Nuggets Game 2 win was more impressive than it appeared on the surface

DENVER—The third-best assist-getter ever, fourth-best scorer in league history and eighth-best postseason scorer the NBA has ever seen couldn’t break 90 on Monday night against the Denver Nuggets.

Chris Paul, Kevin Durant and Devin Booker dropped 67 points combined with 15 helpers. The rest of the Phoenix Suns scored 20 and threw eight assists as they fell 97-87 in Game 2 of the second round.

“87 points for that team… the firepower they have…couldn’t be more proud of our guys,” Michael Malone said.

It was far from Denver’s prettiest game ever but they found a way on their back of the defense and shut the door on the West-favored Suns. And it wasn’t like the Nuggets biggest guns showed up to the OK Corral and just out-dueled them, Jamal Murray and Michael Porter Jr. combined for a dismal 15 points on 5-of-22 from the field.

But as the Suns are learning, basketball is about much more than three guys. And the Nuggets had guys No. 4, No. 5 and No. 6 step up and swing the low-scoring game around Nikola Jokic’s star power.

“Why do you want to talk to me I didn’t do anything,” Jeff Green, who played an important 16 minutes joked when meeting the media. “Nikola did everything, we just followed his lead.”

Jokic notched a dominant 39 points and 16 rebounds, accounting for 17 of the Nuggets’ 36 made shots tonight, which is the highest share of a team’s made shots in a playoff game by any player in club history.

“I think my team needed me to be aggressive. They were guarding me one-on-one. It was just that kind of game,” Jokic said a day before the NBA’s MVP is announced, which he says he has zero interest in watching.

The Nuggets both had the best player in Jokic and the deeper team with the Crayola Box Crew plus Aaron Gordon and Kentavious Caldwell-Pope.

“Any given night, it could be anybody’s night. .. (Jamal) had a bad night, but everybody else stepped up, which we need and that’s why I love this team,” KCP said after tallying four makes from deep. “We got a deep bench and everybody can play, can score the ball and just being able to defend. I told my team earlier before the series, defense is going to win us this series and a championship.”

The Nuggets are now 10 wins away from that title, having won their first six rather easily. Again up 2-0, NBA teams are 225-22 all-time in series after holding that lead. One of those flips happened over the weekend when the Warriors recovered from down 2-0 to topple the Kings. The two before both involved the Suns, blowing it to the Mavericks last year and the Bucks overcame 2-0 to win four-straight to win a title.

“We have to embrace the challenge down 0-2,” Booker said.

“We gotta protect our home floor,” Durant said.

“Playoffs don’t start until the visiting team wins one,” Green said.

What the Nuggets will have on Friday is the rare house money game that doubles as a series starter according to Green. Teams who lose Game 3 after winning the first pair with home-court advantage still win 94% of the time. And teams who win Game 3 to go up 3-0, well they’ve always advanced.

The Nuggets now have a near-death grip on the Suns. If Phoenix couldn’t pull Monday’s game out and they don’t get Paul back from his groin issues—Nuggets out-scored the Suns 46-28 after he left—start game-planning for the Lakers and Warriors.

Nuggets against Suns is all but over, the desert-dwellers are sub-par behind their star power whereas Denver was tested and set for this momentous matchup. The Nuggets won pretty, they won ugly, and Denver will win—it’s just how and how much fight do the near-AARP Suns have as we head back to the land of retirement.

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