The Nuggets look a bit disjointed with one big mountain still to climb

Sometimes people get really close to reaching the top of Mount Everest.

And yet they don’t make the summit.

There’s a reason it’s the most famous mountain on Earth. It’s very, very tough to get all the way up, kind of like winning a championship.

Right now it feels uncertain if the Denver Nuggets will win the NBA Finals. That didn’t seem like the case 48 hours ago, but things change. One bad fourth quarter in Game 2 has shifted the vibe of this entire series. Now, it feels like the Heat might be the ones to reach the mountaintop.

The Nuggets looked disjointed throughout on Sunday night. Michael Porter Jr. was not good, at all. Kentavious Caldwell-Pope might have been even worse. And Aaron Gordon was sick after the game, while Jamal Murray played like he was feeling ill most of the evening.

It was abundantly clear from the first few minutes it was going to have to be a Nikola-Jokic-scores-a-lot-of-points-night. Those aren’t good for Denver. In fact, the Nuggets are now 0-3 in the playoffs when The Joker score 40 or more. The’ve only lost four games all postseason.

If that’s not the most obvious evidence yet that Denver is better when Jokic is a distributor and not a scorer, I don’t know what is. Then again, it’s not the two-time MVP’s fault. If MPJ is going to go 2-8 and KCP 1-4, he probably feels like he has to shoot more. Those guys didn’t have it, so he had to put the ball in the hoop just to keep the Nuggets in it.

After the game, the vibes took an ugly turn. Head coach Michael Malone ripped his team’s effort. We’ve seen Malone pull that card before, but effort, in the NBA Finals? Come on guys. You’ve come way too far to run out of gas now. Way too far to not see the view from the top.

Maybe it’s the absurd amount of time off the Nuggets had after the Lakers series. Or maybe it’s the ridiculously spaced out finals schedule, but Denver is out of sync. It doesn’t help they’ve played just two games over the last two weeks.

The dirty little secret is the Nuggets didn’t play all that great in Game 1, the Heat just shot poorly. They didn’t play all that great in Game 2, and Miami shot well. Now it makes sense why they were able to escape one and not the other.

This has been a grind, there’s no doubt, but someone in the locker room needs to wake these guys up. This is a legacy thing on the line the next few games. Champions get remembered forever, showered with parades and a fancy ring. The runner-up simply has a long offseason thinking about what could have been. The Nuggets don’t want to be that team.

The good news is the road has actually been kind to Denver lately. They’re 3-0 in their last three playoff games out of Ball Arena. They hammered the Suns in Game 6 and took care of the Lakers in Games 3 and 4 of the Western Conference Finals.

Frankly, maybe they’ve had a little too much time in their own beds the last couple weeks. An NBA season constantly has changes of scenery, new airplane rides and five-star hotels. The Nuggets have had none of that recently, probably feeling more like the offseason than a championship series.

But this team is too good not to finish the job. They’ve slogged for miles and miles and can see the peak. Now someone needs to push them to the top.

Jokic is ready to make the final push to the summit, but he’s going to need some help.

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