1. The trou­ble with hit­ting the wall at full-speed? It hurts, baby. For the first quar­ter and change, the Nuggets seemed to feed off their adren­a­line from a dra­mat­ic Game 7 win over Utah, despite a two-night turn­around. Mid­way through the sec­ond peri­od, that juice was com­plete­ly drained. With the game tied at 36–36, the Clip­pers went on an 18–7 run over the next five min­utes, and that was all she wrote. Game 1 couldn’t end fast enough.

2. Joker’s defense? Inde­fen­si­ble. The Clip­pers worked over Big Hon­ey for the first two quar­ters, expos­ing the Nuggets center’s slow rota­tions and brain camps, attack­ing the bas­ket with impuni­ty. It got worse for Den­ver fans at half­time, when TNT guest ana­lyst Dray­mond Green took a flamethrow­er to Niko­la Jokic’s corpse as he broke down the first-half defen­sive mis­cues. Much as we love the Jok­er, against elite teams, the book is out. And it ain’t a pret­ty read.

3. Kawhi was the Nuggets’ worst ene­my. No. 2? The Nuggets them­selves. As poor as the Nuggets looked in the paint, turnovers — forced and unforced — con­tributed to Los Ange­les run­ning away with things in the sec­ond quar­ter of Game 1. The Clips had only eight fast-break points through the first three quar­ters, but it felt like it was twice that. Los Ange­les made it look easy at the offen­sive end, dom­i­nat­ing in the paint throughout.