Danilo Gallinari is, somehow, still here. He is one of just three players remaining from the 2012-13 Nuggets, the 57-win NBA race car that looked, during sublime moments of chaos, like it might outrun the trope that a team needs a top-10 superstar to contend. He is also, in many ways, the symbol of that team’s downfall; his severe ACL injury in April 2013, a few weeks before the playoffs, was the first in a chain of events that exploded an entire team in less than two months. “That’s really what got us fired, if you think about it,” says George Karl, the current Kings coach who as the Nuggets coach embraced a quirky run-and-gun style perfect for Denver’s mile-high air. “Put it this way: There have been more than a few times when I have thought about what might have happened in Denver if Gallo hadn’t gotten hurt.”1 Gallinari has since morphed into a stand-in for the aimlessness of a franchise trapped, by its own doing, in the inescapable NBA dead zone of mediocrity. He stood on the sidelines for all of 2013-14, recovering from multiple knee surgeries as the team fragmented during the mopey and mismatched Brian Shaw era. Players left, losses mounted, Ty Lawson’s off-court issues ran him out of town, Shaw got fired. What had been a proud, fiery team exultant in its unique identity sank into an unrecognizable malaise. Denver seemed to recognize that when it dealt Arron Afflalo and Timofey Mozgov for extra draft goodies; the Nuggets were primed, finally, for a total rebuild. Maybe the other veterans were next to go. And then something funny happened: Gallinari went bananas over 24 games after the All-Star break, averaging 19 points per game on 44 percent shooting, including 40 percent from deep, and playing as the multi-positional jack-of-all-trades Denver envisioned when it nabbed him as the centerpiece of the Carmelo Anthony deal.2 It was tempting to dismiss Gallo’s surge as springtime numbers-grabbing on a terrible team, but he kept it up in leading Italy to the quarterfinals at Eurobasket this month. Gallinari might be all the way back, and he just turned 27. That should be an indisputably good thing for Denver, and it probably is. But it’s fitting that the return of the Rooster raises questions for perhaps the league’s most confusing franchise. Can he stay healthy? And can he sustain this form over a full season? Gallinari came into the league with back issues, and he’s recovering from tears in both his ACL and meniscus cartilage. All the Nuggets can do is throw every training asset they have at him and hope it works out. - See more at: http://grantland.com/the-triangle/c...anilo-gallinari-and-maybe-the-denver-nuggets/
