Will Barton didn’t mince his words.
In the visitor’s locker room at Staples Center back in February, minutes after the Nuggets’ 132-103 blowout loss to the Clippers, Barton called his team out. He was fed up, not just with how Denver played that night, but that the whispers around the league that some teams believed the Nuggets are soft and could be beaten with physicality came to fruition in LA.
“I felt like they came out and took it to us,” Barton told DNVR in March. “And we can’t have teams thinking they can come into the game, and if they’re physical with us, they’re going to beat us.”
“There’s no secrets in this league.”
The Nuggets not only thoroughly outplayed the Clippers in seven games, but in a complete reversal from that highly-anticipated February showdown between the No. 2 and 3 seeds in the West, Denver was the more formidable team. When Marcus Morris connected with a hard right elbow to Paul Millsap’s head in the second quarter of Game 5, it didn’t send the Nuggets to mat. Instead, it woke Denver up. From that point on, the Nuggets were the team that dictated how the series was played. From that point on, Denver was the aggressor.
“I know the word is we’re soft,” Millsap said after Game 5. “We’re not going to let these guys come in and just push us around. I think that’s what really sparked it. We want to prove a point that we’re not going to be bullied. We’re not going to be intimidated.”
The Nuggets’ season came full circle from that February loss during Tuesday’s Game 7, where Denver completed a historic 3-1 comeback for the second time in these playoffs, something no team in NBA history has done. In the fourth quarter of Game 7, the Clippers didn’t want that smoke. They wilted in the face of Denver’s defense. They got skittish and frayed when the Nuggets turned up the heat.
“For some reason, there was a narrative out there there that we’re a soft team, we’re a finesse team,” Michael Malone said minutes after he emerged from a water-soaked Nuggets locker room. “And I think that’s something our players have taken personally.”
The Nuggets put entirely to rest the notion that they’re a soft team. It wasn’t the only narrative that they dispelled throughout the series. How about the common sentiment throughout NBA circles that you can’t craft a championship-level defense, let alone a playoff-level defense, around Nikola Jokic?
Denver dismissed that notion too.
After Morris’ elbow in Game 5, the Nuggets outscored the Clippers 286-236 over the remainder of the series, and Denver held what was the second-most efficient offense in the playoffs in the first round to 98 points in Game 6 and 89 points Game 7. For the series, the Nuggets kept the Clippers to 105 points or less in five of seven games. In the first round against the Mavs, the Clippers scored at least 111 points in all six games.
Malone has preached all season that the Nuggets’ defense was going to determine how long their playoff run would last. In the end, it was their defense that shifted the series and turned in an all-time effort against the team that opened the playoffs as the favorite to take home the Larry O’Brien trophy.
“I have a great staff. I have a bunch of head coaches on my staff. Wes Unseld should be a head coach. He manages our defense. I trust Wes to do his job,” Malone said of his assistant, who hadn’t worn the “defensive coordinator” hat before he arrived in Denver in 2015. “Our defense in the last three games has been phenomenal.”
Over the final two-quarters of Game 7, the Clippers scored just 33 points. Kawhi Leonard and Paul George combined to score only five points in the second half of Game 7, and Leonard and George both went scoreless in the fourth quarter. Jerami Grant held Leonard to 3-8 shooting in Game 7, per NBA.com tracking data, and Leonard shot 27-59 (46%) when guarded by Grant him in the series.
“We’ve been growing as a team since back then. We’re a different team. Were not the same team that lost to them by that much back in February,” Grant said.
But it wasn’t just Grant’s defensive effort on Leonard, or how Gary Harris stuck to George like glue throughout the series. Denver’s second-line defense turned in a sterling performance as well. Jokic recorded three blocks in Game 7 and averaged 1.4 blocks per game in the series after blocking three shots total in Denver’s series against Utah.
In the days following the Feb. 28 shellacking in LA and Barton’s locker room declaration, I got a call from a source who’s well-connected throughout the league. He echoed Barton’s sentiment entirely. Essentially, what Barton had conveyed to his teammates was a strongly-held opinion across the rest of the NBA. Teams like the Clippers thought that if they punched first, the Nuggets weren’t going to punch back.
“Playoffs is the playoffs. This is where it matters,” Jamal Murray said. “We brought the physicality and made the adjustments we needed to make.”
The Clippers came into this series thinking they were going to walk all over the Nuggets just like they did in February. They undoubtedly believed that even more after a convincing Game 1 win that came only two days after Denver closed out a physically and mentally taxing seven-game series against the Jazz.
The Clippers weren’t the only ones that were dead wrong about the never-say-die Nuggets.
The entire NBA was wrong too.
