DENVER — Nikola Jokic was blunt after the Denver Nuggets fired coach Michael Malone and general manager Calvin Booth with just three games left to go in the season, saying the organization was clearly looking for change.
The Nuggets had just lost four in a row, the season was slipping away and there was very little time left to turn things back in the right direction before the playoffs.
An early postseason exit looked inevitable with the way the Nuggets were going. A wasted season of Jokic’s prime.
“If we don’t make the changes, there’s no way we’re even in a Game 7,” a Nuggets executive told ESPN.
Instead, Denver is back to playing the type of basketball they did two years ago, when they won the NBA championship.
“I think the owner … wanted to change something, to change the energy, and probably he did,” Jokic said after the Nuggets finished off a 120-101 win over the LA Clippers on Saturday night in Game 7 of their Western Conference first-round playoff series. “He got the result he was looking for.”
The fourth-seeded Nuggets were masterful in Game 7, leading the Clippers by as many as 35 points to finish off what had been the NBA’s most competitive series of the first round. LA came in as the hottest team in the league, winning 18 of its final 21 regular-season games as Kawhi Leonard and James Harden were finally healthy and in peak form. And each superstar in this series left his mark on it.
In Game 7, however, Denver’s supporting cast was the difference. Christian Braun had mostly been valuable for his defense on Harden in the series, but on Saturday, he helped get Denver off to a strong start, scoring nine of the teams 21 points in the first quarter.
“Last year, obviously the team had a missed opportunity, but I felt like we should have won,” Braun said, referring to the Nuggets’ Game 7 loss to the Minnesota Timberwolves in the second round of the playoffs. “Obviously, they were a better team that night. But I just felt like there was opportunity left on the table, and I felt like I wanted to be a part of it. [Saturday’s performance] was exactly what I wanted, and those guys trusted me — they have all year, but they trusted me in that moment.
“So, this is the exact moment I was looking for, and I’m just glad that it went our way.”
Denver’s Aaron Gordon led all scorers with 22 points, eight of which came in the second quarter when the Nuggets opened up the game with a 37-point outburst. In the third quarter, Gordon had one of the best dunks you’ll ever see — a reverse, two-handed jam that sent the crowd at Ball Arena into a tizzy and seemed to crush the spirit of the Clippers once and for all. Sixth man Russell Westbrook scored 10 of his 16 points in that decisive second quarter, hitting two huge 3-pointers to push his series average for 3-point shooting to 42%, the best in any playoff series in his career.
What made that especially painful for the Clippers is that they were basically daring the career 30.5% 3-point shooter to beat them from behind the arc. According to Genius IQ, Westbrook got an average separation of 9.1 feet between himself and the closest defender on his 3-point attempts in this series. That’s the second most separation for any player in a playoff series since player tracking began in 2014.
Westbrook had said after a virtuoso performance in Game 1 that he would talk about the way his former team was defending him after the Nuggets “took care of business” and won the series.
“I think they believed that that was their best bet of stopping me or taking me out of this series,” Westbrook said. “But one thing that nobody knows is that I work my ass off. So regardless of what anybody does, I’m always prepared and I’ll be prepared for anything because I prepare myself for everything.
“And like I said, after Game 1, if they continue doing it, I’m going to make ’em pay. I don’t know what I shot for the series.”
Told that he shot 42%, Westbrook smiled and said, “Damn, that’s solid. I guess it didn’t work out so well for them.”
Westbrook also had five assists, five rebounds and five steals in just 27 minutes of play.
The performances by the Nuggets role players more than made up for a below-average-for-him performance from a foul-plagued Jokic, who had just 16 points on just 6-of-14 shooting.
In all, six Denver players scored in double figures but no one had more than 22. It was the kind of balanced attack the Nuggets rode to a title in 2023 and interim coach David Adelman was confident enough to refer to that team in his postgame comments.
“I thought it reminded me of the year we won it,” Adelman said of the balance his team found in Game 7. “There’s a lot of humble confidence in there. You have to go into these games with great respect for who’s across the hall here, what those guys are capable of doing. But you also can’t go into the game not thinking that, ‘Yeah, we can get this done.’ We’ve done this, we’ve seen this, we’ve been through this before and we’ve succeeded.”
The Nuggets will have just one day to prepare for top-seeded Oklahoma City and the start of the second round on Monday night.
“This was a memorable series,” Adelman said. “We just don’t really have time to remember it. … because we fly to OKC tomorrow.”
