DENVER — In the Nuggets’ 123-98 win over the Los Angeles Clippers Saturday night, Denver’s fourth win in their last five games, Nikola Jokic, Will Barton, Danilo Gallinari and Wilson Chandler led the Nuggets to 123 points, a total that’s about par for the course since Michael Malone changed his starting lineup back on Dec. 15.
Yet, there were two stark differences in this latest Nuggets win.
The first was that Denver turned in their best defensive effort in recent memory. The Nuggets held the Clippers to 41.7 percent shooting from the field and 31.3 percent from three. Denver limited J.J. Redick to just two second-half points after he scored 12 over the first two quarters and frustrated DeAndre Jordan who finished a team-worst -22.
The second was that the Nuggets played in front of and fed off the energy from arguably the liveliest crowd to grace Pepsi Center this season.
“When there were ‘Let’s go Nuggets’ chants, I haven’t heard that since I’ve been here,” Malone said. “I applaud our fans for coming out and making this a tougher home environment to play in. We need more of that. We want to be a playoff team, we want our fans to get involved in the process. We have some really loyal fans. We want those fans who haven’t come out yet to start coming out and make this place a really tough place to play.”
The Nuggets are last in the league in attendance, drawing an average of 13,768 fans per game, but you would have never known that Denver has struggled with attendance for the past two seasons if you were one of the 16,056 in attendance Saturday night.
The crowd was energetic, engaged and enthusiastic throughout. Kenneth Faried, Jokic and the rest of the Nuggets took notice. The atmosphere inside Pepsi Center was the talk of the locker room following the win.
“Thank god. I mean, sh**. We were ecstatic. Just as a team we were ecstatic. Just proud,” Faried said of the crowd. “Them cheering, ‘Let’s go Nuggets.’ That never happened here in the last three years. It was just electrifying. It helped us to be able to play the defense we needed and to do the things we did offensively. To hear the crowd roaring when we hit shots and made big plays. When the refs made bad calls, and they were yelling at the refs, ‘That’s a bad call.’ That’s what we need each and every game. I hope the crowd understands that they help fuel us as much as we fuel them.”
Faried, who’s never afraid to speak his mind, was appreciative of the turnout and excited the fans answered his call to show up following his comments after Denver’s win in London.
“I kind of called them out, I got kind of jacked up for it but I didn’t really care. I was just speaking my mind and I felt how I felt and they responded tonight by coming out and supporting us. It was a Saturday, I guess people didn’t have anything to do, no job, no work, tomorrow’s Sunday, so it was great to see. I was excited about that and our whole team got up when they was cheering for us and we basically urged the crowd on like ‘Come on!’ We love it. Thank you and we applaud them for that and I applaud them for that so thank you for responding and coming out.”
“We look down on the bench at eachother like ‘Wow, we have a crowd.’ Even when we were warming up, we were shocked there were more people, there were the same amount of people that we usually have for a game that were there for warmups, so that was amazing to see. Then the crowd started filling in. Dang near a packed house. So hopefully they take notice and see that and we have sold out crowds, but you never know, man. We’re just excited tonight we were able to see that. And I understand we were playing the Clippers, a good team, but hopefully we’ll see it against, hey like a bad team like Philly or a bad team that’s not in the playoff race or as high-flying as the Clippers.”
Jokic took notice as well.
“Today, the fans, I want to say they were incredible, they were, which was really great to play in front of them,” Jokic said. “I want to thank them a lot. They get us going.”
The Nuggets are a fun team to watch. Denver has the eighth-most efficient offense on the season and second-best since Dec. 15. Malone has the Nuggets playing at the fourth-fastest pace in the league since the lineup change as well. Denver’s also one game up on Portland for the eighth seed in the West and three games up in the loss column in a playoff race that’s bound to come down to the final weeks of the regular season.
“We’re a fun team to watch,” Malone said. “If you’re a basketball fan, you have to like watching us play. Even nights when we don’t get stops. The way we play offense, the way we share the ball, the way we move. That’s the way the game should be played.”
