With the 2011 NBA Finals in the books, all attention turns to 2011 NBA Draft, especially for Denver Nuggets head coach George Karl. While the Nuggets currently hold the No. 22 pick, Karl thinks the Nuggets will use the week leading up to the June 23 draft to seek a move up in the order. As he recently told Chris Dempsey of the Denver Post:
"The bottom line is we have a first-round pick that we think is going to be a pretty good player," Karl said. "But the possibility of maneuvering and putting yourself in position to see what else happens is I think what (team management) is going to be doing in the next 10 days."
And they will likely need to move up in the draft if they want to select someone like Morehead State's Kenneth Faried, whom Dempsey suggests in the article. Mock drafts have had Faried go a few picks ahead of where the Nuggets draft, but he could even win up going toward the very last few picks of the lottery.
If one wants to read into Karl's later comment about the team being a "solid, fundamentally sound basketball team" at the end of the season, one can see Karl is quite glad to have Carmelo Anthony off the team. With that distraction gone, the Nuggets could concentrate on the court. While they fell in the first round of the playoffs, the issue is to return there and advance with a reconfigured team.