A frus­trat­ed Michael Porter Jr. said his qui­et sec­ond half in Game 4 had noth­ing to do with the Clip­pers’ defense.

“I just didn’t touch the ball,” he said. “They didn’t do any­thing different.”

Porter had 15 points in the first half, but none in the sec­ond half of Denver’s 96–85 loss to the Clip­pers, which set them back 3–1 in the series. He took just two shots in more than 17 min­utes on the court over the third and fourth quarters.

Asked what he can do to get him­self more involved, Porter put the onus on Den­ver coach Michael Malone.

“I mean, that’s real­ly up to the play calls, that’s real­ly up to the coach­es, who they want to put the ball in whose hands,” Porter said. “We kept going to (Niko­la) Jokic and ‘Mal (Mur­ray), and they’re two amaz­ing play­ers, you can nev­er get mad at that. But I just think to beat that team, we got­ta get more play­ers involved, we got­ta move the ball a lit­tle bit bet­ter. We can’t be pre­dictable against that team.”

Game was over here, but this isn’t an encour­ag­ing look. MPJ was obvi­ous­ly frustrated/dejected at this point. pic.twitter.com/UtLJ1oycin

— Mike Singer (@msinger) Sep­tem­ber 10, 2020

Jokic and Mur­ray took a com­bined 20 shots in the sec­ond half, con­nect­ing on nine of them. Most of their sec­ond-half dam­age came after the Clip­pers had built a 16-point lead with a 21–5 run in the third quarter.

Though Porter is still a rook­ie, he said that if Mal­one is going to play him con­sis­tent min­utes in the play­offs, he feels like he deserves a voice in the offense.

“If I’m gonna be out there on the floor play­ing a lot of min­utes, I think I should voice that (con­cern),” Porter said. “I’ll prob­a­bly talk to the coach­es, just tell them what I see being out there on the floor. Just let­ting them know, ‘Look, they know what we’re doing.’ Like, we got­ta swing the ball. We’ve got a lot of play­ers who can play bas­ket­ball and score. We got­ta get some more guys involved.”

Porter, who was benched in the first round against Utah because of his defense, has had promis­ing moments on both sides of the court since then. But the dilem­ma for Mal­one, which has been there the entire sea­son, was always whether he could trust his defense. Mal­one showed a fair amount of faith in him Wednes­day night, play­ing him 34 min­utes while Paul Mill­sap played just 14.

When asked about Porter, Mal­one said he need­ed to find his shots the same way he found them in the first half, when his 15 points on six shots gave the Nuggets a huge boost.

“Well, get them the same way you got them in the first half,” Mal­one said. “The ball found him. We play an offense where the ball moves, you trust the pass, you trust your team­mates. In that sec­ond half, obvi­ous­ly, I think they keyed in on him. They’re a real­ly good defen­sive team. They switched a lot. They blew things up. They were phys­i­cal with us, took us out of our offense at times. He did some good things, 15 and 6, but yeah, he’s anoth­er guy that we have to find ways to get open looks for.”

In the after­math of the loss, Mal­one said there were a lot of frus­trat­ed guys in the lock­er room. Porter attrib­uted that frus­tra­tion to the Nuggets not play­ing up to their potential.

“Because we’re beat­ing our­selves right now,” Porter said. “We held that team under 100 points tonight and I think we had like 83. We’re too good of a team to be scor­ing that few points. We feel like the last cou­ple of games we’ve just been beat­ing our­selves. Give them cred­it. They’ve come in with a good game plan, but that’s not a good feel­ing, when you feel like you’re beat­ing yourself.”