Nuggets on the Abyss – by CoachThorpe

BY DAVID THORPE

If you stopped watching Game 2 of the Nuggets-Wolves conference semifinals at the halftime buzzer, I understand.

At one point, Reggie Miller noted that it looked like there were seven Wolves playing defense. That’s a fair analysis. The Wolves gave the Nuggets no openings and by the end of the first half had reduced the reigning champions to a high school AAU team.

Think of the Nuggets’ offense as a jet with two propellers: Nikola Jokić and Jamal Murray. At this point, while one engine sputters, the other must fend off a tornadic attack from defenders.

Murray, clearly limited by his lingering calf injury, lacked his trademark explosiveness and lift. That gave Jokić too much work, as the creator of all the Nuggets’ scoring chances. It resulted in it rattling for the first time I remember. Neither Murray nor Jokić looked confident in Game 2 against the Wolves’ swarm defense, which swallowed everything up with collective speed and length. The frustration boiled over so much that the time had come Murray impetuously threw a heat pack into the live game.

The Nuggets, who are heading to Minneapolis after two games, are now teetering on the precipice. Can the Nuggets get their mojo back?

After watching Game 2, it seems clear that if Murray can’t be himself, Nuggets head coach Michael Malone and his staff will have to figure out a new way for Jokić to get an easy run. The standard is for Wolves to find Jokić early, and then he tends to dribble into the teeth of the defense. At that moment he looked unsettled, and most vulnerable to Wolves’ speed and length. How can the Nuggets get Jokić the ball where he can catch and read without dribbling? My first thought: plays that allow Jokić to slip between screens and get to the back door if Wolves overextend themselves to deny him the ball. It would be a way to use the Wolves’ aggression against them.

The Nuggets are also in dire need of an efficient, reliable play that forces the Wolves to change their defense. Maybe that’s Jokić around the edge; maybe it’s Michael Porter Jr. who scores pin-downs. If Murray’s shaky health means Mike Conley is no longer the Wolves’ defensive weak point, maybe targeting Karl-Anthony Towns will work. Either way, the Nuggets will have to figure out a counter in Game 3 or they’ll find themselves in an inescapable nosedive.

Here’s what didn’t work:

It’s human nature to relax after a success. In Game 2, the surprisingly nonchalant Nuggets looked like they expected the Wolves to beat themselves. Murray is fighting (13 rebounds in Game 2), but his body seems to be failing him. Without Jokić and Murray playing in optimal form, the Nuggets have no chance of winning this series.

Through two games, Murray has struggled to create, making just nine total field goals. And it’s not just Conley, Anthony Edwards and Nickeil Alexander-Walker smothering him at the point of attack. The Wolves’ bevy of tall, mobile, switchable bigs — Towns, Rudy Gobert, Naz Reid and Kyle Anderson — have also suffocated Murray-Jokić’s pick-and-roll.

So far, the Wolves have cut off both heads of the two-headed snake. The Nuggets can’t rely on Murray isolation plays or the Jokić pick-and-roll because the Wolves bigs can change everything; active hands fill every passing lane.

The solution has eluded Malone, whose head was seconds away from exploding in Game 2. Malone is and always has been a panicky coach, but when he exploded in the first quarter, that panic bled into his team. They rebounded better than him, and that’s the problem: Malone couldn’t find a way to be competitive.

This series has revealed that the Nuggets may have benefited from favorable matchups last year. Malone had no answer in this game, and his inability to find a solution probably had more to do with his inability to compose himself.

Obviously the Nuggets believed this series would be easier, but the autopilot without working engines guarantees the plane will crash. That’s why it’s so hard to repeat and only the best coaches – Phil Jackson, Erik Spoelstra and Steve Kerr most recently – achieve this feat. Maybe Malone will join that group this summer, but Game 2 didn’t give me much confidence.

How many more times can teams rest their stars and win? At TrueHoop we’ve been talking about it for more than ten years. Gobert’s absence meant a fresh-faced Naz Reid had to race all over the field, causing problems for the champions. Gobert’s day off could make him better in Game 3, thanks to the magic of rest.

Gobert was masterful in Game 1, playing cat-and-mouse with Jokić throughout the game. Obviously, Gobert focused on taking away higher percentage lob dunks for Aaron Gordon and Michael Porter Jr. by letting Jokić score. He provoked Jokić by showing early, forcing either a rushed shot or a lob with so much arc, moving so slowly, that Gobert had time to meet him at the end of his trajectory.

Thus begins the chess match between one of the best paint defenders in NBA history and one of the greatest offensive giants. Joker undoubtedly had a counter planned for Game 2, but the Wolves threw the Nuggets a nodding curveball.

That curve kept the Nuggets on their heels the entire game. Instead of increasing their intensity, the expected things seemed to come easier. They were looking for a fastball, but curveballs are especially effective when the fastball is good.

The Nuggets will have to be ready for both on Friday.

All the Wolves bigs are either tall or can move their feet. Without Gobert, the Wolves were more aggressive in their attack. Recently crowned Sixth Man of the Year Reid, somehow overlooked by the entire league coming out of LSUirritated Jokić and thwarted Murray on switches.

But the entire team is, as Conley put it last night, “on a string” on defense. They know how to use their speed at the rim and their size inside to overwhelm the Nuggets. Wolves defenders lean on everyone and form ball handlers, taking advantage of the fact that the referees allowed a lot of contact.

The Nuggets are too good to fold, but now they’ll reconsider their Game 1 adjustments with the added fear that the Wolves might be harder to solve with Gobert off the court. I suspect Jokić would eventually solve Gobert’s defensive approach, but now he has even more to worry about.

It’s not that the Nuggets are overlooking opportunities, it’s that they’re running into a juggernaut. Edwards, so special downhill, was sublime. KAT moves fluidly and scores easily. Jaden McDaniels and NAW play both sides with unbridled confidence. The Wolves have not lost a game yet in these play-offs. It’s a bad situation for Denver.

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