In a truly bonkers night of flailing MVPs, the Nuggets outlasted the Thunder 113-104 in OT to take a 2-1 lead in the Western Conference semifinals. Here are three key points from Friday night’s contest.
The Michael Porter Jr. ride continues: The man is self-aware enough to tell reporters he’d get it if David Adelman wanted to turn elsewhere. His impact has waxed and waned, largely subject to his body’s demands. By the end of playoff games, at times, he’s been barely able to lift his left arm.
But Michael Porter Jr. wants to at least try, and the Nuggets have had little choice but to let him.
It’s not quite as stunning an image, perhaps, as Willis Reed hobbling out of the tunnel in 1970. But the outrageously large wrap on Porter’s left shoulder has spoken for itself, night in and night out, through feast and famine. And on Friday night, MPJ buoyed the Nuggets, his 3-for-18 start to this series now just a distant, painful memory.
Two first-quarter flare screens sprung him free for threes. A first-half midrange J dropped, and he’d found a spark. A third-quarter moving 3 off a Nikola Jokic handoff, and he’d found a flame. Porter lifted Denver amid Jokic’s struggles in regulation, nailing four 3s. And his cap-tip came in overtime, a monumental right-wing triple that sent Ball Arena into a frenzy.
Nikola Jokic, in the negative: Exactly two games after Jokic came strolling into the OKC series in a neatly tucked white tee, he cleaned up for a fashion statement in Game 3 that went viral: a purple suit and green vest reminiscent of Jack Nicholson’s portrayal of The Joker.
In the first half Friday night, though, Jokic played more like the Jared Leto version.
It’s been infinitesimally rare, even in his quietest performances, that Jokic has ever actively brought down his team’s chances of winning. Yet he was a decided drag on both ends for much of Friday’s contest, a step slow on the back-end on defense and several ticks off offensively. An 0-for-10 night from three was brutal, nixed by a massive effort from Denver’s supplemental shot-makers in the Nuggets’ Friday night win.
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Denver’s zone gambit pays off: The luxury of juggernaut status, as Oklahoma City head coach Mark Daigenault alluded to before Game 3, is seeing every opponent’s best defensive schemes on regular-season battlegrounds. And this Thunder team has seen the Nuggets a lot: Friday night’s matchup was their seventh meeting this season.
For stretches in the first half Friday, it seemed as if the Thunder brought machetes to a knife fight. Oklahoma City attacked Denver’s zone early, ballhandlers breaking through the top of a 2-3 to whip passes to shooters or find bigs in soft spots at the rim. Chet Holmgren had 15 first-half points and didn’t have to work hard. Isaiah Hartenstein got all the Pillsbury-soft push shots he could handle.
Yet Denver dodged exactly 26 bullets on Friday night, as a host of normally capable Thunder shooters finished 9-of-35 from deep and spent long stretches clanking open triples off the rim. The zone’s gambit to limit drives from Shai Gilgeous-Alexander worked, and Oklahoma City frequently found holes but couldn’t exploit them. And the Thunder’s attack, beyond a scintillating Jalen Williams, completely clammed in the fourth quarter and overtime as a bounty of Nuggets collapsed on Gilgeous-Alexander on perimeter isolations.
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