OAKLAND, Calif. — With his team down by 30 points after 24 minutes, Nuggets coach Michael Malone had to change his goals on the fly Friday night.
“I told our guys at halftime, ‘Listen, don’t even worry about the scoreboard. Don’t worry about winning and losing,’” Malone said. “Our goal was to come out and win the second half. Win the third quarter. Win the fourth quarter.”
The Nuggets achieved that partial goal, making a game of things against the Golden State Warriors before falling to the defending NBA champions, 119-104.
It wasn’t enough to stop the Nuggets (2-4) from dropping both halves of their first back-to-back set of the season. But it gave Malone and his young team some hope after they avoided a fate similar to that suffered by Memphis in a 119-69 defeat to the Warriors on Monday.
“We just didn’t want to go down like that, getting beat by 50, 40, 60,” Nuggets guard Will Barton said. “We wanted to at least make it competitive, make it a game and just try to win the second half. There’s no moral victories… but we did some good things in the second half, and we’ve just got to build on that.”
Danilo Gallinari led the Nuggets with a season-high 25 points, with 19 coming before intermission. Barton, given his first start of 2015-16, responded with his own season bests in points (19, all after halftime), rebounds (eight) and assists (five). The Nuggets outscored the Warriors 60-45 over the final two periods.
Barton was in the opening lineup in place of J.J. Hickson after Malone chose to go small as a matchup concession against the Warriors’ array of shooters. Golden State took advantage of the overmatched Nuggets inside to start, piling up 20 second-chance points and a franchise-record 28 assists on 30 baskets while building a 74-44 halftime lead.
The Nuggets came out of halftime on a 7-0 run, with rookie point guard Emmanuel Mudiay scoring four points and assisting on a 3-pointer from Gary Harris, who had a career-high 16 points.
Golden State’s lead was trimmed to 16 on Barton’s driving layup with 3:42 left in the third quarter. That prompted Warriors star Stephen Curry — spurred on by a wakening crowd — to pour in 10 of his game-high 34 points during a 12-2 run to close the period.
The Nuggets kept charging, however, closing to within 13 points midway through the fourth period, forcing Warriors interim coach Luke Walton to bring back his starters. The deficit shrank to 112-102 behind a Jameer Nelson trey before the Nuggets finally wore down in the closing minutes. Harrison Barnes’ 3-pointer with 2:02 left — putting Golden State up 16 — served as the final nail.
“Much better effort,” Malone said. “My message to them after the game is, ‘I can coach that team that played in the second half and be very proud, regardless of the results.’ Because we did compete. We did play for each other. And that’s all I can ever ask of them.”
The Nuggets will be asking themselves to play with that same level of urgency comeMonday, when they return to the Pepsi Center to face Portland at the start of a three-game stretch, still searching for their first home win of the season.
“The way that we played in the second half, we need to play it every time, for 48 minutes,” Gallinari said. “You cannot just do it sometimes. This is a mental game. We’ve all got to be on the same page. We’ve got to find a way to do it for 48 minutes. The best teams in the league, they do it for 48 minutes, almost every game. That’s what we need to do.”
Said Malone: “We’ve yet to play a complete game at home. And we have to start protecting our home court, because we’re 0-2, and that can’t be like that much longer.”
Geoff Lepper, Special to The Denver Post
