We’ve seen what the Nuggets can look like when they play to their potential, and it’s a beautiful sight. If Denver gets strong play from most of their rotation players, with the typical elite play from Nikola Jokic, that provides an extremely high ceiling, just as they proved in Game 1, rolling into Oklahoma City on short rest and taking down the Thunder.
But in Game 2, we saw the other side of that coin, and just how small Denver’s margin for error is. When the Nuggets aren’t playing to the best of their abilities, they don’t have a lot of counter options, and everything falls off a cliff pretty quickly. We saw it throughout the regular season with gruesome losses to teams like the Wizards, Blazers, Bulls, and Spurs down the stretch.
And unfortunately, we saw it again on full display in Game 2 as the Nuggets got absolutely trounced in OKC, 149-106. When things don’t go right for Denver, it’s hard for them to make up that difference, and this game just snowballed right from the opening tip, leading to a historic loss.
When the Nuggets play their best, they can beat any team in the NBA. But when they don’t, they can just as easily lose to any team in the league. The problem is that this Nuggets team has no depth, very little versatility, and they’re lacking star power outside of Jokic. They badly need to win on the margins, and for their role players to step up. And when those things don’t happen, it can look really ugly.
Nuggets must find way to win 4 games, no matter how it looks
In that sense, perhaps the Nuggets have to pace themselves in this series. They aren’t going to be able to sustain elite play up and down their roster against this OKC team for long, so they must find enough bursts to squeak out four games by hell or high water.
That’s a lot easier said than done, but it remains clear, for the Nuggets to win, they need every player to step up. David Adelman is only trusting 6 or 7 guys, so there aren’t many options if every player isn’t on.
In Game 1, Jokci was incredible, Jamal Murray was solid, and Aaron Gordon, Christian Braun, and Russell Westbrook all added great performances. But in Game 2, the Thunder clamped down more on Jokic, and the role players didn’t rise to the occasion. Their level dipped, and we saw the result.
The Nuggets need all hands on deck just to have a chance in this series against an outstanding Thunder team. That’s not what they got on Wednesday night, and as a result, they’re heading back to Denver tied 1-1.