Was Brian Shaw Just a Scapegoat for Denver Nuggets Front Office?

Nearly two full seasons into a drastic and unforeseen demise, the Denver Nuggets have decided to hold head coach Brian Shaw accountable for all their misgivings.

That includes any mistakes their front office made.

As first told to The Denver Post's Christopher Dempsey and later confirmed by Yahoo Sports' Adrian Wojnarowski, the Nuggets fired Shaw on Tuesday with the team sitting 19 games under .500, miles outside the Western Conference's playoff race.

Although there is never any one reason why an NBA team dispatches its head coach, the timing here is telling. There is no measurable incentive to firing Shaw now, almost three-quarters of the way through his second season at the helm. To make a change this big, this late, the situation must be dire.

For the Nuggets, the situation is exactly that. They own one of the league's 10 worst records since hiring Shaw and have devolved into a two-way disaster that barely resembles the 57-win outfit from 2012-13.

But such nosedives are never one-person efforts. Shaw is not alone in any wrongdoing. As ESPN Los Angeles' Ramona Shelburne suggests, to a certain degree he's collateral damage:

Indiana Pacers forward David West, who played under Shaw while the latter was an assistant in Indiana, took a similar, albeit less nuanced, stance.

"That's b******t," he said of Shaw's firing, per Scott Agness of Vigilant Sports. "No grownups on the roster. You can't win without grownups."

Indeed, the motives and subsequent execution of the Nuggets front office these past couple of years are nothing if not confusing.

Head coach George Karl was shown the door during the 2013 offseason after leading Denver to its third-highest winning percentage in franchise history and being awarded Coach of the Year honors. His departure was compounded by general manager Masai Ujiri's exit; the Nuggets watched as he shuffled off to the Toronto Raptors.

Shaw was named Karl's successor soon after, a curious hire if there ever was one. The Nuggets blitzed their way to 57 victories the previous season, running at the league's second-fastest pace. But Shaw was a branch off Phil Jackson's coaching tree, a triangle offense enthusiast who placed a premium on plodding half-court sets that began inside the post.

Running the rock through frontcourt players, specifically JaVale McGee, became top priority. Never mind that the Nuggets were built to run and employed a star-level point guard in Ty Lawson. The ball would be taken out of his hands and thrown into the low post, where Denver would grind its way to victory, adhering to more traditional tenets.

Except the Nuggets' on-court personnel has never once embodied tradition. They've never made any wholesale changes to the roster—not ones that advanced a new identity.

They signed the explosive Nate Robinson. They said goodbye to the uber-athletic Andre Iguodala. They reacquired and re-dealt Arron Afflalo. They traded Timofey Mozgov and McGee. They invested tens of millions of dollars in Kenneth Faried, a high-octane forward with virtually no interior presence on offense.

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So, of course this experiment failed. Of all the tweaks and twists the Nuggets endorsed, not one of them kept in theme with a more time-honored, slow-paced style.

Injuries were thought to be the culprit at first. Wilson Chandler, Lawson and Robinson all missed at least 20 games in 2013-14, and Danilo Gallinari didn't play at all. J.J. Hickson even tore his right ACL in late March 2014, adding further insult to Denver's growing list of injuries.

Last season, then, was viewed as an aberration. Healthy and still brimming with individual talent, the Nuggets projected as one of the many teams that would contend for the Western Conference's eighth and final playoff spot this season.

But the disparity between who the Nuggets are and who they want to be still exists. Shaw himself recognized this and compromised, embracing a more fast-paced brand of basketball.

The Nuggets ranked third in pace for 2013-14 and are inside the top five this season. Their spacing is poor, but they're middle-of-the-road in post-up frequency, so Shaw has not been forcing tired methods on a team unfit to install them.

At the same time, Shaw has been culpable in the Nuggets' downswing. They rank 24th in offensive efficiency and 25th in defensive efficiency, and there has been a disconnect brewing between the coach and his team.

Not only has Shaw frequently berated his players, but the players themselves have not shied away from questioning the sideline leadership. Veteran point guard Jameer Nelson voiced his concerns back in January, per Dempsey:

Things have been even worse in recent weeks. Shaw admitted to reading books that would help him relate to millennials during an interview with TNT's Rachel Nichols, and the Nuggets were heard seemingly counting down the weeks until this season ended while exiting a huddle on Friday, a development Shaw refuted, according to Dempsey.

And that's on top of Denver's on-court warts. Shaw may have adapted the speed and focal points of the offense to best suit the talent on hand, but the Nuggets have no identity, a direct result of their coach's indecision and flip-flopping between philosophies.

Bleacher Report's Fred Katz expands on this point:

It's ultimately on the coach to make the best of his team's situation. Deficient work ethic implies flawed guidance, something that falls entirely on Shaw.

Then again, he's been out of his comfort zone from the jump, practicing a style he isn't meant to preach, coaching players he isn't programmed to lead. And to that end, the Nuggets won't necessarily be better off without him.

A lengthy rebuilding process awaits. The Nuggets have sold off chunks of their core and will now start over, attempting to undo the mess they had a hand in making—a mess they haven't even come close to cleaning by firing Shaw.

He was only part of the problem.

The rest falls on Denver.

As much as Shaw failed the Nuggets, the front office failed him.

*Stats courtesy of Basketball-Reference.com and NBA.com and are accurate leading into games for March 3.