Denver ? The swelling in his sprained right ankle nearly gone, Carmelo Anthony feels ready to play against Memphis tonight.

That doesn’t mean he will.

The way things have gone for Anthony and the Denver Nuggets this season, he might be better suited to wait a few days before coming back.

“As bad as I want to play, I don’t want to play because if I go out there and make any moves, anything can happen,” Anthony said Thursday. “It’s like I’m snakebitten.”

He’s not the only one.

One of the preseason favorites in the Western Conference, Denver’s lackluster performance cost coach Jeff Bzdelik his job last month, and the team only has been marginally better under interim coach Michael Cooper. Denver was 10th in the West at 16-22 as of Thursday.

There’s been plenty of breakdowns at both ends of the floor, though injuries have certainly played a big role in the Nuggets’ struggles.

It started in the season opener, when guard Voshon Lenard — the team’s only legitimate outside shooting threat — was lost for the season because of a torn Achilles’ tendon. Denver also started the season without Brazilian power forward Nene, and since then players have seemingly tag-teamed each other on the way back to the bench — one comes back, another goes down.

The Nuggets have lost 133 games to injuries. Point guard Andre Miller is the only starter who hasn’t missed at least two games.

“It would be nice to have everybody healthy, but we’ve just got to work with the guys here,” Cooper said. “We’ve got some pretty good guys on the team here and are working hard and playing pretty big minutes.”

Other than Lenard, who is ahead of schedule in his rehab and has an outside chance of returning this season, Anthony has gotten the worst of the injury bug. He missed one game in November after spraining his right ankle, then six more last month after spraining his left.

Anthony did it to the right side this time, stepping on the foot of Seattle’s Nick Collison on Tuesday.

It’s a situation that has Anthony looking over his shoulder and down at his feet.

“It’s always going to be on your mind,” he said. “You think you can do something, and once you start doing good and feeling comfortable, an injury happens.”