OK, we understand no NBA team can be eliminated from a seven-game playoff series in only four quarters. But the Nuggets are on the brink.
“The old adage is defense wins championship. If we’re playing defense like that, we’re not winning nothing,” Denver forward Aaron Gordon said late Saturday, after a 123-109 loss during Game 1 of this Western Conference playoff series.
His teammates stood slack-jawed as guard Damian Lillard and Portland torched the Nuggets from the 3-point line and tortured Denver’s injury-depleted backcourt. You didn’t need to check the clock on the wall to know: It feels as if this party is already over.
So the symbolism weighed as heavy on the chest as heartburn when center Nikola Jokic finally plopped down in a chair to analyze his team’s disheartening loss to Portland at six minutes before midnight.
After only four quarters of these playoffs, it already is must-win time for Denver. The Nuggets now desperately need “a consistent game somehow just to give us hope,” Joker said.
He struggled to find the words to describe a forgettable evening that began with the home crowd in Ball Arena booing every move by our old friend Carmelo Anthony but ended with old man Melo getting the last laugh at the expense of Michael Porter Jr., whose lack of playoff experience got him repeatedly mangled in Portland’s pick-and-roll grinder.
Advanced analytics have given us a deeper understanding of why basketball games are won or lost. But sometimes the answer is as basic as the law of the playground. The Nuggets have no good answer for a talent mismatch as big as the Rocky Mountains and as wide as the Columbia River.
In Lillard, who scored 34 points and dished 13 assists, and CJ McCollum, the Blazers have one of the most potent backcourts in the league, while Denver is missing starting guards Jamal Murray, lost to a season-ending ACL tear, and Will Barton. Although Thrill vows to be back in uniform soon, he better not wait long, unless Barton is not planning to participate in anything except the autopsy on the Nuggets’ championship dream.
After Portland ended the third quarter on a 32-13 blitz, it would have been less agonizing to stick your head in the fridge, searching for solace in beer and guacamole, than yelling at the television in a futile argument against the inevitable outcome.
“When we were bad, we were really bad,” Denver coach Michael Malone said. “And they exploited it.”
Oh, the Nuggets will fight to the end, even if it proves to be as bitter as one of those mouth-puckering IPAs that Portland unleashes on an unsuspecting world.
A team coached by Malone won’t ever quit, as was evidenced when Denver twice dug out of 3-1 playoff holes in the NBA bubble a year ago.
Whatever magic lingered from the bubble, however, was burst by each of the 19 shots the Blazers drained from 3-point range, with way too many of their looks free and easy, despite the emphasis of defending the arc placed by Malone in practices prior to Game 1.
“We have to make them work for it,” said Jokic, whose 34 points and 16 rebounds were MVP heroic.
As magnificent as the Joker is, however, here’s what he’s not: a DC Comics superhero.
So Jokic can’t beat Rip City by himself, because Portland’s unrelenting scoring power in the backcourt unmercifully pummels the Nuggets precisely where a battered Denver team is hurting the most.
And motivational tricks? Well, they can only help so much.
As Malone admitted before the series began, whatever desire the Nuggets might have to avenge being eliminated from the playoffs by the Blazers two years ago, there’s simply been too much turnover on the Denver roster since for it to matter all that much on the scoreboard.
“It can’t be a rallying cry when a bunch of your guys weren’t here for it,” Malone said. “Remember the Alamo! The Alamo? I wasn’t here for that.”
It would require a minor medical miracle for Murray to return to top basketball shape before 2022, and try as we might to deny it, that piece of sorry luck means the wait for next year has probably already begun for these Nuggets.
Curse the basketball gods for Denver’s fate, if it makes you feel better. But it won’t change one fact as obvious as the pain on Malone’s mug as the Blazers buried his team in the second half of Game 1. Right here, right now, the Nuggets are the second-most talented team on the court.
Am I warning you to brace for a sweep? No. But buy a broom anyway.
We’re going to need it to pick up the pieces of a broken championship dream.
