I Had to Dump a Bucket of Cold Water on Myself When it was Over: Denver Nuggets 115, Minnesota Timberwolves 113
I watched a regular season game from start to finish (which I readily admit I don't do more than about twice a month, whereas I watch every single playoff game I possibly can) so I wanted to make some comments based on the game. Plus, I want to signal that I am still alive. I have been buried with the need to put out “a bunch of fires” that all flared up at the same time, which required me to suspend Quest for the Ring (QFTR) for almost three weeks.
I just watched the Timberwolves lose to the Nuggets 115-113 and as someone who has come to the conclusion that playoff basketball is much more worth watching than regular season, I must say my opinion on that was verified big time during this game. The game was horrible.
TY LAWSON
Neither team had any organization or flow to speak of although Ty Lawson, who ironically should be a Timberwolve instead of a Nugget, was outstanding. It was great to see him have such a great real point guard kind of game, especially considering that the Nuggets have, two years after their miracle season in 2008-09, reverted back to the same old same old: a team with very little if any offensive flow and a team that will not even try to defend the paint. In defense of the Nuggets though, it should be said that with no Kenyon Martin due to injury, with no Chris Andersen due to injury, with no Renaldo Balkman due to coach stupidity, and when Al Harrington, Shelden Williams, Gary Forbes, and Nene are your actual playing fours and fives, you are probably not going to be able to defend the paint well even if you try to do it.
If anybody is looking for a great point guard who would be good in the playoffs, they should consider trying to get a hold of Ty Lawson. Who knows, the Nuggets might be stupid enough to include Lawson in the upcoming Carmelo Anthony deal or in some other deal. I don’t waste my time trying to keep up with all the contract minutiae and nor do I waste time speculating about trades that never happen. All I am saying here and now is that Ty Lawson is going to be one of the better point guards in the NBA for many years to come and I am also saying that the Nuggets are stupid enough to lose him.
J.R. SMITH
With regard to J.R. Smith (Nuggets 2-guard) he looks more confused and awkward out there and not less when compared with how he was when he first came to Denver, following his going through three years of George Karl’s dubious to say the least coaching. Before Karl confused and disturbed the hell out of him, Smith’s game was a very, very large amount of raw talent mixed in with seemingly half crazy decision making and a half crazy style. But it was partly or possibly mostly an illusion that his decision making and style were half crazy. To avoid being made a fool of, you need to dodge illusions by looking at real evidence, such as that provided by statistics. Numbers don’t lie and they show that Smith in the old days before he was changed for the worse by George Karl was extremely good. The numbers these days show that Smith is not all that good. Although he used to be more than good enough to start, even in the playoffs for a good team, these days J.R. Smith is good enough to start only on bad teams in the regular season. At this point, if he is ever going to be the starter that he was meant to be, I think he will have to go to a losing team to do so.
The main point I want to get across is that it is sad to see what George Karl has done to J.R. Smith. To go into very heavy detail is beyond the scope here. Let’s just sum it up this way: Karl turned an extremely talented but immature player lacking in decision making skills into an almost as immature player who seems to be making bad decisions much of the time and whose skills, therefore, are going to waste. At the same time, it seems that his skills have actually been at least slightly reduced from what they were, and I would wager that the coaching would have to be a miserable failure for that to be even possible to happen.
Other than Ty Lawson (and Carmelo Anthony, who these days seems to play exactly the same and to end up with the same stat line every single game) none of the other Nuggets were much good from a playoffs level perspective. But Denver has so much offensive fire power that they can use only a portion of it, stink on defense, stink up the court as far as offensive strategy and tactics are concerned, and yet beat one of the worst teams in the League by two points or more. (Laugh out loud that it WAS a two point win; that the Nuggets even came close to losing this game). In fact, were it not for Lawson and his nine assists, the Nuggets obviously would have lost to one of the very worst teams in the League! The two main reasons would have been (1) The Nuggets in this particular game were completely asleep as far as defending the perimeter (even more asleep than the Timberwolves who are often asleep) and (2) The Nuggets always insist on running an almost completely disorganized offense consisting of nothing more and nothing less than the sum of all the individual efforts, mostly in isolation plays, of the individual Nuggets players. In other words, the Nuggets are a sad excuse for playoff caliber offense.
But the thing is, if you are armed to the teeth with scoring power, you can easily get by with that kind of offense in the regular season when you play a lot of teams who are way behind you in scoring power, and when defending is not as ramped up (energetic and tough) as it is in the playoffs. Although it can and does happen in the regular, in the playoffs, the Nuggets’ type of offense becomes very lame and ineffective for long stretches of time (which costs them the playoff game). In the playoffs, teams like the Nuggets are squashed like bugs.
And not being able to defend the paint matters not against the worst teams in the League, who usually have no post up offense to speak of. For the Timberwolves, Kevin Love at power forward didn’t post up much at all yet scored a career high 43 points on 14 of 23 made field goals which included five of five on threes, and Love also made 17 rebounds and 3 assists. On the other hand, Love did not look to me in this game to be someone you could possibly rely on in a playoff game to force a few misses in the paint. The very worst teams usually have one guy who makes a very large number of rebounds, so the 17 rebounds was nice for Love but disturbing from a Timberwolves point of view. Having one guy on even one occasion make that many rebounds means that other players are not rebounding and/or it means you are a horrible rebounding team.
This game was miserable on so many levels! The Nuggets should have won this game by 20 points rock bottom minimum and yet they lazily and awkwardly stumbled to the finish and won the game by a bucket even though they were outscored in the fourth quarter by 11 points, 38-27. Yes, the Nuggets gave up 38 points to one of the very worst teams in the League in the fourth quarter as they tried in vain to give this game away; yes, the game was so miserable that the Nuggets lost their effort to try to lose the game! Does it get any more pathetic than that? Not much more.
George Karl might as well not have been there. Apparently thinking (as I was) that the Nuggets could not possibly lose this game, he didn’t even bother to call any timeouts as the Nuggets imploded in the fourth and almost gave away the game. Had the Nuggets lost, it would have been fair justice for Karl, although I would have looked bad for claiming that the Nuggets “can not possibly lose this game,” laugh out loud.
The Minnesota coach, Kurt Rambis, made a miserable error of his own at the end. With 27 seconds left and with Minnesota behind by two, he elected to not foul the Nuggets! Wrong move! Carmelo Anthony, who knows a cheap win when he sees one and is good at nailing a cheap win down, wisely used up virtually the entire 24 second shot clock before putting up an arching shot that took almost forever to reach the rim. Of course, the shot missed (remember, we are talking about a miserable, pathetic game here, so it had to miss). The ball careened off the rim and no one could really get to it before the miserable horn (I don’t like the sound of that horn) blasted to end the miserable game. Then the miserable fans filed out into the miserable cold and the miserable traffic and, well, hopefully the misery will come to an end soon so that everyone has a happy holiday season.
THE PLAYOFFS? YOU ARE SERIOUSLY ASKING ABOUT THE PLAYOFFS???
If the Nuggets were to make the playoffs this year it’s obvious at the moment (and I don’t see how in the world this could possibly change) that the Nuggets will lose convincingly in round one. It would be the same old, same old, in other words (except for the 2008-09 miracle). But actually, the Nuggets will most likely not be making the playoffs this year, simply because Carmelo Anthony agrees with everything I ever wrote and has therefore decided to quit the Nuggets. (Well, at least the last part, about him leaving the Nuggets, is definitely true; the part about him agreeing with everything I ever wrote might be a wee bit exaggerated, laugh out loud.)
RILEY SAYS: "NUGGETS YOU SUCK"
Seriously though, was there ever a team that more deserved to lose one of its very best players (and its’ “franchise player”) more than the Denver Nuggets? The Nuggets, regardless of all the puff pieces written about them on ESPN and regardless of all the puff statements made about them in TV broadcasts, are not really a well run or serious basketball franchise. Every year they do stuff that reinforces this fact. For example, just a few months ago the Nuggets’ ownership fired the two guys who constituted their general management team (for unknown reason(s) but a good guess is that it was for cost cutting) and replaced them with someone with no general manager experience. This was after other potential managers (with experience) turned down the job due to the insufficient salary being offered. The two fired Nuggets managers are the very same ones responsible in the last five-six years for loading the Nuggets to the rafters with players who can score the hell out of the ball. In other words, those managers made it possible for the Nuggets to get away with having essentially zero organization offensively and to get away with (excepting 2008-09) half assed defending. The damage to the Nuggets from losing Carmelo Anthony is probably going to be compounded when the seemingly endless flow of relatively obscure but extremely talented scorers coming to the Nuggets comes to an end as a result of the firing of the two managers.
As for the Timberwolves, aside from having lost a game they definitely should have won, they have let about four point guards slip through their fingers in the last couple years, including Ty Lawson, any one of which are better than all of the ones they have on the team right now. What their problem is is beyond me.
THE VERDICT ON THE DENVER NUGGETS>>>
THE VERDICT ON THE MINNESOTA TIMBERWOLVES>>>