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Chris paul traffic cone10/10/2023 ![]() An exhausted Booker went 4-for-13, and Durant came alive enough in the second half to salvage a disastrous first during which he clearly didn't have the legs to keep punishing Gordon. They simply hit prohibitively difficult shots, over and over, through double teams and tough coverages. Aaron Gordon did as well as anyone can hope to do against Durant, and KCP at least made Booker work. The wild thing about Booker and Durant's incredible pair of games in Phoenix earlier in the series was that the Nuggets played them pretty tough. Without Paul or Ayton, who could catch lobs and score around the rim when he was sufficiently motivated, the two stars had to create and hit all the team's shots. Paul wasn't great in these playoffs, and the Nuggets funneled shots to him early in the series, but he at least relieves the shot-creation burden on Booker and Durant. The Suns were already stretched thin by Chris Paul's absence, and they found themselves even thinner without Deandre Ayton in Game 6. OK MAL /nxKQl8JuuV- Denver Nuggets May 12, 2023 The Murray-Jokic two-man game was simply too devastating to contain. The Nuggets posted a 122.1 offensive rating in this series, which would have led the regular season, and they did it despite shooting a hair under their regular season percentage from deep. It was a brutal display of offensive basketball, and though Kentavious Caldwell-Pope finally came alive and nailed a bunch of shots, the two teams were evenly matched from three, thanks to a heroic Cameron Payne performance. Nikola Jokic spent the first quarter destroying Jock Landale, then Jamal Murray took over in the second. They didn't commit their first turnover until the dying minutes of the half, at which point their bench had already been doing silly dances to celebrate Denver's increasing number of absurd transition finishes. Game 6 was over at halftime, maybe even before, as the Nuggets closed the last three minutes of the first quarter with a 17-0 run, then ripped off another 13-0 run in the second to build an 81-51 halftime lead. For the second year in a row, the striving Phoenix Suns have been ignominiously eliminated on their home court, by a million points at the hands of a Balkan superstar. ![]() In Denver on Tuesday, we saw how easily the Nuggets could win if Phoenix's two stars were merely normal in Phoenix on Thursday night, we saw what it looks like when one of them is straight-up bad. They had shown zero proficiency at even slowing the Nuggets down, so the only route to the Western Conference Finals was to shoot their way there. Phoenix-Denver was not that.Īfter Devin Booker glowed Betelgeuse-hot in an all-timer of a Game 4 win at home, against a 53-point night from Nikola Jokic, the Suns' win condition was clear, and it was not an optimistic one: Booker and Kevin Durant, producing at a historic level, would have to keep going nuts for their team to have any chance of taking the series. There comes a point in certain great, all-action playoff series, usually after the fourth game, where two relatively evenly matched teams adjust and counter-adjust to each other and reach a tactical stalemate.
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