Is it destruction that you're required to feel?/ Like somebody wants you, someone that's more for real?

Scattered Ashes

Nuggets 88 - Heat 96/Nuggets 100 - Hawks 125
Now!
OK, so 82-0 isn't in the cards for anybody, ever. But as the Nuggets went all in with some awful hands last weekend, it was apparent that this is a team struggling and staggering to find the suffocating defensive identity that salvaged last season. Just as the Broncos were attacked from above by the Ravens a few days earlier, the Nuggets had their undefeated bubble burst in a quick 24-hour window and their undefeated beginning was doused with a dose of cold bathwater.
Though the way that the Nuggets lost these first two games was indicitive of sure to be season-long size struggles, the truth is that they were undeniably injured and inured. As soon a Kenyon Martin went out early in the Miami game the defense on the inside was softer then the air that lingered with the absence of JR Smith. The injury took a game that was tied at 33 and sucked the air out of the Nuggets, leading to a backdraft that fueled a Heat explosion that left the starters on the bench in the fourth quarter, burning.
It is a credit to the Nuggets that in the Hawks game, without Kenyon, they played big, aggressive and determined. They fell behind early and never quite clawed their way back into it, but they broke off every damn fingernail. What the Nuggets picked up this weekend was not the beginning of a queasy feeling, but a reality check. Now they remember how they won last year: with defense and heart compensating for size and strength. Now they remember how it feels to lose to someone else's best. Now they remember that a hot start is sweet but a hot finish is the sweetest, and if the Nuggets wand a reminder of what hubris gets you, they need think no further than the cold and soggy mess they've been left in each of the last five springs.
The time is now, but nobody is winning a ring this week. Relax, fellas. And remember.