually help you play the right way." Finally, a little bit of righteous anger. No more of this taking the losing in stride and the "we're going to break out of it just have a little patience" talk. The only question was whether the anger would turn out to be more than simply rhetoric and translate into something tangible between the lines. On this night, fury ultimately proved to be a very productive emotion as Denver emerged victorious by a final count of 114-107. However, it was far from an easy win, as evidenced by Brandon Roy's three-point heave which dropped with less than 3 seconds to play, forcing Denver to play an extra five minutes to get the win. Nene played perhaps his best game of the year and Steve Blake was huge in the overtime period, both of which were crucial in counteracting Melo's somewhat sluggish performance. After the game, Anthony admitted not being named an All Star was something which had a significant impact on him. "I mean, it was in the back of my mind. If I sit here and tell you that I wasn't think about it I'd being lying to you and I don't want to do that. It was in the back of my mind and I was thinking of it all day. What more can I possibly do?" Well, one thing Anthony, Camby and the rest of this frustrated Nugget bunch can do is take out their frustration on their opponents in the fashion they did Friday night. All one had to do was observe some of the extra power Camby put behind all five of his blocked shots to understand the team was sending a not so silent message to the rest of the league about just how frustrated they've become. "Everybody was frustrated," forward Eduardo Najera said after the game. "The coaches, the players, everybody was frustrated and finally we got this one and we feel a lot better." And after finally breaking their four game losing streak and achieving that better feeling, don't expect Karl to be referring any of his players for anger management counseling in the near future. </div> Source
