Few seemed surprised when word emerged last weekend that the Nuggets broke a huddle during Friday night's game by shouting "1, 2, 3 ... six weeks!" Celebrating the looming end to what has been a miserable season in such a manner was unseemly, but not necessarily shocking considering the way things have gone in Denver lately.
As it turns out, though, the "six weeks" mantra might have been commemorating a different stretch on the calendar.
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Nuggets coach Brian Shaw and multiple players insisted Monday to the Denver Post — which reported the original story — that the chant was a reference to the team's ongoing home losing streak.
"I said, probably three or four days ago in practice, that we hadn't won a home game in six weeks," Shaw told the Post. "… So, the comment that the players made when they got together and said '1, 2, 3, six weeks!' was the players saying 'this is the end of the six weeks, we're going to get a win tonight on our home court and break the six-week losing spell on our home court.' Not six weeks that it's the end of the season.
"Now, coincidentally it does happen to be a little over six weeks from then, that it's the end of the season. But I think our players and the Denver Nuggets as a whole were misrepresented in how that was reported."
Shaw said he didn't instruct the players to break the huddle that way and, in fact, wasn't in the huddle when they did. But he was upset that the way it was portrayed put the Nuggets in a "bad light."
For their part, Nuggets players including Danilo Gallinari and Ty Lawson echoed Shaw's explanation, with Lawson calling the original implication "100 percent wrong."
Then, with the media gathered around Shaw listening to his explanation, the players huddled up at Monday's practice, stared at the assembled reporters, and chanted "1, 2, 3 … six weeks!"