SAN ANTONIO — All that talk of matchup manipulation by the Nuggets was much ado about nothing. Whether or not they had Houston in mind, there was no escaping their destiny.
Denver and Minnesota are meant for each other. Nikola Jokic and Anthony Edwards might be meant to do this forever.
“We’re not ducking anybody,” Nuggets coach David Adelman said after a limited version of his team knocked off the Spurs, 128-118, to clinch the No. 3 seed in the NBA playoffs.
Easy to say now, certainly. But Denver had earned the right to talk by upending expectations with two short-handed wins in the final weekend of the regular season. One against Oklahoma City. One at San Antonio. The result is a third Nuggets vs. Timberwolves playoff series in four years. Call it a rubber match.
“We’ve played so many times over the years — playoffs, regular season,” Adelman said. “We know each other, with Tim (Connelly) over there and Chris Finch and Micah (Nori) and those guys. So we know it’s gonna be a battle. It always is with that team.”
The optics surrounding Denver’s decision to rest all five starters Friday and four of them Sunday were suspicious. Minnesota was locked as the No. 6 seed, waiting for the third-place finisher. Were the Nuggets running scared from their rivals? Were they still haunted by the image of Ant Man taunting fans on his way out of Ball Arena after a 20-point Game 7 comeback two years ago? Did they prefer the cushier first-round matchup against the Rockets?
“We won the game. So we didn’t mess with the game. Simple as that,” said backup center Jonas Valanciunas, who had warned on Friday that gaming the system is begging for bad karma. “We did everything. No matter who’s playing, we played hard. Coming out of timeouts, after the halftime, during the quarters, we played hard no matter what. And that’s our face. That’s our identity. That’s what we’re gonna do until the end of the season.”
Two things can be true at once. It wasn’t lost on the Nuggets that they’re better equipped to contain Kevin Durant than most superstars (including Edwards), in part because KD is simply not looking to get around his defender and score at the rim as often as most primary shot creators. Edwards is young, spry and a certified blow-by threat in addition to his jump-shooting pedigree. Lump that in with the overexposure these teams have had to each other, and yes, the Timberwolves are probably a tougher matchup on paper.
And yet, as team sources detailed to The Denver Post in recent days, there was enough nuance to this whole playoff path debate — Minnesota then San Antonio? Houston then OKC? — that the arguments canceled each other out. Health was the one controllable variable that was unambiguous. A decision was reached with front office involvement and input from key players such as Nikola Jokic and Jamal Murray, a source told The Post: Injury avoidance mattered more than seeding.
That didn’t mean the people playing and coaching the games didn’t care about the results.
That much was clear from the enthusiasm on Denver’s bench Sunday, and from the effort put forth by Jokic. He was only on the court to meet a games-played quota so that he could appear on MVP and All-NBA ballots. But he turned the obligatory work trip into an aggressive display of offense, scoring 23 first-half points to the tune of “overrated” chants.
“I think he embraced it because how hard those guys were playing with him,” Adelman said. “And I think there’s a respect value there when he sees guys playing for opportunities. And a guy like him that’s done everything in this game, I think he respects that. And I heard the ‘overrated.’ I don’t know about the ‘overrated’ thing.”
The 65-game minimum wasn’t the only new-age NBA rule that Jokic was up against in San Antonio, it turns out. One of the lingering questions this weekend was why the Nuggets would rest Jokic on Friday but make him travel to Texas, if the plan was for him to play only one of the last two games. After all, his fellow starters stayed home in Denver. Why not manage him in reverse? According to a source, it was in large part because the Nuggets-Spurs game was flexed to a national broadcast (ESPN) earlier in the week, making Denver subject to a Player Participation Policy fine if both Jokic and Murray sat out.
The PPP stipulates that teams cannot rest multiple healthy star players in the same game, with stricter enforcement for nationally televised games. The Nuggets didn’t have to worry about that until recently, because a star player is defined by the rule as someone selected to an All-Star or All-NBA team in the last three years. Murray wasn’t either of those until February. Denver is finally a multi-star team.
If Jokic was already going to play 15 minutes this weekend to satisfy one rule, the Nuggets decided they might as well make sure they satisfy another.
They were also at least somewhat influenced to choose the San Antonio game, according to three sources, by the players opposite Jokic on Friday and Sunday. More specifically: Denver was wary of Lu Dort’s tendency to be involved with plays in which opponents end up injured. The Thunder wing was confronted by Jokic earlier this season after sticking out his hip and leg to trip the Nuggets center. Dort was ejected, and he said later that he apologized to Jokic. He was the only Oklahoma City starter who played Friday, and he earned boos from Denver when his forearm struck Nuggets wing David Roddy in the face during a rebound.
In San Antonio, Jokic was facing an old friend, ex-Nuggets center Mason Plumlee. Denver raced to a 23-point lead and never looked back. Except maybe six or seven times during the fourth quarter.
“We’re coming together. We’re playing great,” Bruce Brown said. “We’re getting stops. Main thing was our defense. Each game, we’re getting better and better.”
On the topic of Minnesota, Denver’s most relevant players who had made the trip to San Antonio didn’t have a lot of initial thoughts to share about the matchup. But Brown entertained this much: “I guess you could say it’s a little rivalry.”
“We’ll be a Tuesday start for prep,” Adelman said. “Tomorrow is a (day off) for players, but also for coaches. That allows us to get ourselves prepared, organize the first couple days of practice, and you kind of work your way off those practices. See what you’ve missed, what didn’t go well, fill in the blanks.”
If there’s one immediate and obvious advantage to facing the Timberwolves, it’s that Adelman already knows them like the back of his hand.
As for any perceived disadvantages? Now he can say definitively that Denver isn’t scared.
“You can’t duck opponents,” he said. “And they didn’t want to duck us. We’re not ducking anybody. And everybody talks about the best matchup and all these things. You don’t know what’s gonna happen. And if you’re asking to play against Kevin Durant … what? So the opponent’s the opponent. And we have a ton of respect for them, as I know they do for us. It’s gonna be a hell of a series.”