As the Nuggets tried to process the pain of missing the postseason last week in Minneapolis, a handful of the team’s players got together to discuss why they fell short. The Nuggets won six of their last seven games. They played their best basketball of the season during that final stretch when the stakes were highest.
Their issue, shooting guard Gary Harris said, was the uninspired basketball they played during the dog days.
“Me and a few guys talked about it after the game,” Harris said. “If we just played like that the whole season, I don’t feel like we’re in that position. We dropped a few games maybe we shouldn’t have that came back to haunt us. We’ve got to come in next year more locked in and play how we played the last seven games of the season.”
January losses to the Kings, Hawks and Suns doomed them. So did starting a seven-game road swing in March with a loss to the tanking Grizzlies. The Nuggets needed to be more consistent, the team’s most consistent player said.
Harris was his steady self for the Nuggets as they dealt with near-constant change in 2017-18. At the beginning of the season, Denver worked through the growing pains of incorporating Paul Millsap into the lineup. Then it had to recalibrate after Millsap got hurt in November. It got Millsap back in late February. Through the ups and downs, there was Harris — playing his controlled, clean brand of basketball.
Harris was one of three guards in the NBA this season to average at least 17 points per game on a 57 effective field goal percentage or better. The other two? Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson. Harris’ blend of outside touch and power put him in the same company as the Splash Brothers.
Harris shot a hair under 40 percent from three-point territory on a career-high 5.9 attempts per game. As good as his shooting stroke was, he was even better inside. Harris converted 69 percent of his shots around the rim, according to Cleaning the Glass, which put him in the 85th percentile among guards. Nuggets coach Michael Malone called Harris Denver’s “most complete basketball player” in March.
“I think you have to remember that he is a former All-American high school football player,” Malone said. “He could’ve gone anywhere in the country to play football. He’s not going to shy away from contact. He’s a tremendous athlete. And he’s got really big hands. He’s able to absorb the hit and still finish. His finishing, when he gets going to his right hand downhill, good things usually happen.”
The 23-year-old also made strides as an in-between scorer. Harris took 3.9 pull-up jumpers per game this season and converted them at a 40.0 percent rate. That was a significant improvement from the 31.4 percent he shot on 1.9 pull-up jumpers per game in 2016-17.
As the season wore on, he looked more and more confident breaking his defender down one on one.
Harris’ improvement off the bounce helped him develop into more of a crunch-time threat as you can see in the clips above. He shot 43.6 percent in “clutch” situations this season, which the NBA defines as any time the score is within five points in the last five minutes of a game. On Feb. 1, he provided the highlight of the season by drilling a game-winning three against the Oklahoma City Thunder.
The only major hiccup in Harris’ season came when he landed awkwardly during the fourth quarter against the Detroit Pistons on March 15. He was diagnosed with a right knee strain/sprain and missed the next 11 games. The Nuggets went 7-4 in that stretch. Harris returned for the final two games of the regular season, though he was clearly not 100 percent.
“We missed the playoffs, and we were 10 games over .500,” Harris said. “If you would’ve told me that at the beginning of the season, I would’ve been like, ‘You’re crazy.’ But we’re improving. We won 46 games this year, and we weren’t .500 last year. We’re improving. You can see everybody getting better. Everybody’s maturing. We’re getting better. That’s all you can ask.”
