Denver Nuggets Coach Gets Brutally Honest About Team’s Failure

Was the Nuggets' season a failure?

Ron Chenoy-USA TODAY Sports

The word failure can be a very harsh one when it comes to describing an NBA season. In terms of winning an NBA championship, 29 teams fail at it every single season. At the same time, there has to be silver linings throughout it all.

Denver Nuggets head coach Michael Malone addressed whether or not his team's season was a failure in the team's exit interviews and looked at it from both perspectives. In terms of winning a championship, it was a failure for Malone.

"If you look at it solely from the lens of winning a championship, yeah we failed in that regard," Malone said.

Despite looking at it from one lens, Malone refuses to let it be the only perspective he looks at the season through. He believes that losing in the second round has forced the Nuggets to look within themselves.

"But the season wasn't a failure in my eyes," Malone said. "We did a lot of great things this year and lost a tough Game 7 at home to a quality opponent. But when you do lose, it forces you to look within and find out ways to be better. That's something we always do, win or lose, after each season - how can we be a better team next year? From within, from a coaching standpoint, from a player development standpoint, from a draft standpoint, whatever it may be. It wasn't the outcome that we all wanted, we realize that. I still have a tremendous amount of confidence and faith in that group, across the board."

Failure is a rough word when describing the Denver Nuggets' season this year, but there's no way anyone could be happy with losing in the second round after being up 20 in Game 7 at home - that's the stone cold truth of it all.