Michael Porter Jr. may not see the court this year for the Nuggets, but that hasn’t dulled the enthusiasm surrounding the first-round pick’s potential.
“You know exactly what ’s mad, there are times where he’s able to go through parts of training, non-contact of course, and you also see his size, his skill level, his shooting,” Nuggets coach Michael Malone explained. “I believe the man has a pristine jump shot. You forget just how long he’s. So when we perform ball-handling and finishing drills and you observe his handle as well as his capacity to finish, it’so impressive. When we do shooting exercises and you also observe his stroke and just how pure it is, it’s actually encouraging. ”
The Nuggets have been devoting their time together with Porter Jr, who’s working his way again following a second back surgery last summer. At glimpses of his workouts, make it on the road or following clinics, Porter Jr. has looked polished in shooting exercises for someone who played in only three games in college.
“As far as I love our team now, you consider Michael, you seem at Isaiah (Thomas), you seem at Jarred (Vanderbilt), we’ve got a chance to become a special team when we do get everybody healthy, whenever that is,” Malone explained.
The small silver-lining left in the wake of the Nuggets’ most lopsided loss of the season was the recognition that their squad isn’t complete.
As difficult as it had been to break down movie before Wednesday’so practice of 21 3-pointers the Warriors murdered Tuesday, it’d be unfair to judge their potential entirely from what we’ve seen during the first half of the year.
“I don’t know who people are,” Malone said in the aftermath of the reduction. “We’ve ever been whole for 1 & 1 frac12; games this past season. ”
The newest injured rookie is Gary Harris, that has now missed five games in a row having hamstring tightness. He missed almost all of December using a hip injury and returned to four games simply to leave in the second half against Houston on Jan. 7.
“I believed he’d return after a couple of games, but obviously it’s not at all the place where he or our healthcare staff believes it ought to be ”” Malone explained. “It’s one of those injuries where if you go out there and you push it, he can do much more acute damage and be outside for an extended period of time. Really attempting to be sensitive with that. ”
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Harris, the group ’s greatest player, could ’t been valuable against the Warriors’ lethal trio of Steph Curry, Klay Thompson along with Kevin Durant, that took a joint 18 for 28 in the 3-point lineup.
While Harris could come back within the next few games, there’s even intrigue surrounding the offseason signing of Isaiah Thomas, that had hip surgery in the end of March and doesn’t have a definitive deadline to return.
“It’s really still kind of in the grey area, to be honest,”” Malone explained. “I know that he’s making progress. If you return to when we signed him last summer, I don’t think any of us envisioned it being as late as it is. ”
Thomas was a fixture at post-practice shooting competitions, but that hardly offered anything substantive on a potential return. If he is able to play this year, Malone would need to weigh the cost-benefit of adding him into a second unit which has flourished under the steady hand of Monte Morris.
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