Wednesday night, the Nuggets both made the case they’d be okay in crunch time without a star, and then buckled under the weight of what a star player could do.
The Nuggets lost 115-111 in overtime to the Houston Rockets at the Pepsi Center. Arron Afflalo made a 3-pointer at the buzzer of regulation to send the game to the extra frame.
And then Houston’s Mr. Everything, James Harden, took it from there.
In overtime, Harden made all the shots he was asked to make, the game’s most critical plays, and assisted on another – all part of his 41 points and 10 assists, all of that production very necessary to beat a Nuggets team that scrapped but could not come out with the win.
It was bittersweet to Nuggets coach Brian Shaw, who got the effort that had been missing half of the time in the last 10 days or so. And so he was left kind of shrugging his shoulders and saying, “I’m proud of the guys and the way they played. So these kinds of losses I can stomach a little bit better.”
But what is becoming harder for the team to stomach is their slippage down the Western Conference standings. This is normally much too early to keep daily tabs on playoff races, but the Nuggets know the consquences if the losses keep coming at this rate.
They’ve lost seven of their last eight games, and while they remain just 2 ½ games out of the eighth spot, they also know the bleeding has to stop for them to remain realistic about making a postseason run.
“At the end of the day we have 15 losses,” said Nuggets guard Arron Afflalo, who finished with 22 points. “And we understand what it’s going to take to make the playoffs in this conference, and with each passing game…we’ve got to start stringing (wins) together. We’re discouraged by some of these gut-wrenching losses, some of these close games that we’re not winning, especially here on our home floor.
“Hopefully, the big picture perspective allows us to remain confident and start getting on a winning streak, get back to .500 in the next week or two and then have an impressive month of January and move forward.”
A Nuggets offensive power outage in the second half set up the late game drama. The offense mustered just 39 points in the third and fourth quarters after scoring 60 by halftime. Some of the individuals responsible for getting the Nuggets’ offense going in the first 24 minutes couldn’t keep it going in the second.
“The ball was not moving like it as in the first half,” Gallinari said. “Sometimes we were not running as much as we did in the first half. We missed some open looks.”
When Kenneth Faried slammed through a put-back dunk with 1:24 left in regulation, the Nuggets had a 96-93 lead.
Dwight Howard is no free-throw superstar, but he knocked down two when it counted to draw the Rockets within one point with just over a minute to play. The Nuggets got two cracks at stretching the lead back out but couldn’t convert.
Rockets rebounded a Ty Lawson miss and had 21.4 seconds to win the game. Harden faced down Darrell Arthur and nailed a 3-pointer with 10.4 seconds left, putting the Rockets up by two.
And on the next possession, the Nuggets threw the ball away. Faried’s turnover gave the Rockets the ball back, but Harden made 1-of-2 free throws and the Nuggets had one chance left.
They sprinted the ball up, got it to Afflalo, and he nailed a 3-pointer to send the game into overtime.
The teams traded buckets in the first couple minutes of overtime. With 1:36 left, Arthur made 1-of-2 free throws to reduce the Nuggets’ deficit to 107-105. Harden and Arthur exchanged jump shots to keep the Rockets lead at two with under a minute to go.
An offensive goaltending call on Houston with 39.3 seconds left gave the Nuggets the ball with a chance to tie.
Afflalo was fouled but made 1-of-2 at the line.
“I can’t even get past it,” Afflalo said. “I felt like that was the killer.”
Harden made two free throws. So with 23.9 seconds left, the Nuggets had another chance to tie the game with a 3-pointer. But Danilo Gallinari missed his attempt, and it was rebounded by Patrick Beverley, who was fouled. He made two to give the Rockets a 113-108 lead to seal it.
“We got the looks that we wanted,” Shaw said. “They got the looks they wanted. They made the key plays, they made their free throws down the stretch when they needed to, and that was the difference.”
