Nuggets are desired by shooting walls, progress in playoffs

Denver – Nikola Jokic was dull after the Denver Nuggets coach Michael Malone and General Manager Calvin Booth released with only three games in the regular season. The organization clearly searched for changes.

The nuggets had just lost four times in a row, the season slipped away and it was very little time to cover things in front of the playoffs in the right direction.

An early seasoning out of the season looked inevitable how the nuggets went. A wasted season by Jokics Prime.

“If we do not make the changes, there is no way in a game 7,” said a nuggets manager to ESPN.

Instead, Denver plays the type of basketball that they made two years ago when they won the NBA championship.

“I think the owner … wanted to change something, change the energy, and he probably did,” said Jokic, after the Nuggets on Saturday evening in game 7 of their playoff series of the Western Conference had completed a win of 120-101 against the La Clipper. “He got the result he was looking for.”

The nuggets with fourth seeds were masterful in game 7 and led the Clipper to up to 35 points to end the most competitive series of the NBA in the first round. La came in as the hottest team in the league and won 18 of his last 21 games of the regular season when Kawhi Leonard and James Harden were finally healthy and top form. And every superstar in this series has left his mark on it.

In game 7, however, Denvers was the difference. Christian Braun was mostly valuable for his defense on hardness during the series; But on Saturday Braun helped to bring Denver to a strong start and score nine of the teams 21 points in the first quarter.

“Last year the team obviously had a missed opportunity, but I felt that we should have won,” said Braun, referring to the defeat of the Nuggets games against the Minnesota Timberwolves in the second round. “Obviously they were a better team that night. But I just felt that there was an opportunity on the table and I felt like I was part of it. [Saturday’s performance] Exactly what I wanted and these boys trusted me – they have all year round, but they trusted me at that moment.

“Well, this is the exact moment I was looking for, and I'm just glad that our way went.”

Aaron Gordon von Denver cited all the scorers with 22 points, eight of which came in the second quarter when the Nuggets opened the game with an outbreak of 37 points. In the third, Gordon had one of the best darks that they will ever see-a reverse, two-handed jam that the crowd in the ball arena in a tilted one and seemed to have to crush the spirit of the clipper once and for all.

Nugget's sixth man Russell Westbrook scored 10 of his 16 points in the second quarter and scored two huge 3 points to increase his series average for 3-point shooting to 42%, the best in every playoff series of his career.

What made the Clipper particularly painful is that they basically dare to take a career of 30.5% 3-point shooters to beat them behind the arch. According to Genius IQ, Westbrook received an average separation of 9.1 foot between himself and the closest defender in his 3-point attempts in the series. This is the second most common separation for each player in a playoff series since the start of player tracking in 2014.

After a virtuoso performance in game 1, Westbrook had said that he would talk about how his former team defended him after the nuggets “looked after the business” and won the series.

“I think they believed that this was their best bet to stop me or take me out of this series,” said Westbrook. “But one thing nobody knows is that I work out my ass. Regardless of what someone does, I am always prepared and I am prepared for anything because I prepare for everything.

“And as I said, after game 1, if you continue to do it, I will let you pay. I don't know what I shot for the series.”

He said he shot 42%, Westbrook smiled and said: “Damn, that's solid. I think it didn't work so well for her.”

Westbrook also had five assists, five rebounds and five steals in game 7 in just 27 minutes.

The performances of the Nuggets role players have more than brew a below-average excursion from a badly plagued Jokic, which only had 16 points with only 6-von-14 shooting.

A total of six Denver players achieved in double -digit numbers, but nobody had more than 22. It was a balanced attack that the Nuggets rode in 2023, and interim coach David Adelman was confident enough to refer to this team in his postgame comments.

“I thought it remembered the year we won,” said Adelman about the balance that his team found in game 7. We did that, we saw it, we've been going through it before and we did it. “

The Nuggets have only one day to prepare for the top seeds in Oklahoma City Thunder and the beginning of the second round on Monday evening.

“This was a memorable series,” said Adelman. “We just don't have time to remember it … because we fly to OKC tomorrow.”