Booth be told?
Calvin’s kids were all right.
“There’s no time to play like a young guy,” Christian Braun told me after his third postseason double-double of the spring helped force a Nuggets-Thunder Game 7 on Sunday in Oklahoma City. “There’s no time for that.
“It’s not about how old you are. It’s not about any of that. It’s about who’s going to show up. And who’s going to play the best.”
CB keeps showing up. And showing out. After 23 points and 11 rebounds in Game 6, Braun now has as many playoff double-doubles over the last five weeks as Anthony Edwards and LeBron James. He’s got one more than Jalen Brunson and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. And three more than Jamal Murray.
“Did you know you’ve had three double-doubles this month?” I asked him after the Nuggets’ 119-107 win extended a wild, woolly series into the weekend.
CB raised an eyebrow.
“Really?” Braun replied.
“Not bad,” I said, nodding at Murray’s locker stall. “Don’t think this guy’s had that many this month.”
CB smiled at that one.
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Darn straight. But he’s going to need more help to keep this party bus rolling to Minneapolis. He needs Braun knocking down open 3s from the corner, because OKC is happy to let Big 0 beat them. He needs Julian Strawther coming off the bench like Vinnie Johnson of old, microwaving the Thunder while Nikola Jokic cools his heels.
Before Strawther’s 15-point burst, the sirens of Cancun were calling the Nuggets to the coast.
“I mean, it takes everybody,” Braun said. “Obviously, for Julian, that was huge, man. For Julian, it was huge — but for our team, it was huge. We needed that. We needed a guy to just come in and hit shots and fly around and do exactly what he did. It’s big for him.”
It’s big for the guy who drafted them, too. Take a bow, Calvin Booth. Wherever the heck you are.
For one night, at least, the former Nuggets GM, fired along with coach Michael Malone during Josh Kroenke’s April purge, wasn’t just right.
He was vindicated. Absolved. Exculpated. Redeemed. Atoned. Avenged, even.
Malone would never have played Strawther that many second-half minutes in an elimination game — let alone Strawther and Peyton Watson together.
Yet together they were, allowing Jokic to squeeze in a precious few minutes of rest at the start of the fourth quarter.
“We understood the assignment,” Strawther said. “We had to bring energy to the game and leave everything out there. There was nothing to take home with us.”
At the start of these playoffs, Strawther recalled, interim coach David Adelman told him to stay ready. That there would be nights he won’t check in at all. And on the nights Strawther gets hot, he might never leave the floor.
Promise kept. See? The Booth shall set you free!
“Me and him have had a transparent relationship through these playoffs,” Strawther continued, “and I’m really appreciative for him throwing me out there (Thursday).”
So are Nuggets fans, who’d been waiting for somebody — anybody — off the bench to pick up the scoring slack from outside with Russell Westbrook’s jumper fading. Strawther’s 15 points off the pine were almost as many as he put up over his previous seven playoff appearances combined (17).
“When they try to double (Jokic), it’s tough when you have Julian out there,” Braun stressed. “So, he was huge. I mean, it’s hard to really put into words how well he played. And I thought he was one of the best players in the second half.”
The Thunder’s bench wound up outscoring Denver’s 32-27 in Game 6. In the long view, that’s a win. Like the Nuggets’ non-Jokic minutes, the gap in bench points is more about mitigating the losses until the cavalry’s back on the floor again.
Thursday certainly made for a refreshing change of pace from Games 1-5, in which OKC’s bench had averaged 34 points to the Nuggets’ 22 and made four more 3s per contest (6.8 vs. 2.8).
“We just keep finding a way,” Adelman said.
The Nuggets have been in four Game 7s since 2020 and won three of them. SGA has played one Game 7 over his career — and lost. Thanks to Braun speaking Booth to power, he’ll have to bring it one more time in Bricktown.
“Everybody in this room has been in that moment,” Braun said. “But I understand that it’s a little different playing there — but it’s the same thing. … (We’ve) got to play well from the jump. And I feel like we’ve played really, really well the last three games. But (Game 6) was the first day we really closed.”
Did they ever. The Nuggets outscored OKC 41-29 over the final 16 minutes, weathering a late Thunder-storm in the process.
“We have a ton of confidence,” Braun said. “We just played Game 7 (vs. the Clippers) not too long ago. So we have a ton of confidence.”
Like the man said, there’s no time to play like a young guy. And no time like the present.
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