The Denver Nuggets are NBA champions, dispatching the Miami Heat in five games. They did something neither Boston or Milwaukee, the two teams anointed by everyone as the two best in the NBA, could do. They actually stopped Miami from doing what they wanted, and they took the power of the zone defense away.
The biggest lesson for Boston is that while 3-point shooting mattered, Denver didn’t live and die by the 3
I'm going to preface this by admitting sometimes we all make too big a deal about 3-point shooting in today’s NBA. A lot of 3-pointers will be taken by every team, and there's some amount of adjusting on all of our parts that needs to happen.
That said, here are Denver’s shooting numbers from deep in this series.
- 8-27, 29.6% (W)
- 11-28, 39.3% (L)
- 5-18, 27.8% (W)
- 14-28, 50% (W)
- 5-28, 17.9% (W)
Denver won three games shooting 29.6% or less in the Finals. Boston won once all playoffs at that number. Their four worst shooting percentages of the playoffs all came against Miami, 28.6% or lower, and they were 1-3.
How did they do it?
Part of it was certainly luck. Caleb Martin shot 48.9% from deep against Boston and 33.3% against Denver. Gabe Vincent shot 51.6% from 3 against Boston and 33.3% against Denver. Some of those were open shots that fell against the Celtics that just didn’t against the Nuggets.
But you can also make your own luck in the NBA, and that's by focusing on defense. Yes, Martin shot worse against the Nuggets, but he also only shot three 3-pointers per game in the Finals. That's less than half the 6.4 he got per game against Boston. Vincent got a few more looks from 3, but Denver cut off his drives. Vincent was 15-16 from the line against Boston where Denver held him to 5-6, about half the free throw rate.
Miami’s offense was mediocre in the regular season but they became a juggernaut for most of the playoffs. Through 18 games of their first three rounds, they scored less than 100 points three times. They were held below 100 four times in the Finals, losing all of them. In fact, Miami was 1-6 in the playoffs when being held below 100.
Again, some of that can be attributed to shooting variance. Some of it can be Jimmy Butler coming back down to earth. But a lot of it is just about plain old effort from everyone involved.
Not sold on that concept? Think this is just make or miss league stuff? Okay, here’s the biggest killer stat for Boston’s defense:
Duncan Robinson was 8-8 on cutting layups against the Celtics. He was 2-3 against Denver. I think both of those came in the same game, Miami’s lone win.
Denver didn’t rely on the 3-pointer to win any of these games. In fact, there were a few times in these Finals where I thought “oh I’ve seen this before. Here comes Miami’s big fourth quarter takeover.” And the Heat did make plenty of runs.
The difference in the Finals is that where Boston relied on 3-pointers having to fall to stop Miami’s runs, the Nuggets relied on their defense to get transition opportunities and their star, Nikola Jokic, to get into the middle of the zone and pick it apart.
Who hit the clutch free throws to end Game 5? Kentavious Caldwell-Pope and Bruce Brown, not Jamal Murray or Jokic, because they made defensive plays and got out into transition where they had to be fouled. When KCP got his steal, didn’t didn’t freeze and look for Jokic. He didn’t scan the floor and look for Murray. He just got it and took off.
Miami’s zone, which has killed teams by mucking up the game and slowing teams down, was rendered so ineffective that they didn’t even go to it in Game 4. They used it in Game 5 but it never truly had an impact on the game.
Jokic is a basketball god, but the Celtics have personnel good enough to pick it apart. If Denver taught the Celtics anything, it’s that a defense-first mentality that leads to transition opportunities and THEN 3-pointers is effective enough to win games even when shots aren’t falling.
The Nuggets won a championship this season (a) because they have the best player in the league and (b) because they still play beautiful basketball around him. Jokic is a unique megastar who truly only cares about winning games, and he’ll pass when he needs to, shoot when he’s open, and do nothing but make the right plays.
Denver got 10 cuts per game in the playoffs, getting 13.9 points per game off those plays. The Celtics only get 5.5 cuts per game. Amazingly, Boston was second in the playoffs at 1.49 points per play on those, getting 8.7 points per game. Yet even though those plays worked, they never made it a point to get more, because Boston was worried more about spacing the floor than it was getting to the basket.
Championship teams don’t color by numbers. They do whatever needs to be done in every series to win. Boston didn’t win a championship because they were married to a strategy and didn’t deviate from it.
The lesson for the Celtics is clear. Do what it takes to win, not what it takes to stick to a strategy. Denver, not known for being a defensive juggernaut, clamped down when they had to, got buckets however they needed, and found a way to win.
“I don't know how long it would take me to go through the autopsy of this Final game, but I would say that it will probably rank as our hardest, competitive, most active defensive game of the season, and it still fell short,” Erik Spoelstra said after the loss. “That gives you a good indication of how good this Denver Nuggets team was in this series but also throughout the course of the season and all of the playoffs. They were the superior team in every series. They deserve this championship.”