INGLEWOOD, Calif. — The Denver Nuggets didn’t play good defense this season. They were a middle-of-the-pack team for much of the year (16th in the league before the All-Star break) that got worse in the final months of the season and was bottom 10 in the league after the break.
It’s impossible to play defense like that all season and then flip the switch in the playoffs.
Especially going against a Clippers offense that was the best in the league in the final 20 games of the season, when the Clippers went 17-3.
That’s the story of Game 3 on Thursday night. It was the kind of night where everything worked for the Clippers, even when it shouldn’t have.
After two tight games to open this series, the Clippers’ offense caught fire when it got home to the Intuit Dome — a 132.9 offensive rating behind 21 points and 11 rebounds from Kawhi Leonard — and the Nuggets had no answers.
The result was a 117-83 blowout Clippers win, taking a 2-1 series lead. Game 4 is Saturday afternoon.
“The first two games were very competitive. This game was not,” interim Nuggets coach David Adelman said. “But you can come back Saturday and you can right a lot of wrongs.”
There are a lot of wrongs for Denver to right.
The Clippers rained 3-pointers, hitting 18 on the night and shooting 46.2% from beyond the arc. It was the Clippers’ bench that did much of the damage, led by Derrick Jones Jr. and Nicolas Batum, each hitting four 3-pointers.
In addition to the defense, the Nuggets’ offense struggled, scoring less than a point per possession for the game. Nikola Jokic had an efficient triple-double of 23 points, 13 rebounds and 13 assists, but take him out of the equation and the rest of the Nuggets shot 34.9% on the night. Denver had just six points from their bench.
Usually, when the other Nuggets have struggled this season, Jokic has just done more and done it better. However, that will be difficult against a strong Clippers defense, led by Ivica Zubac, who has played well against Jokic.
It’s a lot of questions for the Nuggets to answer. Maybe too many, this was the kind of blowout playoff win that makes it feel like the Clippers solved the puzzle.
We’ll see on Saturday if that’s the case, or if the former champions have a little more fight left in them.
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