Michael Malone isn’t much of a wine guy, but for one week in Argentina, Gregg Popovich turned Denver’s coach into a sommelier.
The setting: The NBA’s Basketball Without Borders camp in Buenos Aires. There, Malone and Popovich met for the first time, drank plenty of high-priced Malbecs and bonded over conversation about Russian history and basketball.
The week went so well that Popovich helped Malone, a Knicks assistant at the time, get a job on the Cavaliers’ coaching staff under Mike Brown, who was a Spurs assistant in the early 2000s. Malone spent the next five years on the Cleveland bench, before taking a job in New Orleans. After two seasons, Malone ventured to Golden State as an assistant, then to Sacramento for his first head coaching gig and finally arrived Denver, where he’s coached the Nuggets to their first playoff appearance in six seasons. Malone credits Popovich with initially getting his coaching career off the ground.
Now, the two will meet in the first round of the Western Conference playoffs beginning Saturday in Denver.
“We’re playing San Antonio. Gregg Popovich has five rings,” said Malone about facing his good friend in the playoffs following after the Nuggets’ 99-95 win over the Timberwolves in Denver’s regular season finale. “I’ve got a wedding ring.”
The Nuggets’ thrilling win over the Timberwolves on the final night of the regular season summed up Denver’s final two weeks of basketball well. The Nuggets needed a miraculous 15-0 run with under four minutes remaining in regulation to overcome an embarrassing effort Wednesday against the Timberwolves B-team, without Karl-Anthony Towns and others. Denver clinched the two seed in the West and its 54th victory of the year, which is tied for the Nuggets’ second-most wins in their NBA franchise history.
But ever since the Nuggets secured their playoff spot in Boston back on March 18, Denver had been sputtering, failing for the most part to achieve an offensive and defensive equilibrium that would send it into the playoffs on a good foot.
Since their emotional win over the Celtics, the Nuggets rank 25th in offense but eighth in defense, and Denver went just 3-4 in its last seven games.
“I think we were physically and mentally tired,” Nuggets president of basketball operations Tim Connelly told BSN Denver around 20 minutes after the win. “We set certain goals. We wanted to get to the playoffs, and we achieved that. We wanted to win the division, and we achieved that. We were kind of in uncharted territory in terms of reaching certain goals and still trying to maintain the same level of motivation throughout the rest of the season.”
The Nuggets’ next goal? Win their first playoff series since 2009. Their opponent? The hallmark of model NBA franchises. A team that’s been in the postseason 22 years running and is led by arguably the greatest coach in NBA history.
But don’t expect the Spurs or Popovich to intimidate the upstart Nuggets. Denver is confident heading into its series against San Antonio. The Nuggets split the season series with the Spurs 2-2, naturally winning both games at home and dropping both road contests. They know they’re more talented than Popovich’s club; at least, that’s the vibe you get from those around the team when taking their temperature on how they’ll fare in the series beginning this weekend.
Nikola Jokic should feel confident too. Except for one game — the Nuggets’ and Spurs’ first matchup of the season when Popovich threw double and sometimes triple-teams at the All-Star center and forced Denver’s injury-depleted rotation to beat him from beyond the arc — Jokic has flourished in this matchup. Remove their Dec. 26 meeting where Jokic scored just four points on 1-5 shooting, and Denver’s big man is averaging 21 points on 76% shooting across the Nuggets and Spurs’ last three meetings. Denver won two of those three games, and if Jokic has his way over the next two weeks, the Nuggets should handle the Spurs and take care of business as a two seed should.
“I think they’ve got something for us,” Jokic said looking ahead to his first playoff series. “So we’ve just got to be ready and prepare ourselves.”
The Nuggets’ youth will be the storyline to follow all series. How does Denver react when its shots aren’t falling, which they haven’t since the All-Star break, a stretch of basketball where the Nuggets have shot just 34.4 percent from three-point range, the eighth-worst mark in the league over that span. Denver should be just fine at Pepsi Center, where it accumulated the best home record in the league at 34-7 this season while San Antonio posted just a 16-25 road record this year, the second-worst among all playoff teams. But how does Denver react when the Spurs’ crowd, which knows a bit about playoff basketball, makes it so the Nuggets can’t hear their play calls coming in from the sidelines?
There’s a level of respect between the two sides that makes this series especially entertaining. Like Malone and Popovich did in 2005, Jokic and the Spurs’ coach bonded in Serbia last summer at Basketball Without Borders. Jokic has called Popovich a “basketball genius,” while Popovich says the best part about Jokic’s game is that he “makes him smile.”
But the mutual admiration society ceases to exist in the postseason. There will be no more friendly butt-ins to Malone’s postgame press conferences, something Popovich has done regularly over the last two years when he’s faced the Nuggets. And Popovich won’t be going out of his way to applaud the Coach of the Year job Malone has done this season, as San Antonio’s coach did on multiple occasions over the last few months.
It’s about the new kid on the block versus the grizzled veteran, student against teacher, and playoff-tested veterans like LaMarcus Aldridge and DeMar DeRozan going toe to toe with postseason rookies in Jokic, Jamal Murray, Gary Harris, Monte Morris and Malik Beasley.
The wine will have to wait.
