In a crushing 123-107 loss to the Golden State Warriors on Saturday night, the Denver Nuggets misplaced the resilience that has served them all season long. Nuggets head coach Michael Malone summed up Denver’s lousy performance well:
“We can’t beat ourselves and the Warriors in the same night, and we did that tonight.”
Most of the media attention following that loss has been placed on the Warriors: the return of Stephen Curry, the new “death lineup”, and the brilliant Game 1 performance of Jordan Poole.
Golden State deserves the praise. The NBA is a better league when the Warriors are healthy and contending. Saturday’s performance showed that their strong regular season was no fluke. The Warriors are back and here to stay.
That said, Michael Malone is right. The Nuggets beat themselves in Game 1. For as well as the Warriors played, the Nuggets hardly put up a fight. Denver didn’t look like a team that fought all season to make the playoffs. They didn’t look like the squad that finished fourteen games above .500 despite the loss of their second and third-best players.
On Saturday, they looked like a team that had given up.
This was most apparent on the defensive side of the floor. Denver kept the first half competitive. They hounded Steph Curry and held him to 2-8 shooting. Impressively, Curry didn’t even get a shot off until the second quarter. The cracks started to show by the second quarter, but the game was still in reach.
By the second half, the Nuggets’ communication was almost nonexistent. Defending against a team where the margin of error is razor-thin, Denver seemed content to let Golden State walk all over them. They gave up wide-open threes in transition and miscommunicated switches almost every time down the floor. It felt like the Nuggets were making excuses for themselves—they have too many shooters, they have too much talent. They didn’t just catch a bad break. Denver had no intention of stopping the Warriors in the first place.
On the other side of the court, they stagnated. The Denver offense we’ve become accustomed to was nonexistent. There was no cutting, the ball wasn’t moving. Players took turns going one-on-five against the second-best defense in the league. Sure, the Nuggets didn’t shoot the ball well, but it wouldn’t have mattered. After a little bit of a cold stretch, Denver abandoned the style of play that has brought them this far. There was no shot of them winning this game.
Luckily, such an abysmal game 1 performance means that Denver has nowhere to go but up. Nikola Jokic understands this. After game 1, he had this to say:
“The pressure’s not on us. We’re underdogs.”
He’s right. If anybody had any questions about the Warriors, they’ve been answered. Denver is a bonafide underdog now, and they’ll be playing from behind all series long. The worst has happened. The pressure is off. Now, they just get to fight like hell to steal games away from Golden State.
Denver will make adjustments for game 2. Coach Malone has already cited the need for more ball movement, and they will definitely have to sort out their communication on the defensive end.
However, the most important change will have to be in their effort. Are they going to be the Nuggets that won two series from down 3-1 in the 2020 NBA playoffs? Or will they throw in the towel and wait for next year? Will they be the team that pushed themselves into the playoffs even without two max contract players? Or will they give it up and fold in on themselves like the Lakers did this year?
Denver will get a chance to answer those questions tonight.
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