We love hyping up games between a great team in the East versus a great team in the West as a potential NBA Finals preview. Every once in a while, the game actually lives up to the hype.
The Celtics and Nuggets gave us a classic game so good that I’m actually upset that I had to work the game and couldn't just sit there and enjoy it with a couple of beers like everyone else. Dissecting this game is almost a shame, because it’s the imperfections of it that make it so wonderful.
NBA basketball is so high-level that every step on the court feels intentional. Guys work on such intricate details that they’ll look at the film and be pissed off about where their toes are pointing. But in the heat of battle, against a two (should have been three)-time MVP, it’s impossible to get anywhere close to the perfection everyone is chasing. Each team makes mistakes.
There is rarely a fight in the world that doesn’t involve the winner getting punched a whole lot while missing a bunch of the punches thrown. By the end of this one, Denver had landed just a couple more.
“I thought we did a lot of really good things well on both ends of the floor,” Joe Mazzulla said. “We only turned the ball over three times, 12 offensive rebounds, got one more free throw than they did. I thought we had some really, really good looks both at the rim and from the perimeter. And they made a few more plays than we did down the stretch.”
It’s very easy to chalk this game up to an aberration. How often will Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown shoot 43 times and miss 28 shots? How many times is an opponent going to shoot 64% on midrange shots? The Nuggets took a lot of shots the Celtics were trying to give up defensively and they made a ton of them. Sometimes that's how it goes.
“I love it even though we lost, it's a great game for us,” Kristaps Porzingis said. “There are many things I think that we're gonna look at and we can study those things because this is, this is a real team, this is, you know, last year's champs and that's what we wanna be. I think from our side, their side, fans, everybody just kind of knew it was a big match up. There's definitely things to take away from this one.”
Yeah, there are. And one of them is that Nikola Jokic is the best player on the planet, and Jamal Murray is pretty damn good himself on top of being able to play off Jokic. And sometimes those guys are good enough to win games on their own.
“(Jokic is) just that good, and he's not fast, he's not anything but it's just pure basketball talent and pure basketball mastermind,” Porzingis said. “All we need to do is, is what we did tonight. We kept trying to put him in actions on the defense to try to, you know, make him as tired as we could towards the end of the game. Those are the things you have to try to do against a guy like that. Otherwise, if you just let him rest on defense, then you're in trouble on the other end.”
Jokic was playing with a purpose, partly to make up for a tough loss to the Philadelphia 76ers at the start of this road trip, and partly to show the world that as much as the Celtics are the NBA’s best so far in the regular season, the Nuggets are the champs for a reason.
But also, he was playing for his mentor, Golden State Warriors assistant coach Dejan Milojević, who died during the team’s visit to Salt Lake City this week. Milojević was a star in Serbia who coached Jokic, convinced him he was NBA material, and helped him hone the skills and fitness level necessary to make it.
“I couldn't be more proud of Nikola for playing the way he played with the tragic passing of Decky,” said Nuggets head coach Michael Malone. “You just lost somebody that you love and you care about that meant a lot to you, that was a mentor and a coach to you. So go honor him.
“And Nikola went out there, he honored Decky's memory and his legacy by playing at the level played at. Not easy to do with a heavy heart, but, Nikola is a special person, obviously, and it was incredible to watch him play with that heavy heart and the level he played at when you consider who we were playing and you add everything else to the mix. And that's why Nikola is the best player in the world.”
The game isn’t perfect, but Jokic damn near was on this night. Murray was right behind him. Both also took 43 shots just like Boston’s stars, but they hit 29. Tatum and Brown have been feeling themselves a bit lately and getting a lot of love for how they’ve been playing. They’ve deserved all of it, and no one should hold a bad game against them.
But a bit of humbling at the hands of the best of the best isn’t such a bad thing. Jokic’s methodic, patient brilliance stood is stark contrast to Tatum and Brown playing a bit too fast.
If there is a knock on them, it’s that they still fall into the pace of the game down the stretch instead of controlling it. If there's a step for them to take, it’s to consistently find that coolness when the world around them is begging them to hurry.
Tatum is actually more on the Jokic trajectory than any other star. Jokic took a few years to get his footing, then a few more to really reach his full potential. He won MVPs at 25 and 26 (his sixth and seventh years in the league) and his first title at 27, his eighth year in the NBA.
Tatum is now 25 and in his sixth year in the league. He wants all those things that Jokic has and more. Tatum has carried his team plenty, and in some of Boston’s biggest games. But on Friday night in Boston, suffering his first loss at home this season, Tatum got a lesson in how the best takes control, executes, and consistently wills his team to a win.