Home Sweet Home: The Nuggets Take On Clippers In Pepsi Center

The Denver Nuggets have been a bag of mixed results under interim head coach Melvin Hunt since he took over for former coach Brian Shaw 17 games ago. They began the Hunt era by winning six of their first eight games, displaying great ball movement and solid shooting. The team looked like a cohesive unit that could potentially turn the corner heading into the offseason, but those feelings of optimism have slowly subsided over the past couple of weeks.

Over the past nine games, Denver’s shoddy defense has been exposed and the ball hasn’t moved around the court as freely as it had during the first eight contests. The team has been exposed and the team has dropped seven of its last nine games. You can blame part of the freefall on the fact that team has played so many road games lately (six of those seven losses came on the road), but there is still no excuse to go 1-6 when visiting other cities.

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Luckily for the Nuggets (28-48), they finished their most recent three-game road trip last night in San Antonio. Hopefully they let this one slip from their memory because they were never in the game in the first place. The San Antonio Spurs nearly matched an NBA record for points scored in an opening quarter when they scored 45 points –the NBA record is 50; accomplished by five teams. The Spurs managed to make 19 field goals on 79-percent shooting during that first period, and the Nuggets never recovered — they ended up losing 123-93.

Tonight, the Nuggets are back in the Pepsi Center (where they have won five of the past seven games), and they will be facing another one of the NBA’s hottest teams — the Los Angeles Clippers (50-26).

The Clippers have won eight of their previous nine games and they currently have control of the fifth seed in the Western Conference Playoffs, but they trail the second-seeded Houston Rockets by only two games. Los Angeles is coming off of a 126-122 win over the Portland Trailblazers on Wednesday. The Clippers showed some perseverance by coming back against the Playoff-bound Blazers in the second half, after trailing by 15 points. Chris Paul scored 25 of his season-high 41 points in the second half, while dishing out 17 assists as well. He has been nearly unconscious lately, averaging 25.4 points and 11.6 assists per-game during the team’s recent nine game hot-streak.

Nuggets guard Randy Foye played two seasons (2010-2012) with the Clippers, where he started 72 games alongside Paul. Last season, the Nuggets managed to pull off two wins against the Clippers and Foye played a huge role. Over those two games, he averaged 14.0 points, 4.5 assists, 4.5 rebounds and 2.5 assists per-game. If he impacts the game tonight, the Nuggets could be at an advantage.

Individuals aside, the biggest key to this game will be Denver’s defense. The Clippers have led the league over the past nine games with a 112.9 points per-game average, while shooting 41.5-percent from distance. On the other side of the ball, Denver has given up 105.4 points per-game to their opponents over that time span, while allowing teams to makes shots at a 47.6-percent clip — ranked 26^th in both categories. Melvin Hunt better have a defensive game plan in place tonight or the Nuggets will get smoked once again.

This is the third of four matchups between these two teams this season. Denver won the first game 109-106 and Los Angeles won the second game 102-98, with each victory coming on the home team’s floor. Denver’s Darrell Arthur and Los Angeles’ Jamal Crawford are both questionable with calf injuries.

These last six games may seem unimportant in the grand scheme of things, but they are worth watching to see if the younger players (Will Barton, Joffrey Lauvergne, Erick Green, Gary Harris, Ian Clark and Jusuf Nurkic) are worth keeping around as the team moves forward. This might be the best opportunity those players receive to make an impression on the team’s management. The same can be said for the veterans and Melvin Hunt, but there are going to be some changes in the top five regardless. If the Nuggets look like they are severely overmatched early in the game, Hunt should throw those younger players out there for the rest of the night. What do they have to lose?

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