The Nuggets were looking for their third consecutive win Wednesday night, and they found it.
The momentum gained from it meant everything for a franchise not yet ready to give up on its postseason goal.
“Despite our struggles, it’s still there for us,” Nuggets general manager Tim Connelly said. “No one’s running away with those final couple of spots, but we’re also realistic. We can’t continue to play at the level we have and expect that to be realistic.”
That made a win against Orlando mandatory. And despite some nail-biting moments, the Nuggets got that win, 93-90 at the Pepsi Center.
“A win is a win is a win, but I was not happy with the fourth quarter and the way we finished the game, at all,” Nuggets coach Brian Shaw said. “And I expressed that to the team.
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“As a team, we’re not good enough to think that the game is over just because we have an eight-point lead or whatever we had at that time. I thought our guys let their guard down.”
The game was the debut of Jusuf Nurkic as the team’s starting center. He was moved into the spot after the Nuggets traded their regular starter, Timofey Mozgov, to the Cleveland Cavaliers earlier Wednesday.
“It’s not much,” Nurkic said, comparing starting to coming off the bench. “You just play the game, you go on the court and show what you can do.”
Until the fourth quarter, neither team had scored more than 25 points in any quarter. Orlando struggled to shoot for the bulk of the night, finishing at 39.8 percent from the field. Former Nugget Evan Fournier did score 14 points in 18 minutes.
But Fournier missed a 3-pointer at the buzzer that would have tied the game.
The Nuggets reached double digits in fast-break points (16), but don’t let that fool you into thinking the game was played at a fast pace. It wasn’t. But these are the type of games Shaw wants his team to be able to grind out, and so, though it was an ugly affair, they were able to do just that.
The Nuggets never led by more than 11 points. Orlando barely had any leads, and when it did, it was never larger than one point.
Arron Afflalo had a good game for Denver against his former team, scoring 17 points on 7-of-13 shooting. Ty Lawson led the Nuggets with 23 points and five assists. J.J. Hickson had his second straight double-double with 11 points and 10 rebounds.
The three-game streak doesn’t impress Lawson.
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“It don’t mean nothing. I look at the standings, and we’re still not in the playoffs,” he said. “We gotta keep going. We need a 20-game win streak to get where we want to be.
Christopher Dempsey: cdempsey@denverpost.com or
