SACRAMENTO, Calif. — The Nuggets can’t get off the road fast enough. Lately, those unfriendly confines contain nothing but frustration.
Sacramento became the latest team to show the Nuggets the door, dumping them 114-106 on Sunday night at Arco Arena. The Nuggets have fallen out of first place in the Northwest Division, have lost six straight away from home and still have one game left tonight against Houston — at home, at least — in a stretch of four games in five nights.
The Utah Jazz is the new Northwest leader, half a game ahead of the Nuggets. In fact, the Nuggets fell to third place, percentage points behind the Portland Trail Blazers.
The Kings bombed away from the 3-point line in a spectacular and inexplicable display of red-hot shooting. The Nuggets couldn’t come close to matching that, and the Kings led wire-to-wire. The Nuggets have lost seven of their last 10 games.
One of coach George Karl’s bigger concerns coming into the game was Sacramento playing without conscience, as teams with nothing to play for sometimes do.
Well, the Kings played free and easy — and then some.
The Nuggets were blitzed early and often, with Sacramento doing most of the damage from 3-point range. Center Spencer Hawes made three from behind the arc in the first quarter on his way to 11 points in the period. He came into the game averaging only 10 points per game.
But it wasn’t just Hawes. The Kings mercilessly fired away from the perimeter in the first half, hitting jumpers from every conceivable, and inconceivable, angle. When the second-quarter buzzer sounded, only six of the Kings’ 61 points came from in the paint, and they had nailed 8-of-16 shots from beyond the arc.
The Nuggets rallied late to within six points but ran out of gas.
