To understand the Denver Nuggets’ draft decisions last Thursday, you need to understand their player surplus at two positions.

Last season, the Nuggets had four players listed as power forwards: Kenneth Faried, Danilo Gallinari, Juancho Hernangomez, and Darrell Arthur. Backup center Mason Plumlee also played minutes at the position. They also had five shooting guards: Gary Harris, Will Barton, Jamal Murray, Malik Beasley, and Mike Miller.

The Nuggets are stacked at shooting guard: Gary Harris looks like a future star, Will Barton was being considered for the 6th Man Award in 2016, and Jamal Murray is one of the most promising rookies of his class. They were so good that Murray played many of his minutes at point, Beasley was sent down to the D-League to get more playing time, and Miller basically turned into a de facto shooting coach.

By contrast, none of the power forwards seem like an immediate solution. Faried has never really turned into the player Denver hoped he would, Hernangomez is undersized even as a stretch-4, Arthur contributes defensively but nowhere else, and while Gallinari is probably their best option, he might command more in free agency than the Nuggets are willing to give him.

So these two positional surpluses leave Denver with two different questions. With the shooting guards, they need to figure out which players they want to trade away. With the power forwards, the question is which players, if any, they want to keep.

This is why the Nuggets, faced with the chance to draft shooting guard Donovan Mitchell, traded him for Jazz power forward Trey Lyles and the chance to draft another power forward, Syracuse’s Tyler Lydon, at 24. Getting another shooting guard would have exacerbated the logjam at that position; drafting two more power forwards gives them two more chances to solve the logjam at power forward. At the very least, their presence allows Denver to continue trying Hernangomez at the 3 and keeps Faried from being too complacent at the 4. There’s a good chance one or both of them constitute an upgrade over Darrell Arthur, who hasn’t provided the defense or rebounding he was hired for.

Of course, now that the Nuggets have a surplus of options for the power forward position, there’s the question of how they’re going to decide who gets the job. Most teams wouldn’t want to base their depth chart solely off of what happens in Summer League and training camp, so it’s possible that multiple 4s will be rotated into the starting lineup in the first few months. But that creates its own problems—remember, the lack of cohesion at the center position was one of the reasons it took the Nuggets so long to gel at the beginning of the 2016-17 season.

There’s also the possibility that the Nuggets are continuing to eye a trade for someone like Kevin Love, and Lydon, who looks like he could develop into a similar player, would be a good trade asset (I personally think they should at least make an offer for Lamarcus Aldridge). But even if holding a huge 6-way power forward tryout is the Nuggets’ backup plan, that suggests that they trust their ability to evaluate player talent over a short amount of time in non-game situations. It will be interesting to see whether they are right about that.