The flash of fast came from an unlikely source.



The Nuggets had slogged through the first three games of the season with the slowest pace in basketball. It’s a loaded metric, one that isn’t always a direct correlation with the tempo at which a team plays. And there’s little evidence it relates directly to winning. There are great teams that play at a breakneck pace and others that have built success on a more plodding attack.



Yet for a Nuggets team searching for a spark to jump-start its middling offense, the topic has merited discussion.



“I’ve never been a huge pace guy,” Denver coach Michael Malone said Tuesday night, before his team’s first loss of the season, 109-106 to the visiting Dallas Mavericks. “The last five years it was such a cool thing to talk about, but when you really dug into it, at least for me, it never correlated into anything. Pace is pace. Cool. What does it mean? I’d much rather be a...