[ad_1]
The second-round series between the Denver Nuggets and the Portland Trail Blazers does not present the same kind of narrative drama as the other semifinal rounds of the NBA 2019 conference. Golden State – Houston proposes a resumption of the attrition war the most convincing of the last series, but it also concerns the great decision of Kevin Durant and the potential end of the Warriors as we know them. Milwaukee-Boston introduced the Giannis Antetokounmpo Bucks, revealing how terrifying they are, but they also explained how Kyrie Irving's imminent choice could tip the house of cards that Danny Ainge spent years building. More than anything, aside from Joel Embiid's health, Toronto-Philadelphia is a nightly referendum on whether Kawhi Leonard and Jimmy Butler should join their respective teams or look for a new long-term home.
There are no super megawatt-free agents in downtown Denver-Portland. Which, honestly, has been rather refreshing. Sometimes it's good to watch two good teams of interesting players play really well at their favorite game styles. (Imagine that!)
The Blazers-Nuggets were a fun watch, and in Thursday's sixth game, Portland made sure we would still have one game, scoring a 119-108 win to force a seventh game back in Colorado on Sunday. The winner goes to the Western Conference Finals to face the Warriors-Rockets survivor. The loser will miss the missed opportunity to return to the last four of the NBA, a trick that the Nuggets have not reached for a decade and that the Blazers have not seen since the year 2000.
Let's review the five most remarkable things about the game that paved the way for a win-and-take-all-day Mother's Day game, starting with the Blazers' backcourt that brought it decisively …
Lady and CJ, taking a stand
The idea that the Blazers will have to separate from Damian Lillard and CJ McCollum if they want to be outmatched and form a training capable of competing for a league title has become one of the most used catch of the commentary. from the NBA. . (Including, uh, here.) You've heard the arguments: they're too small, too much used in doubles, too expensive, too light for playoff achievements. Thursday was something else: all too well.
With their back to the wall, Portland's leaders have mobilized. The Nuggets had largely held Lillard in check in this series, limiting the superstar who praised the Thunder to an average of 23 points on 39.3% of his shots on the ground and a disappointing 21.9% mark on three points since the first match. Thursday, however, Lady lost his temper, finishing with 32 points, a high in the game, 11 shots for 23, with six 3 in 13 attempts. McCollum also stood firm, recording 30 minutes of shooting in 12 minutes in 24 minutes in 42 minutes without rotation.
Lillard exploded in the third quarter, beating all Denver possibilities: covering traps to find space for mid-range jumpers, playing hide-and-seek behind the screens of Enes Kanter and Zach Collins before bombarding Selects near the half-court line to place retreating center Nikola Jokic in the no-man's land of the match, deploying protection defenders and leading them to the cut. It was a masterful performance. McCollum, for his part, was the linchpin of heavy reserve lineups that prompted a quick return to the second and fourth quarter, handling the ball and creating the good look that helped the Blazers stay tied with Lillard at the gap of rest.
They both helped keep the Nuggets at arm's length late in the fourth quarter with some ridiculous shots:
Lillard, who emerged as one of the brightest stars of this playoff series against Oklahoma City, scored 17 goals in the third quarter to take control of the game. McCollum, who is perhaps the least-known playoff hero from 2019 to date, scored 11 points in the fourth to make sure the Blazers retain him. Over the years, we've all heard about this tandem can not to do in the greatest moments of the season, it was pretty cool to see them remember everything they can to avoid the eliminations and get a road victory in Portland from his first conference final position for almost 20 years.
… with a little help from their friends
Once you have asked about the Lillard-McCollum partnership ceiling, the other bumping into Portland has long been that it was essentially a two-man operation. And yet, Thursday's victory owes almost as much to the support formation as to the star guards themselves.
Formerly an object of offensive interest in Utah, Rodney Hood lost his luster last season after falling for the Jazz, being sent to the Cavaliers at the trade deadline, before doing very little to help propel LeBron James in its place. eighth final of the NBA in a row. (In all fairness, having twins in the middle of the first round of the playoffs Most of us would send it in February. After working on Terry Stotts' reserve rotation, Hood began a very unlikely reputation recovery project when he left the airport. save the bacon Blazers in the fourth epic match of the fourth day of last week. He continued his effort in the sixth game by defeating Denver with 25 points on a shot of 8 against 12 in 31 minutes.
With 6 feet 8 inches and 206 pounds with a smooth rider and a soft touch inside, Hood has the size and skills to be a match-up nightmare for a team of Nuggets trimmed with small wings . He played a pivotal role in Portland's clear attempt to attack Denver's barometer Jamal Murray as a defenseman, and proved to be a much more powerful option in this regard than the larger but less talented one. Maurice Harkless's offensive. Hood also made a number on the Nuggets candle and former folklorist Blazers Will Barton – Portland scored 30 points on the 22 possessions on which Barton checked Hood in Game 6, according to NBA.com/Stats – while defending on the wing. Three months ago, Hood looked a little more than an expiring contract in a dead-end Cavs team. Now, thanks to his growing confidence in his ability to punish mismatches and draw from the perimeter, the 26-year-old found himself as the third most important player on the team that won a victory away from the final. the Western Conference.
Hood was not the only reserve of the Blazers to have won a huge victory in the sixth game. Second-year center Zach Collins showed how intriguing he was for Portland's future by protecting the edge (five blocked shots, many more modified) and accumulating 14 points on the shot 4-in. -8. Collins looked so good with Paul Millsap, Nikola Jokic and Mason Plumlee that Stotts had no choice but to stay with the 21-year-old; He played all the fourth quarter, and his 28 minutes and 43 seconds of playing time represent the record he has recorded since January of last season.
Join Collins in the last 12 minutes of match 6: Evan Turner. The versatile swingman catches a lot of sticks for a production that is not quite up to the $ 70 million four-year contract that he signed dizzily in the summer of 2016, a terrifying autonomous agent . did not even attempt a shot, he had his best playoff game. After being toughened by the biggest Millsap in recent games, Turner took the challenge on Thursday, limiting Millsap to two shots on seven of the 24 possessions on which the two players had been paired.
Turner also bit into the glass recovering seven defensive rebounds (only Enes Kanter had more among the Blazers) to help limit the damage the Nuggets bulldozers could do on the offensive boards. And with McCollum's kitchen, Hood and Lillard, Turner played a comfortable role as a facilitator and distributor, handing out seven assists in a single round in 19 minutes:
The formula for a Blazers' win is usually Lillard and McCollum who handles most of the scoring and manufacturing work, then someone else, usually Harkless and Al-Farouq Aminu, who give them at least part of the defense. While Harkless and Aminu continue to fight with their shots in this series – they are a combined 7-30 deep against Denver – Portland needed others to participate in survival. Hood, Collins and Turner obliged.
Nikola Jokic remains unreal
I do not really have a whole spiel here; even if I did, I could not say it better than Tyler Parker did on Thursday. I can not get tired of watching Jokic gallop to annihilate everyone standing in front of him. Large objects that move at such a deliberate pace should not be able to move where they want and do what they want. And even:
Twenty-nine points out of 10 shots on 15, 12 rebounds, eight assists and four turnovers for the Serbian revelation, which teamed up with Murray and Gary Harris – all of whom played the first quarter – to bet the Nuggets at the earliest Only 10 points forward to see the bulk of it go away once it's taken to the bench. (More information about this in a minute.) Jokic was the best player in this series, and the best non-Durant player from all the western side of the range, and he will now face the second game 7 of his first playoff series of the NBA. . He had trouble in the first game, scoring a 9-to-26 score in a match that Denver has survived, largely thanks to a curious clock management from San Antonio, but we know that it's not the same. he is able to do much more than a possible elimination. Thu.
What happened to the nugget bench?
The Denver Reservists, who may have been the league's second best unit all season, have ruined everything. (Although, to be fair, the non-joketic starters also stumbled, Murray, Millsap and Harris shot a combined total of 10-to-36 after the first quarter.) Barton scored seven points, at least, but needed eight shots to do it. so and regularly burned on the defense; Portland outscored Denver by 25 points in 26 minutes. Plumlee's playoffs continued, while Collins outclassed him at every turn and Jokic now seemed to be a much higher defensive option, leaving one wondering what kind of value the veterinarian has been offering for the last six years at this stage.
Malik Beasley, a consistent 3-D performer throughout the season, managed to get eight shots in 10 minutes – and missed them all. Monte Morris, one of the NBA's best backup guards this season, seems lost in the fog since the end of the Spurs series; Coach Michael Malone shot him after less than three minutes Thursday, which would have left the For the first time this season, he is the victim of a bad game., and did not reinstate him for his typical stay at the beginning of the fourth quarter, preferring to stay with Murray, who ended up recording a record 45 minutes.
The depth of quality was a big part of the Nuggets push to 54 wins and no. 2 seeds. In a team with a single All-Star, you need every arm to get where you want. The end of the second round of the series seems to be a particularly difficult time for the guys who start to jump into the sea.
Small ball wins big
Losing Jusuf Nurkic a few weeks before the start of the playoffs was supposed to underscore these Blazers, probably eliminating their second best player, their main defender and the beefiest men like Jokic. In Game 6, however, Portland turned that weakness – insufficient height, with only Kanter (only 2-in-9 on the floor as he struggles through a separate shoulder) and Collins's second student on the menu – in a strength .
Meyers Leonard, the third-choice player, caught a DNP-CD, while Stotts instead chose to rely on four smaller teams to put his best players on the floor as often as possible. Collins, Turner, Hood, McCollum and Seth Curry, a group that did not play a single ball in one go during the regular season Glass cleaningThis could be spreading on the field with three dangerous, fairly believable shooters, and Turner, whose career was completely outclassed in Boston when Brad Stevens started playing him as a second unit pointer. It worked, the unit exceeding the Nuggets by 13 points in 12 minutes of speech; Another group of four balls, Kanter-Hood-McCollum-Curry-Lillard, earned a plus-seven points in two minutes.
These alignments are vulnerable on the defensive side. In a game 7, you'd understand a little if Stotts decided to be a bit more conservative, to ride the guys (Harkless, Aminu) that he thought he could get stops, and just hoped they would start doing more of the wide open looks that Lady and CJ create for them.
Still, Portland does not stop the Nuggets anyway: Denver scored 115.2 points for 100 possessions against the Blazers, by far the all-teams offensive record of the second day. The Blazers are better at defense than before, but they remain a team highly dependent on his attack, the fluid movement pattern installed by his very good head coach and talent in the creation of blows and the game of his stone guards angular. After eliminating the elimination in the sixth match, Stotts decided to double the shot and the making of the game, and that paid off. With a place in the online conference final, it might be a good idea for him to play the same hand and force Malone, Jokic and the rest of the Nuggets to prove they can beat her.
[ad_2]
Source link