Game 7 awaits after Nuggets waste an all-time Nikola Jokic performance

SAN ANTONIO — There’s no reason to bury the lede. Nikola Jokic played the best basketball game of his career Thursday night.

But Jokic’s 43 points, a new career high and the most a Nuggets player has scored in the playoffs in franchise history, weren’t enough. Neither were his 12 rebounds or nine assists. The Nuggets fell 120-103 to the Spurs in Game 6 of their first-round series, and instead of carrying Jokic on their shoulders down San Antonio’s River Walk late Thursday night to celebrate the franchise’s first series victory since 2009, Denver will spend its two-hour charter flight back home pondering what went wrong. The memories of those on board will surely shift to a late-third and early fourth-quarter stretch when the Nuggets’ All-Star center went to the bench and his teammates couldn’t hold up their end of the bargain.

Jokic played 38 minutes in the Nuggets’ Game 6 loss, and Denver trailed 88-85 when he took his first rest of the second half with 1:03 remaining in the third quarter. What followed was a 12-2 Spurs run that took San Antonio’s lead from three to 13 points in a little over five minutes. Jokic returned to the game at the 8:59 mark of the fourth quarter but couldn’t stop the bleeding of what snowballed into a 22-4 run that gave Game 6 to the Spurs.

“Maybe I have to play him 48 (minutes),” Michael Malone said after the Nuggets’ loss. “Every time we take him out it seems like the Spurs go on a run. He’s an MVP candidate in my opinion for a reason, and every time we take him out obviously it’s like you’re holding your breath that we can hold on until we can get him back in the game.”

Malone was joking, of course, but his words held a lot of weight on a night where the Nuggets got next to nothing from their second unit, which has been a reliable group for most of the season.

Denver’s bench scored only 13 points in Game 6, and Mason Plumlee, Will Barton, Malik Beasley and Monte Morris combined to shoot just 5 of 23 from the field in a second-unit performance that reeked of last season’s version of the Nuggets that seemed to hemorrhage points and forfeit leads whenever Jokic rested.

“I thought tonight for the first time in a while those guys looked tentative,” Malone said. “They looked a little hesitant out there. And our bench unit has been really good the whole year, and they’re especially good when they attack. And most of that comes when we play defense at a high level because now we get out in the open court and that’s when Monte (Morris), Mase (Mason Plumlee), Will (Barton, Malik (Beasley) and all those guys really excel.”

“We just didn’t make the looks we had,” Morris added. “I felt like we were playing hard. We just weren’t in a rhythm.”

In a way, Game 6 was San Antonio’s from the opening tip until the final buzzer. The Spurs shot 57.1% from the field, 41.7% from 3, their second-highest mark of the series, and converted 20 of 29 mid-range jumpers. Rudy Gay also had his first strong game of the series, finishing with 19 points on 7-of-11 shooting.

Inside the bowels of AT&T Center, Denver attempted to put its right foot in front of its left and move on from a frustrating loss and get ready for Saturday’s Game 7, which was difficult for Jamal Murray who limped around the Nuggets’ locker room with a wrap on his left thigh. He was still in obvious pain from a hard screen from Spurs’ center Jakob Poeltl in the third quarter that sent the Nuggets’ point guard to the floor. Murray declined to speak with the media after the loss.

Veteran Paul Millsap did.

“I’m looking forward to it, of course,” Millsap said of Game 7. “If you don’t get excited for that, why are you playing basketball? So I’m excited about it, our guys are excited about it, and we’ll take care of business.”

Another Millsap guarantee? Maybe. The 34-year-old is one of the few players on the Nuggets’ roster who knows what a Game 7 will be like. Jokic, Murray, Gary Harris and most of Denver’s bench doesn’t, and that inexperience is where the biggest concern lies for the Nuggets ahead of Saturday night. Especially when Denver looks across the mid-court line and sees DeRozan, LaMarcus Aldridge and Gregg Popovich.

“We need to go out there give our best, you know,” Jokic said. “Just go out there and work and punch people, play physical, setting screens whatever we need to do just to get a win.”

On a night where the San Antonio crowd rattled the outer walls of the arena with every DeRozan mid-range step-back and Aldridge 18-foot jumper, and stakes grew higher and higher as one minute after another ticked off the clock in Thursday’s second half, Jokic answered the bell.

Some of his teammates stood right there with him. Others didn’t.

“I don’t know,” Jokic deadpanned when asked about his career night. “I think that the most important thing is the team and winning the game. The things that you can do to help your team, we need to think about it. We just need to watch the film and try to win the seventh game. My performance is probably the best of my career, but it’s not enough.”