And there it was: Nuggets-Lakers, The Playoff History, summed up in about 2.1 seconds.
1! … 2!. … 3! …
The man in the blue shirt and the bowtie is counting again. Slowly. Loudly. Michael Malone’s Nuggets are face down on the canvas for the third time in four weeks, eyes swollen shut, bleeding from the forehead, cartoon birdies circling overhead.
At least this time, they saw what hit them. Or rather, who.
“I think I had a really good contest, I think I was right there,” Denver center Nikola Jokic, who poured in 30 points, said of the Anthony Davis 3-pointer at the buzzer Sunday night that gave the Lakers a 2-0 series lead in the Western Conference Finals. “He shot the ball really well.
“I kind of felt it (was) going in and I think it was (a) swish. Great players make great shots.”
4! …5! …
“Yeah, I mean losing (stinks), that’s the bottom line,” Malone, the Nuggets’ coach, said quietly after the game. “Losing (stinks). Some guys like to win. Some guys hate to lose. (We’ve) got a group of guys that hate to lose.”
Lakers 105, Nuggets 103.
Man, was there a lot to hate in this game if you’re a Nuggets fan.
The three missed free throws, two of them by reserve PJ Dozier, over the final six minutes.
The last shot, mostly, and whether Mason Plumlee should have left Davis to help out Jerami Grant on LeBron James, leaving A.D. open on the perimeter.
We know better than to count them out completely. After 3-1 once, 3-1 twice, you never, never say never.
But this one?
This one left a scar.
This series feels different. The karma feels different. The basketball gods have traded their Maxie Miner shorts in for a unibrow and a 6-pack of Sprite. History is history now. If the Nuggets can somehow get off the mat after this one, Malone is coach of the century.
Because it’s one thing to get dragged behind the woodshed. It’s another to ball out, as this bunch did Sunday, to leave everything out there, to clean up old mistakes, to get stops, to force turnovers, to get to the line, to surpass the Lakers’ intensity …
… and then have Davis plunge a dagger in between your shoulder blades as the horn goes off.
The Nuggets went to the free-throw stripe 14 more times. They fought back after being down 16 in the third quarter. They led by 1, 103-102, with 1.5 seconds left. It was Clippers all over again.
Until it wasn’t.
“We were in (this) before, I think, (in) the second or third game against the Clippers and we had it and kind of lost it at the end,” the Joker said. “We put in the effort. We put in the fight. We lost the game. But I think we played well most of the game.”
They won the second half by leaps and bounds, which is another reason Sunday hurt so much. The third-quarter bite was back. The effort was, too. But a 10-point halftime deficit against James feels more like 15 or 20. You expend so much energy, mental and physical, just trying to claw back to within shouting distance that when the time comes to push the turbo button, fumes are the only thing left in the tank.
And yet the fumes were working. Somehow, as Jokic kept the Nuggets in the game.
Denver outscored the Lakers 24-12 over the final eight minutes of the fourth quarter. Jokic scored 11 consecutive points over the last three minutes to flip an eight-point deficit into a 1-point Nuggets lead with 20.8 seconds on the clock.
7! … 8! …
“This the Western Conference finals,” Malone said. “No moral victories. No silver linings.”
No second chances. No regrets. For all those comebacks, all that history, the Nuggets are staring at an 0-2 hole in a series for the first time during Malone’s reign.
It’s just a number, granted. But the man in the bowtie is counting louder now, and you hope, underneath all that ringing, that the Nuggets can hear him.
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