Even without Alex Caruso, the Thunder managed to turn Nikola Jokic into a complete basket Cason.
“They’re all-in, their whole team is guarding him,” Nuggets coach David Adelman said of a 121-111 loss to Oklahoma City late Sunday night at Ball Arena. “It’s a night-to-night thing with how they’re allowed to guard him as well. He shoots four free throws, there’s a lot of contact everywhere, (while) their guy (Shea Gilgeous-Alexander) shoots 13. So, we just have to play through the contact.”
The sooner, the better. The Nuggets (33-17) visit Detroit (36-12) on Tuesday night, and the Thunder (39-11) finished off Denver’s homestand by giving the hosts a taste of what’s coming up over the next six days. Big men hugging Jokic like he’s a giant teddy bear that Chet Holmgren just won at the state fair. Guards hanging off of Joker the way a piranha hangs off a chicken leg. Elbows and knees as registered weapons. OKC games are 60% basketball and 40% Muay Thai.
“I think they genuinely go out with a mindset to win every regular season game,” noted Nuggets wing Peyton Watson, one of the few bright spots (29 points, five rebounds) of an otherwise dour evening. “I think with that mindset and the togetherness they have as a team, it makes them a difficult opponent.”
It also makes them difficult to watch, much less officiate. Do we blow the whistle every possession? NBA officials largely throw up their hands and hope for the best. At their worst, which is often, the defending champs are “Howard The Duck” offensively and Moe Howard defensively. Flop on one end of the floor, slap away on the other.
The Thunder on Sunday dared the Nuggets to match their physicality, then their chutzpah, then their shooting. Denver failed on every front.
The Joker (16 points, seven rebounds, eight assists, six turnovers), in just his second game back over the last month, looked to be flustered early and gassed late. Murray deserved his first All-Star berth, but the man played in a fog on both sides of the court. When the Blue Arrow wasn’t out of sync with his jumper (4 for 16, 1 of 8 on treys) he was lost or late on closeouts.
The Nuggets got cute. SGA got nasty. Cason Wallace (27 points, seven treys) got open.
Lu Dort got open. Aaron Wiggins got open. Jaylin Williams got open. Everybody got stinking open.
“They made shots,” Murray reflected later. “They made more shots than us (Sunday). That’s all it is.”
Not quite. Yes, OKC made 19 treys. With no Jalen Williams. No Ajay Mitchell. No Caruso. Adelman and the Nuggets gambled on smothering SGA, who got his (34 points, 13 assists) anyway. Which, in hindsight, was a terrible idea.
Sending the house at the Thunder’s best player left gaping windows for everybody else along the perimeter. Whenever the Nuggets sold out to double Gilgeous-Alexander, OKC countered swing pass after swing pass that usually found an open man along the wing. The Thunder drained 10 treys (on 24 attempts) in the first half, while the Nuggets knocked down seven (on 17 tries). OKC forced Denver into 17 turnovers and outscored the Nuggets in points off of giveaways, 19-8.
“If you play a good team like that and you don’t have your top-tier game going,” Adelman noted, “you’re going to get beat.”
That next tier wasn’t much to write home about, either. Denver’s second unit, the one that was supposed to shorten the gap between the Nuggets and Thunder, seemed overmatched.
Through three quarters, the 6-7-8 player combo of Tim Hardaway Jr., Jonas Valanciunas, Bruce Brown, the spine of Denver’s Bench Mob, were a combined 7 for 19 shooting, 2 for 6 from beyond the arc, with an assist-to-turnover ratio of 2-to-3. The Thunder’s 6-8 of Wiggins, Williams and Joe, concurrently, were 10 for 18 from the floor and seven for 13 on treys, with a ratio of 5-to-3.
When the guys you cleared cap room for couldn’t close the gap on the very reason — the Thunder’s depth — you’d acquired them in the first place, that’s gonna leave a mark. And more than a few questions.
Without Aaron Gordon and Christian Braun, who’s left as an “enforcer” on this roster? Someone who makes the opposition think twice before crashing the lane? Or when fighting through a screen? Is it too late for the Nuggets to land one before the trade deadline? The Thunder gobbled up eight offensive rebounds over the first period alone, all while playing hack-a-Jokic on the other end of the court.
If that’s a harbinger for the rest of early February, then buckle up, buttercup. The Pistons are the Houston Texans of the NBA, the kind of defense that doesn’t just make scoring painful — it makes everything painful. Then it’s a visit to the Knicks (Wednesday) for the second evening of a back-to-back, The roadie concludes with a visit to Chicago, a bunch which always seems to give the Nuggets fits, on Saturday night.
“(We) got really lucky with the second-chance points,” Adelman said. “(OKC) had a lot of offensive rebounds early in the game … So, just a lot of areas (where) we can be a lot better.”
Even the Nuggets’ hustle plays early went askew. With 3:22 left in the first quarter, Denver plugger Spencer Jones won a mad scramble for the defensive board under the Thunder’s hoop while falling backward in the paint. So as not to draw a traveling call, he shoveled the rock wildly.
Only a heads-up effort turned into a Jarrett-Stidham-esque chest pass in the end — one that missed a nearby Valanciunas entirely and instead landed in the arms of OKC’s Kenrich Williams. The Thunder guard couldn’t believe his fortune, drained the bunny from about 12 feet out and got fouled in the process. It was that kind of night. Sunday was that kind of statement.
“The guys said this in the locker room, (that) we just have to have a more physical mindset from the beginning,” Adelman said. “And test those waters as best we can.”
Round II of Denver-Thunder, Feb. 27 in OKC, will be here before you know it. And if the Nuggets don’t start testing those waters soon, they’ll be drowning on dry land.
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