NEW YORK — No one could remember experiencing a quarter quite like the second 12- minute period the Nuggets played Sunday at Madison Square Garden.
Sixteen field goals attempted. One made, a buzzer-beating lay-in to end the second quarter.
The Nuggets’ misfires proved the difference in their 109-93 loss to the New York Knicks.
Denver was buried in a sea of bricks that piled 15 misses high before Ty Lawson’s last-second basket averted an entire quarter of misses. Lawson’s lay-in went to video review before it was ruled that he got it off in time.
“I remember some tough quarters at various times,” Nuggets coach Brian Shaw said. “I don’t know that I’ve experienced the last shot of the quarter being the only one at that point.”
Said Lawson: “One basket in a quarter, that’s crazy. We just had a bad quarter, weren’t knocking down shots. Got a couple of clean looks, just wasn’t going in.”
The Nuggets (2-7) were outscored 31-8 in the quarter. Shaw pointed to a lack of aggression on offense as the main culprit for the Nuggets’ latest loss.
“For whatever reason, we were tentative offensively and we had a long drought,” he said. “We weren’t getting any penetration. We were just swinging the ball outside around the perimeter. We turned the ball over, we missed free throws. They slowly continued to score and create that deficit.”
New York led by 23 points at halftime and was never threatened during the second half.
Part of the Nuggets’ second-quarter struggles had to do with the absence of Arron Afflalo. He scored 13 points in the first quarter and made 4-of-5 3-point shots. But he picked up his third foul early in the second quarter and had to sit the remainder of the period. And when he left, the Nuggets’ shooting touch seemingly left with him.
First-year Knicks coach Derek Fisher credited his team’s defense for the Nuggets’ woeful performance.
“That was the difference in the quarter,” Fisher said.
Afflalo wasn’t so certain.
“I don’t know if they were doing anything special defensively,” said Afflalo, who led the Nuggets with 18 points. “Sometimes the game goes that way, typically not for an entire quarter. But it happens.”
Asked if he had ever been through anything like the second-quarter showing, Afflalo said: “Not as a team. I noticed that we only had scored six points pretty much that whole quarter. I knew we made a few free throws, but I didn’t recognize the fact that we hadn’t been able to score the ball from the field.”
The Knicks weren’t taking full advantage of Denver’s ineptitude until they got their money guys — Carmelo Anthony and J.R. Smith — back in the game. Smith played one of his best all-around games this season, scoring a season-high 28 points (matching Anthony), but he also was a playmaker, setting up his teammates for easy looks.
The Nuggets finish their first back-to-back set of the season Monday night at Cleveland.
“You hate to have the mentality a little bit of giving games away and moving on all the time,” Afflalo said. “But at this point, with the game being over, you have no choice.”
Christopher Dempsey: cdempsey@denverpost.com or
Bad basketball
Denver had only one field goal in the second quarter Sunday:
• Ty Lawson’s lay-in field goal came at the buzzer.
• The Nuggets missed their first 15 field-goal attempts in the second quarter.
• The last time an NBA team went without a field goal in a quarter was in 2007, when Atlanta misfired against Chicago.
DENVER AT CLEVELAND
5 p.m. Monday, ALT; 950 AM
Spotlight on Kyrie Irving: After a couple of hiccups in getting adjusted to his new teammates, Cleveland guard Kyrie Irving is flourishing. The Cavs have won four consecutive games, and in that span the all-star guard is averaging 22.8 points, 6.3 assists and 4.0 rebounds. He’s shooting 52.6 percent from the field, including 52 percent from 3-point range.
