Were You Fooled into Thinking That Carmelo Anthony is Dumb?

AND YOU THOUGHT CARMELO ANTHONY WAS DUMB!

As gradually reported in several recent reports, Carmelo Anthony has completely broken out of several boxes during this playoff season:

1. Prior to this year, he was a star in only one out of four playoff series, the 2007 Nuggets-Spurs series. This year, so far at least, he has broken out of that great regular seasons followed by miserable post seasons box.

2. Prior to this year, Carmelo Anthony was willing to defer too much to other offensive players, such as Allen Iverson last year. This year, tired of all the playoff flameouts of prior years, Anthony has decided he isn’t going to defer to anyone, that he is going to become the power scorer in the playoffs that he clearly was meant to be. He was not willing to play an equal or inferior role to Chauncey Billups or anyone else in this year in the playoffs.

3. Prior to this year, he was willing to believe in George Karl as an offensive Coach. That started to come to an end a year ago when against the Lakers Melo correctly concluded that the Nuggets quit in the playoffs and that George Karl was the most important reason for that quitting. At this point, it is clear he has realized that Karl is a very good defensive Coach but is not a very good offensive Coach, which is absolutely true.

Did Chauncey Billups explain this stuff to Carmelo Anthony? I couldn’t tell you, but I tend to doubt it.

So the Nuggets, with their aggressive, hard fouling, bulldog defense, and the classic, power scoring Carmelo Anthony snag game two in the 2009 West finals against the Lakers in Los Angeles, and go back to Denver still holding on to the title of America’s most amazing basketball team in years, probably many years. The Nuggets and the Lakers are tied one game each in their best of seven games series.

Completely raw and unedited but accurate game notes are here. Don't expect careful sentence structure or perfect spelling in that game commentary there.

Quest for the Ring has been learning some new things from this improbable run of the Nuggets, many of which have been reported recently. The latest thing we have learned is that if you know a player is smarter than he appears, just wait for a year or two and sooner or later he will surprise or maybe even shock you. Just like in non-sports situations, there are people who “play dumb” for various reasons.

Carmelo Anthony has been enjoying an extended childhood and playing dumb for the past few years, for so long that I was more and more thinking that he might actually be dumb. But give me credit; I never actually concluded that he was dumb; I will never again waste any time in the future thinking he might be dumb.

You have been a sly and deceptive one, Melo, lurking in the background, assuming Karl knew what he is doing for way too long and waiting to prove him and everyone else wrong when the time was just right to do so, when there was enough defense on your team, combined with your offense, to actually win playoff games, including one in Los Angeles no less. By doing it this dramatic way, you can make up for most of the stupid statements that have been made about you for many years in one foul swoop.

Melo is now in effect manipulating the media almost as well as Obama does.

The last few years have been like the ultimate pump fake: Carmelo Anthony pump faked out the entire sports world, laugh out loud.

SELFISH PLAYERS?
Rather often you see people refer to the concept of a “selfish” basketball player. For example, almost all of the Iverson haters refer to him as being a selfish player. One of the reasons I have been investigating the Iverson mess is that it was obvious to me from early on that this is a dubious concept.

Saying it is dubious is too generous actually. Learn this well kiddies: there is almost no such thing as a “selfish basketball player” in the NBA. (I would expect that it is more possible to have a selfish player at the high school level, but I can assure you that a selfish high school player is never going to get close to the NBA.) Remember for the future, every time you post on the internet that this or that NBA player is a selfish player, you are making a fool out of yourself.

As an aside, will all the highly paid TV announcers please stop using the word “chippy” to describe games with a lot of fouls, contact, and raised tempers? That word is goofy to say the least. But I digress.

Players who take a lot of shots don’t do so for the hell of it or because they are selfish. They meet numerous preconditions for doing so….

Players who take scoring seriously are invariably players who have better track records than other players at heavily scoring the ball. They have higher scoring percentages over the years. They have a greater versatility in how they can score. They have spent more time in the gym practicing shots than other players have. They have the skills to make a lot of shots, and just as importantly, different kinds of shots. They have in games an ability to maintain some degree of balance between different types of shooting. They have the mindset that they will take responsibility for losing a game if they don’t choose their shots well and/or if they miss too many shots.

There aren’t that many players in existence who meet all those qualifications, but they are extremely important for winning pro playoff games. While there are fools who call such players “selfish,” I call players such as this “power scorers”.

Any player who does not meet those qualifications will not game after game take too many shots. Players with even half a brain know that if they do that they will be more and more benched and eventually they will be out of the League. If a younger player is taking too many shots, the coach simply informs him that he is not qualified to take as many shots as he is taking, and I can guarantee you that the player will reduce his shooting after that.

As has been stated many times at Quest, it is much easier to win playoff games with a power scorer than without one. This could not be more obvious than this year, when now that Carmelo Anthony has thrown Karl’s theory that no one should heavily dominate scoring out the window and has joined the other three power scorers on the final four playoff teams of 2009:

1. Cleveland Cavaliers: LeBron James
2. Orlando Magic: Dwight Howard
3. Los Angeles Lakers: Kobe Bryant
4. Denver Nuggets: Carmelo Anthony

Wow, that is good company.

Carmelo Anthony has finally proved Karl was wrong about him when Karl claimed that Anthony would never be able to challenge for a Championship from the power scoring mode. I’ll be damned if he is not challenging for a Championship as a power scorer right here and now.

Last year Carmelo Anthony realized that Karl does not have all the answers for winning playoff games.

This year he decided to provide some of the answers himself.

So it turns out there is a little Che Guevara in Carmelo Anthony after all, a little bit of a rebel.

Now the next question is can Anthony continue to jab step the Lakers into the dust?







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George Karl Mostly to Blame for Nuggets' Game One Loss to Lakers: Too Many Defensive Guards, Not Enough Trust in J.R. Smith

The Nuggets, as everyone knew they would, brought a blend of tough and rough defense and a fast and furious offense too to Game One of the West Final Series against the Lakers. Also appearing was the classic Carmelo Anthony, a power scoring and even power defending Carmelo Anthony.

But unfortunately, the more things change, the more they stay the same. While in the previous two seasons numerous huge Allen Iverson efforts ended up in a Nuggets loss, in this game it was a huge effort by Carmelo Anthony that ended up resulting in a loss rather than a win. The Nuggets lost 105-103 to the Lakers in game one in Los Angeles.

I will tell you the number one reason why the Nuggets lost this game to the Lakers, even though the Nuggets' defense held the Lakers offense to a miserable shooting percentage of 41.1%, while the Nuggets shot a very, very good 48.6%. The Nuggets should have won this game.

The number one reason the Nuggets lost it is among the sixteen reasons I thought back in January that would lead to the Nuggets not even winning a single playoff series: J.R. Smith has not been developed properly as a pro basketball player.

Not only does this relatively recent full report explain in detail why Karl failed with respect to J.R. Smith, but numerous references are made to this big problem in reports from 2007-08.

By the way, I thought that enough of the 16 factors would be in play and would cause Denver to fail to win a single playoff series, but what actually happened is that a smaller number of the 16 factors emerged than I expected. So the Nuggets were able to get by the walking wounded Hornets and the defensively challenged Mavericks. But the Lakers are another matter entirely.

But now back to the Smith situation:

Smith was trashed repeatedly in 2006-07 and in 2007-08 by Karl, in public no less, due to factors beyond Smith's control, namely, due to Smith's immaturity and impulsiveness.

Karl simply failed to see the potential in the very young player, and obviously wanted Smith to be traded. But Nuggets management did see the big upside potential, and they signed Smith to a mid-level contract in the summer of 2008.

But Karl has doggedly and seemingly vindictively persisted in refusing to make Smith a starter, even though Smith by early this season was no longer a defensive liability in any way, shape or form. If anything by early in 2008-09, Smith had become a defensive asset.

Well, if Karl does not like a guard in the mold of J.R. Smith, what kind of guard does Karl like? To get at this, let's see how the playing times for the guards other than starting point guard Chauncey Billups went in this game. This games' playing times, as you might expect, were reflective of what was typical throughout the season.

J.R. Smith (2-Guard) 25 minutes
Dahntay Jones (2-Guard) 16 minutes
Anthony Carter (Point Guard) 15 minutes
Linas Kleiza (Guard-Forward) 7 minutes

I hate to inform anyone who does not know, but of the above four players, there is only one who the Lakers would even consider having on their team and that one would be J.R. Smith. The other three they most likely would not want on their team at all, let alone starting. The reason is simple. For different reasons, the other three players are not full scale players offensively.

EARTH TO KARL:
It's time for some Earth to Karl transmissions:

Earth to Karl #1 Dahntay Jones will hardly be able to score much at all in this series against the Great Wall of Los Angeles: Gasol, Bynum, Odom, Ariza. And Kobe Bryant will not be slowed down by Jones anywhere near as much as was the young and slightly banged up Chris Paul. It just isn't going to happen on our planet.

You need someone else to guard Kobe Bryant, someone like J.R. Smith, for example, who can even when he is burned offset many of Bryant's scores with scores of his own. Or just keep Carmelo Anthony and Kenyon Martin on Kobe all night. Or try Renaldo Balkman; he's got 2 inches on Jones and he is more defensively skilled than Jones is when all is said and done.

Mr. Karl, you are going to get killed by Kobe and Company if you keep thinking that you can get away with having Dahntay Jones guard Kobe Bryant.

For more about George Karl's guard rotation errors this year, see this report.

Earth to Karl #2: Anthony Carter is too short against the Lakers, and you don't have an organized offense anyways, so why do you need him in there for more than 10 minutes a game to rest Chauncey Billups? You don't. Stop overplaying Anthony Carter.

But laugh out loud, I have been saying this for going on two years now, and Karl always insists on not only overplaying Carter, but on overplaying short, defensively oriented guards in general. There is only one thing worse than overplaying Dahntay Jones, and that is overplaying both Dahntay Jones and Anthony Carter in the same game.

Even worse still is having Carter and Billups, the backup and the starting point guards, in the game at the same time. In game one, this happened for almost half of the second quarter and for very close to 5 minutes of the 4th quarter. Wrong move, especially since it was Carter's lame inbound pass intended for, you guessed it, Chauncey Billups, that was picked off by Trevor Ariza, allowing the Lakers to take away Denver's last chance to win this game.

I mean, I couldn't dream this stuff up if I tried.

Earth to Karl #3: Kleiza was sort of an offensive asset last year, but this year, he fell off badly and should not be playing in this series. Period. At the very least, Balkman should be getting the minutes Kleiza is getting.

Earth to Karl #4: For the love of the man in the sky George Karl, if you could not bear to start J.R. Smith in this series (and long before it) why didn't you start Guard-Forward Renaldo Balkman? He is actually a better defender than is Dahntay Jones, and while not being a full scale pro offensive player, at least he is better than Jones offensively as well. He's very much like a younger and slightly less talented version of Chris Andersen.

KARL HAS UNDERESTIMATED BOTH SMITH AND THE GAME OF BASKETBALL
Sorry Mr. Karl, your inability to fully appreciate J.R. Smith and the offensive vision and weapons he brings on the court was what did you in in game 1. You have failed in your task to make Smith all that he can be; he needs to start to be all that he can be. Mr. Karl, you were destined to lose this game due to your conclusions and actions going back many, many months ago. And this Smith thing may very well do you in for the series.

Yes, this is a little thing compared to your offensive coaching shortcomings in general. But in a tight game in the Western Conference Finals, all it takes is a relatively little thing to lose a game you should have won.

To summarize mathematically, for the Nuggets to win, Smith needs to be playing 30-35 minutes a game, Balkman 10-15 minutes a game, Carter should be backing Billups, and Jones should be backing J.R. Smith. Carter and Billups should never ever be on the court at the same time.

Mr. Karl, your team needed J.R. Smith to start this game, to have the confidence of a starter, to have the 3-point shooting of a starter, and the courage to attack the Great Wall of Los Angeles of a starter. Bench players do not ever have much if any success taking it to the rack against the Great Wall of Los Angeles. You needed Smith to be in the flow with the other starters, to not be the odd man out at crunch time like he was.

Instead of a full scale, starting J.R. Smith at the end of the game, you had J.R. Smith standing there on the line with 3 seconds left and having to miss his second free throw on purpose so that the Nuggets might get lucky and be able to stuff in a tying bucket at the buzzer.

Instead, Kobe Bryant, another 2-guard like Smith, snagged Smith's intentional miss and heeved it down court as the last 3 seconds ran out.

Let's compare here:

Kobe Bryant, Lakers starter, 2-guard, Superstar and usually almost perfect, is fully trusted by his Coach even though he can be a little impulsive, headstrong, and immature. And even though he used to be much more so than now.

J.R. Smith: Nuggets reserve, 2-guard, definitely a Star and almost a Superstar, is NOT trusted all that much by his Coach because he can be impulsive, headstrong, and immature. And because he used to be much more so than now.

See the difference? See one reason that Phil Jackson is a better Coach than is George Karl?

Phil Jackson always respects offense, and he will make any player who can bring offense all that he can be. He will not stuff a player like J.R. Smith down a hole on the bench somewhere. Granted, the very risk-averse Lakers' managers would probably never "take a chance" with a very young and raw player such as Smith in the first place. But if they did have him, Phil Jackson would not stuff him down a rat hole on the bench.

Jackson does not mess around with trying to have someone win the Best 6th Man Award. He puts his best five players out there as starters, and he uses a large rotation, almost always 9 players and sometimes 10, with the 4-5 reserves being insurance policies for wins. The idea behind all these reserves as insurance is that you have four or even five wild card chances amongst your reservies to empower and enable a player who is "feeling it" in a particular game, and so is able to pump in 10-15 points in 10-20 minutes, and/or is able to make some brilliant stops.

Coaches: follow what Phil Jackson does! Trust me (or actually trust Phil, laugh out loud) you will win more games that way.

Another thing Mr. Karl does not understand besides the importance of offense in general is that 2-guards are supposed to be a little impulsive and headstrong and they are in most team situations supposed to be a little more concerned with offense than with defense. The position is called "shooting guard". Shooting as in what is done on offense. Get it?

Guards who are careful and thinking often and not usually instinctual and impulsive, are point guards, not shooting guards. You need both kinds of guards on your team to win the Quest.

An NBA coach, just like any coach, is supposed to make all of his players all that they can be. Sports is not about pigeonholing and red flagging players for personality characteristcs beyond their control and that have little impact on playing the game when all is said and done.

I will grant you that Karl has come a long way from two years ago, when Smith was not even allowed to play a dozen minutes a game in the Nuggets 4-1 first round loss to the Spurs. He wasn't allowed to play at all, in fact.

What a confidence booster and good development that was. Not.

Unfortunately, Mr. Karl has not come far enough with respect to J.R. Smith and, as a direct result, Smith has not come far enough and, as a direct result of that, the Nuggets lost game one of this series. One thing leads to another, you know.

More broadly, it seems at the moment that the Nuggets are going to lose this series. The number one reason will NOT be that defensive intensity and a lot of fouling is a hopeless strategy. (If that's the only way you can defend well, then you have no choice but to go for it.)

No, it seems that the Nuggets are going to lose the series because Karl and the Nuggets do not understand that basketball is NOT biased in favor of defense the way football is. Karl and the Nuggets do not understand that you can not have a substantial number of players out there who have very little role to play in the offense.

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That Team With Nine Rings to Play That Amazing Team--Lakers vs Nuggets, 2009

On every journey where almost everyone you run up against is tying to stop you from reaching the destination, you will eventually come to a river that seems too wide or too swift to cross, a mountain too towering and rocky to climb up and over, or a wilderness to big to find your way out of. The Conference finals, the final four of the NBA, have been where these kinds of almost insurmountable obstacles have been engaged and then the journey ended for dozens of very, very good and some extremely good teams over the decades.

There have been millions who have sworn that they saw NBA Champions never crowned playing and losing in some of the Conference Finals, because they were knocked off by a fluke or by unfair fate in the Conference Final.

How about for example the 2000 Portland Trailblazers, who lost to the 2000 Los Angeles Lakers in game seven of the West finals when the Lakers mounted the biggest comeback in a 7th game in history, 15 points, in the 4th quarter no less. And you thought Kobe Bryant and the Lakers had trouble this year with Aaron Brooks, Sean Battier, Ron Artest, and the Rockets? That was nothing compared to having to deal with the 2000 Blazers and their 15 point fourth quarter, game seven lead.

Conference Finals losers can be teams that may have been more talented than the ones that defeated them and that went on to the NBA Championship. They include teams that were proud, with amazing energy, amazing spirit, and amazing will to compete. Teams that were often younger, teams that had a dreamer or two, a player for example like the Nuggets’ Nene, whose dream to come to the United States and be in the NBA playoffs came true. Teams whose players did not have many fat Nike contracts, if any at all. Teams that millions swore were going to win it all. Teams that in a perfect world would never be called “the loser” of the Conference Final, but only maybe “the team that was not chosen”.

Or sometimes the Conference Final loser was and will be the team whose coaching staff did not understand the game of basketball as well as the other staff did.

Now the Nuggets have come to that river, or to that mountain, or to that wilderness. Or actually they have come up to all three at once; the Lakers are that good. They have come up to the Los Angeles “Nine Rings” Lakers. They have come up to the Great Wall of Los Angeles, formed by Pau Gasol, Lamar Odom, Andrew Bynum, and Trevor Ariza. Although probably not the biggest such Wall in NBA history, it’s the kind of wall that ordinary semifinal winners don’t get past.

ON THE QUEST TO DETERMINE HOW TO GET PAST THE WALL
What exactly separates the winners from the losers is what this site is all about. We already have made a lot of progress in identifying the real keys to winning the Quest, but there is a good distance to go still. We will produce as many reports and take as long as needed to find all of the reasons.

In the near future, we will have a page where there will be a summary, Master List of all identified factors that allow teams to win the Quest. We might call it the “How to Win the Quest for the Ring for Dummies Who Don't Have the Time to find out the Whys and the How’s". In other words, there will be a warning at the top that the devil is in the details and just knowing the summary is not going to get you very far, since you have to know how to specifically achieve those things, and since you have to know when you don't have the prerequisites to achieve one or more of them.

A FEW OF THE THINGS THE NUGGETS TAUGHT US IN 2008-09
The Nuggets, those unpredictable devils coached by someone who we sometimes think of as a blood relative of the devil, have helped this site a lot this year, by teaching us, among many other things, that:

1. You can not predict basketball winners or losers, even playoff series, weeks or months in advance. It’s not like if you are an economist predicting the unemployment rate or the gross domestic product that will be revealed at the next report, which is actually easy to get right by comparison. Injuries alone make the whole idea ridiculous, but predicting series far in advance would not work even if there were no injuries.

2. You can get one of the best defensive players in the League for almost no money, as the Nuggets did this year with Chris Andersen. All managers should donate $1,000 to charity as a penalty for not picking up the unemployed Andersen before the Nuggets did. What is wrong with you people, you 29 managements that just stood around with your hands in your pockets while the Nuggets swiped Andersen off the waiver wires for chump change, whereupon Quest made a fool of itself by reporting that the Nuggets could not go very far with Andersen, since clearly the other teams had little if any interest in him.

Well, it turned out that Andersen was the 2nd best total and per game blocker in the NBA this year, behind only Dwight Howard of the final four Magic in first. Since Andersen played only 20.6 minutes per game while Howard played 35.7 minutes per game, the true blocking leader was Andersen by a country mile; Andersen led the NBA by a massive amount in percentage of possessions resulting in his making a block.

For the overall picutre, here are the top 20 defenders according to the Basketball Reference site:

1. Dwight Howard-ORL 94.6
2. Kevin Garnett-BOS 97.5
3. LeBron James-CLE 99.1
4. Anderson Varejao-CLE 100.0
5. Kendrick Perkins-BOS 100.2
6. Tim Duncan-SAS 100.2
7. Zydrunas Ilgauskas-CLE 100.5
8. Chris Andersen-DEN 100.6
9. Yao Ming-HOU 100.8
10. Rajon Rondo-BOS 100.9
11. Lamar Odom-LAL 101.6
12. Trevor Ariza-LAL 102.1
13. Luis Scola-HOU 102.3
14. Gerald Wallace-CHA 102.4
15. Joel Przybilla-POR 102.4
16. Samuel Dalembert-PHI 102.6
17. Emeka Okafor-CHA 102.7
18. Rashard Lewis-ORL 102.8
19. Chris Paul-NOH 103.1
20. Ron Artest-HOU 103.3

You see how Chris Andersen is way, way up there, in between Yao Ming and Tim Duncan? That is some serious company. To say that Andersen was for real would be a stupid understatement.

The icing on the cake turned out to be that Andersen also converted numerous defensive rebounds to offensive rebounds and scores, by almost literally flying in from 10, 15, even 20 feet out, denying the defensive rebound to the dumbfounded would be rebounder, and stuffing it in for the score.

3. Your fans may forgive you even if you in effect declare that how you were playing the game in recent years was dumb and goofy. Or probably, it is more accurate to say that most of the fans you had back then have moved on to other interests, and now you have a new group of hardcore fans who won't know about or will make excuses about last year, and believe no matter what.

Change your scheme, and you get a whole new fan base, which makes running a sports franchise successfully far easier than I thought it was. Now I guess I know why NBA general managers are not fired all that often: their jobs are not as difficult as I was thinking.

I mean, the Nuggets' manager recently won an award for undoing the stupid mistake he made earlier, for getting rid of Allen Iverson, after he himself made the blunder of obtaining him less than two years earlier. How many awards have you won by undoing your own blunder, laugh out loud?

KARL DIDN'T LIKE HIS OWN TEAM, AND THE QUEST WAS BORN
One such 2008-09 Nuggets "super fan” would be George Karl, and I’ll tell you a secret: this was quite a reversal. Karl was not a big fan of the Nuggets in 2006-07, and he almost hated the Nuggets last year, in 2007-08. He hated his own team, apparently because he had no faith in offense winning a lot of games, and/or in his ability to coach offense.

Meanwhile, and by contrast, Quest was born as a Nuggets site in late 2006, and when the doctor slapped us in the ass and we started breathing as a basketball winning information machine, we were really, really liking the almost limitless offensive potential of those two Nuggets teams.

We followed every game, every move of those teams, and gradually grew to hate the failure of the Nuggets to do much with the offense other than watch Allen Iverson run around and take a lot of shots and make a lot of assists and get to the line a whole lot because the referees have a lot of respect for a Hall of Fame, less than six feet tall, point guard who is playing both guard pisitions at once but no one gives him credit for it since there is no such position.

But that was then and this is now.

GAME ON--TUESDAY MAY 19 2009
So go ahead Nuggets, you go out there and take your best shot against those Lakers with their metro area of over nine million people and with their nine rings. While you have less than three million and zero rings.

Try to confuse the Lakers, Coach Phil Jackson, and the referees, by having two completely different ways of playing. Sometimes you can play according to George Karl’s half insane all defense and fast breaking all the time way of playing, and sometimes you can play some real hoops, like you did in games four and five of the Mavericks series.

It appears that Dallas Coach Rick Carlisle and one of the top ten veteran players in the League, Dirk Nowitzki, were dead serious when they said that the Nuggets can advance to play in the Champjionship, most likely versus the Cavaliers. Endorsements from both the Coach and the best player don’t come along every day.

QUEST VIEW IN JANUARY, AND NOW ON THE EVE OF THE SERIES
While we still don’t think the Nuggets can get to the Championship, Quest is proud of the Nuggets and proud that this site was born as a site dedicated only to them. We’re alright with having been made to look a little foolish by predicting that the team would fall into many of George Karl’s traps, many of which are set up as a result of the man’s lack of confidence about his own teams and about the power of basketball to give the win to those who love to make hoops, regardless of supposed personality problems they may appear to have.

I mean, the man for real falls into his own traps! But the Nuggets players have lately shown some amazing ability to keep away from many of those George Karl traps.

Specifically, we predicted, way back in January, that the Nuggets would be bounced in the playoffs quickly again. We made it sound so official and authoritative, as if it definitely would happen. We were 100% convinced that the Nuggets would be limited by Karl in enough ways that they would lose again. But against the Mavericks if not before, they did a prison break out of that jail.

So all we ended up doing back in January by making it a foregone conclusion was a good job at setting ourselves up to look goofy. It was as if we were predicting the next number of jobs lost report, which you can do over 98% of the time without looking goofy, because it turns out that it is much easier to predict economics developments than it is whether a team will win a playoff series three months later.

In January we made a list of sixteen detailed reasons why the Nuggets would lose. In April! Many of the items on that list have not come to pass, as a result of this team being too smart and too athletic to fall into those traps.

On the other hand, if and when, as expected, the Nuggets lose to the Lakers, some of those reasons are sure to be involved.

But damn, all I had to do to avoid looking goofy during this whole "The Nuggets Shock America" thing was to phrase the claim this way: “The Nuggets will lose in the first round if many of the following things happen. And they will win if many of these things do not happen." But no, I had to sound like Nostradamus, laugh out loud.

It's funny how that, as well as Quest botched this up, writers who already have written millions of basketball words over more than a decade, such as David Friedman, know enough to couch all of their predictions this way: he starts all of his playoff predictions with: (name of team) will win if…, but (name of team) will win if. And he waits until just before a series starts to even do that.

That’s how we will be usually phrasing predictions in future reports, I can assure you. We made a few mistakes during your first million words, what more can I say?

But for the record, Friedman predicted the Nuggets would not get out the first round also. Laugh out loud; Mr. Five Million Words was wrong too.

Actually though, to be fair to ESPN writers, to sportswriters everywhere else, to Mr. Friedman, and to myself, I think hardly anyone in America other than a few teenagers and a few super fans in Denver predicted that the Nuggets would be playing the Lakers in the West finals this year.

THE NUGGETS' AMAZING SEASON
In the end all this Nuggets season was ever going to be about was whether the tragedy of last year would be repeated, if not in the same way in some other new, twisted way. The Nuggets went down in 2008 as the only 50 wins or more playoff team to not win a single, solitary playoff team!

The questions for this year were: Would the Nuggets quit the Quest again, during a game no less, as Carmelo Anthony realized they did last year? Would it be another sad year in general?

See Carmelo Anthony informing everyone, after game 3 in May 2008, that the Nuggets quit during the 2008 Nuggets-Lakers series, at the end of this report.

Although we knew this season could not possibly be as tragic as last year, we were convinced it was going to be another sad one. We thought that the Nuggets, having run out of money and offensive credibility, were simply not going to have the manpower to compete with teams such as the Hornets and the Mavericks.

THE GANG OF FOUR
We asked for example: is Chris Andersen anything more than a circus act, and who the heck is Dahntay Jones? We usually but not always spelled Jones’ first name right.

Andersen, Jones, the veteran Kenyon Martin, and the not as much of a little kid anymore either JR Smith were the Nuggets’ tough guys this year, the "we are going to get some stops from uncalled fouls and we don’t give a damn about it" crew.

But if that rough attitude you have with a bunch of your players is the only way you can defend, if you don’t have the best of hands for defending without fouling, and if you probably can’t get the referees to give you the calls they give to the well known defensive veterans, then you might as well defend that way, even though you most likely can not possibly win a Ring by doing that.

Another reason you can’t blame Denver for doing it though is because everyone with half a brain can realize that not all fouls are called in the NBA, and that the more aggressive and energetic a team is on defense, the more uncalled fouls they will “earn” from the zebras.

It’s as if the Nuggets were saying to the refs: “We know you won’t give us rogues many uncalled fouls individually, but we’ll operate our defense in overdrive and get a good number of uncalled fouls as a team. We will swarm you zebras with energetic and rough defending. Because maybe you will not individually but you will respect us as a team. And that will get us some wins”

And that rough and tough way of defending did get the Nuggets wins they would not have gotten otherwise, about 10-15 of them in the regular season. But as already reported, and as you will see proved in detail in the future, only a tiny number of teams have won the Quest while doing this, and all of them had a higher quality defense to go along with the rough defending.

OTHER 2009 NUGGETS
The Nuggets' center Nene played the whole year for the first time in the history of the World, and as someone who can hardly be stopped. I mean, Tim Duncan is probably happy he didn’t have to go up against the too much like a freight train to stop Brazilian.

We thought that certain players were still going to be little kids, whether or not they were benched by George “The Bencher” Karl.

But there are no little kids on the Nuggets this year, even Dahntay Jones you would hardly call a "little kid," and Karl has not forbidden anyone from playing in the playoffs this year. So the manpower has appeared out of nowhere, as has Karl liking his team for a change.

We were very happy especially that Carmelo Anthony this year proved that he is not a little kid anymore, and that he proved to be a little bit of a rebel, against his Coach to some extent. Being a man and being a little bit of a rebel are two among many prerequisites for winning the Quest. Not to mention that most teams that have won the Quest have had a player who is totally dedicated to and responsible for making hoops, with everything else paling in significance.

For the Nuggets it was not another sad year at all.

It was all just amazing.

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CARMELO ANTHONY AFTER GAME THREE OF LAST YEAR'S 4-0 ROUT BY THE LAKERS OVER THE NUGGETS--THIS SHOULD NEVER HAPPEN ON A PRO BASKETBALL TEAM

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