Nuggets-Lakers Game 2 Preview: Can Denver humble LeBron James and AD the way it did Kawhi Leonard?

Lest we for­get, they dropped the last Game 1 to the Clip­pers by 23. So maybe the Nuggets are angling to go 2‑for‑2 on the ol’ rope-a-dope trick. Fool me once …

“Obvi­ous­ly, it’s the first game, we’re not going to over­re­act,” said Den­ver guard Jamal Mur­ray, whose hum­bled squad heads into Game 2 of the West­ern Con­fer­ence Finals on Sun­day look­ing to even the best-of-sev­en series with the Los Ange­les Lak­ers at one win apiece. “We’ve just got to be better.

“The first half real­ly didn’t go our way … but yeah, we’ll just come back and be bet­ter. And try to be more phys­i­cal, try to hit them ear­ly, try to get on a run and push (things) in our favor.”

If there’s hope for the sec­ond install­ment of the series, it’s the light years that the Nuggets jumped between Games 1 and 2 of the West­ern Con­fer­ence semis against the Lak­ers’ unfriend­ly neigh­bors, the L.A. Clip­pers. And the sim­i­lar­i­ties that appeared to stain both series openers.

Dif­fer­ent teams. Same L.A. sto­ry. Clippers/Lakers couldn’t miss from beyond the arc. Clippers/Lakers used a mas­sive sec­ond-quar­ter surge to run away with the game. Clippers/Lakers forced the Nuggets into more than a dozen turnovers, then turned those mis­cues into easy buck­ets the oth­er way.

“Look, at this point, West­ern Con­fer­ence Finals, you have to be the tougher team,” not­ed Nuggets cen­ter Mason Plum­lee after he net­ted nine points over 21 min­utes in Game 1. “It’s not even about match­ing (the Lak­ers’ lev­els). We just have to men­tal­ly, phys­i­cal­ly have a pres­ence and rise to the moment.”

Men­tal­ly and phys­i­cal­ly, they’ve been here before. And they wouldn’t be rock­ing the NBA bub­ble for this long if they didn’t know how to bounce back from a swift kick to the ego. In the open­er of the West­ern semis, Mur­ray had tired legs from the Utah series, a con­di­tion exac­er­bat­ed by Doc Rivers’ back­court defen­sive trio of Patrick Bev­er­ley, Kawhi Leonard and Paul George.

After a day to recal­i­brate, the Nuggets coun­tered in the sec­ond game of the series thanks to stel­lar defen­sive mojo, 27 from Mur­ray and a dou­ble-dou­ble from cen­ter Niko­la Jokic (26 points, 18 boards), lead­ing wire-to-wire in a 110–101 victory.

Can his­to­ry repeat itself? The Lak­ers have every bit of he Clip­pers’ swag­ger but also offer more size — and ath­leti­cism — in the paint to back it up.

Rivers’ gam­bit to counter the Jok­er start­ed with 7‑foot Ivi­ca Zubac, who lacked the foot speed and lat­er­al quick­ness to close the Nuggets cen­ter down on jumpers or con­test the Serbian’s unortho­dox dri­ves to the paint with­out foul­ing. Plan B was to go small­er and more athletic.

The Lak­ers, by con­trast, start big and stay big. Antho­ny Davis, at 6–10, is a stretch 4/5 who can guard almost any posi­tion on the floor. Los Ange­les start­ed JaVale McGee at cen­ter, and the Joker’s com­fort lev­el with the 7‑footer wasn’t all that dis­sim­i­lar to the lev­els he’d flashed against Zubac.

Enter Dwight Howard. And exit the good vibes.

The for­mer three-time NBA Defen­sive Play­er of the Year, who still cuts an impos­ing fig­ure at age 34, went medieval on the Nuggets’ best play­er, block­ing two shots and col­lect­ing two steals while help­ing lim­it Jokic to 10 points in Game 1 over the contest’s final three quarters.

“They are real­ly good shot block­ers,” not­ed the Jok­er, who fin­ished with a com­par­a­tive­ly qui­et 21 points and six boards Fri­day. “They are attack­ing us off of the rebound. We just need to match that.”

And quick­ly. Because for all these cool rewrites of his­to­ry, all those Game 7s, the Nuggets also have yet to trail a series 2–0 dur­ing these last two years of play­off runs under coach Michael Mal­one. Den­ver has only won one series as a fran­chise in which it dropped the first two tilts — that epic 3–2 upset of top-seed­ed Seat­tle in the first round of the 1994 NBA Playoffs.

“I don’t even think we’re think­ing of it as a marathon,” Plum­lee said. “(The) big game is Game 2. You just take each game as an oppor­tu­ni­ty. So that’s what most impor­tant, is Game 2.”

(Vis­it­ed 1 times, 1 vis­its today)



Tags: suchen suche search tag anzeigen besucherzahl brows­er design domain inhalt jahr karpfen kon­to prob­lem inhalt schal­ten mod­ell­bahn spiele­max spiel tag web­seite preise werbung 

Ein Reichsmarschall von Adolf Hitler hatte auch Märklin Modelleisenbahn Modelle > read more

Schreibe einen Kommentar