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Tuesday's Game of the Night: Denver at Portland and the big battle
The 2016-17 NBA regular season, thankfully, is nearing an end. Though the tops and bottoms of the standings have all been straightened out since January or so, little has been made certain yet beyond the Golden State Warriors’ move to ensure home-court advantage through the Finals. Even with just a short run left, there is still plenty to figure out as the NBA takes to April.
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Since we all need the reminders as to who is set to start the playoffs where, who needs a bump during awards season or with a statistical accomplishment, and who is doing their best work in losing in order to grab improved lottery ball odds, Ball Don’t Lie is set to look at what should be your game of that particular day between now and the end of the term on April 12.
Denver Nuggets at Portland Trail Blazers, 10 p.m. EDT
When the Trail Blazers and Nuggets gave the trade deadline transaction mill an early shake in February, it was noted by many that the deal sending center Jusuf Nurkic to Portland may have signaled the rare instance in which two similarly-positioned playoff hopefuls dealt with each other. Based on Nurkic’s ho-hum career thus far in Denver, it was assumed that the trade (which also sent a first-round pick Portland’s way) felt more like a way to enhance Denver’s bench corps than it did supply Portland with the ingredients needed for a season turnaround.
Now we’ll get Jusuf Nurkic vs. Nikola Jokic, more or less, to determine the final playoff team in the West. More or less.
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Portland, with Nurkic playing up a storm (14 points, 10 rebounds, 3.4 assists and 3.1 combined blocks/steals in just under 29 minutes a night), has gone on a 12-7 tear since the trade. Denver hasn’t exactly fallen in the face of a new Plumlee with its 11-8 record, and the two enter Tuesday night’s contest tied with each other at 35-38, also tied for the eighth and final spot in the Western playoff bracket.
Denver is coming off an embarrassing home loss to the Pelicans on Sunday, pitched while the Blazers were safely dispatching the tanking Los Angeles Lakers in El Lay. The Pelicans were up 21 after three quarters, as the Nuggets shot fewer than 38 percent while letting five New Orleans players (three of whom you could name) score double-figures in a win that helped save NOLA’s slim postseason hopes.
The Nuggets, and coach Michael Malone, were not happy:
"Embarrassing loss," Malone said. "Awful effort."
— Nick Kosmider (@NickKosmider) March 27, 2017
This is part of the reason why some Denver fans consider this the biggest Nuggets game in years. Meanwhile, some Blazers followers are ready to peg Denver (a team that, lest we forget three paragraphs ago, traded the Blazers their pivotal new piece just over six weeks ago) as Portland’s newest and light-bluest rival.
Malone, however, wants little to do with vaulting the Blazers above any of the other would-be contenders – including the one from New Orleans that just made a fool of the Nuggets – in the West:
“It’s big because it’s the next game,” Nuggets coach Michael Malone said. “That’s the only reason why. We haven’t looked at standings the whole time, and we’re not going to start looking at it now because it’s Portland.
The Trail Blazers and coach Terry Stotts, in a rare move that flies in the face of Malone’s orthodox line of thinking, actually aren’t taking things one game at a time. They’ve been looking forward to this Denver game, and the sort of fruit that an exacting run through a workable mid-March schedule would bear:
When the Blazers convened in Orlando after the All-Star break, Portland was 23-33, a season-high 10 games below .500, sitting in 10th place in the West, two games back of Denver and a game and a half out of 13th. Stotts broke from his normal approach and dared to peek ahead on the calendar. He pointed to March 28 and a home game against Denver.
“We talked about getting ourselves to this point,” Damian Lillard recalled of the team’s discussion in Orlando. “That it was going to be a lot of hard work if we wanted to make it a meaningful game when it came time.”
That’s seven road wins and a 12-5 record overall since coach Stotts used that extra time off during the All-Star Weekend – in which Lillard, yet again, infamously did not take part – to outline the plan that has put a team that was at one point nine games under .500 back into the playoff race.
Portland owns the tie-breaker over Denver, they’ll be playing at home, and they seem to have taken to the stresses of a late-season playoff rush. Denver, if the team’s play against New Orleans is any indication, still needs to de-tangle a bit.
This game will go a long way toward determining just who had the right approach.
Also worth watching
The Indiana Pacers, somehow, will have a chance to take on the No. 6 seed in the East if they can pull out a win over the reeling Minnesota Timberwolves, a team that has lost seven straight … The Milwaukee Bucks have done well to emerge from the sub-postseason mess in the East, and would like to keep that standing with a win over the sub-postseason-stuck Charlotte Hornets, who are 2 1/2 games out of the Eastern bracket … The Atlanta Hawks have lost seven straight and will be gifted the presence of a tanking Phoenix Suns club, rife with teenage lore, playing on the second night of back-to-back … the Miami Heat (No. 8 in the East) and Detroit Pistons (No. 10, losers of seven of eight, beaters of only the Suns during that stretch) are the Eastern version of Portland and Denver’s Game of the Night, one you probably won’t want to watch too much of … Philadelphia/Brooklyn is a “no” … The Warriors and Houston Rockets will be, unsurprisingly, featured on national television on Tuesday, but those two have given us a series of sleepers thus far … while the new-look Washington Wizards should have no trouble with the no-win Lakers in Los Angeles.
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Kelly Dwyer is an editor for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at KDonhoops@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!
