Nugget's Strategy is a Loser; Spurs Win 96-89

The Spurs did the same things they did in game 3 and so did the Nuggets, so the result was the same, a Spurs win that was bigger than the score makes it look, 96-89. The Spurs now have a 3-1 stranglehold on the best of 7 series and will likely close out the Nuggets on Wednesday night in San Antonio. For alot of detail on how the Spurs win games, read my game reports for games 2 and 3, especially the report on game 3. For alot of detail on why the Nuggets were basically blown out in this series despite being a more athletic and talented team, read on here.

In sports, as in life, if you think you are going to lose, you will lose, and you will almost always lose in sports if you are playing an experienced opponent who knows exactly how to win. Let's look at five of the self defeating assumptions that the Denver Coach and possibly others in the Nugget's organization came up with. First, George Karl, at the least, and maybe others in the front office, thought the Nuggets were doomed in the playoffs many months ago. In their book, the Nuggets were simply not disciplined and experienced enough to be able to win in the playoffs this year. Second, they assumed that there was not enough time to integrate Iverson onto the team. Third, they assumed that the team lacks "mental toughness," and I am not completely sure what they have been talking about, but I will make an educated guess later in this report. Fourth, they assumed that Melo's obsession with scoring has to be eliminated at all costs. So Karl criticised the League scoring leader in public, in the newspapers, only to have to later backtrack in public when he realized what a mistake going public was. Fifth, Karl and maybe some others assumed that all of the acrobatics that the Nugget's Coach went through with the lineup and the rotations were worthless, and that the Nuggets had about the worst bench in basketball. They also assumed the Spurs were probably the most unbeatable team in the League, so that the only way to keep the series respectable would be to abandon the bench and go with Melo and A.I. for well over 40 minutes a game, while at the same time having no plan and no desire to have either one of them dominate and attempt to take over games.

Every one of these assumptions was clearly a blunder. First of all, as the Warriors are now proving against the Mavericks, it is stupid to assume in advance that you can most likely not win a best of 7 game series against a great team. Nothing is written in stone in sports, and if you can unleash the talent on your team, and you have the will to win, you can defeat with athleticism and energy a very experienced and knowledgeable team. The fact that the Warriors are beating the Mavericks just makes being stuck with Karl even more miserable than it already is, because the Warriors are playing more or less like the Nuggets were playing in the first half of the season, until George "Scrooge" Karl, focusing on the negatives only and forgetting about the positives of that style, lowered the boom and banned that style of play.

Second, the assumption that Iverson could not be fully integrated on the team was not based on any logic that I know, but it turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophesy. Iverson was fully integrated on the team only during an eight game stretch in late February and early March, when he was the point guard. Give Iverson something to do and he will do it. In this game, Iverson ended up confused as to exactly what he was to do, which is logical since the Nuggets did not really have set offensive plays to speak of, particulary ones started by someone other than Blake.

Following game 4, sports writers such as Hollinger at ESPN were left to give their opinions as to what Iverson should have done, such as getting the ball to Melo more, especially in the 4th quarter. But how quickly Hollinger and others forget that Melo was no longer supposed to be the go-to guy under Karl's ruinous plans. In fact, Iverson was doing exactly what Karl wanted, which was to try to score in isolation as much as possible. In the end, Karl didn't trust anyone on his team to score, except for Iverson and Melo, and I guess he figured: why bother to develop a good set of offensive plays when no one except A.I. and Melo can score?

Neither the Nuggets nor Iverson magically played better immediately when Iverson was starting at the point at the end of the winter, but since this was just one of George Karl's many little experiments and was not allowed to continue long enough to produce real results, we will never know whether it would have produced big results or not, unless it is tried again next season. Steve Blake is a George Karl kind of player, to say the least. He's as steady and dependable as they come, he works hard in practice, understands the basics of the game well, does exactly what he is instructed to do by the coaches, and is as unselfish as you can get. He is the kind of player that makes life easy on a coach. Unfortunately, he is about the last kind of player you want facing the mighty San Antonio Spurs in the playoffs. The Spurs made mincemeat of Blake in game 4, stealing the ball from him 4 times and pressuring him to miss every one of his 6 shots except for one. Blake who had 2 points, 4 assists and the 4 turnovers in 35 minutes, was utterly demolished by the Spurs. George Karl can talk about mental toughness, a professional team, and not quitting all he wants, but there is, in the end, no excuse for having Blake as a 35 minute starter against the Spurs, when there was the obvious alternative of having A.I. play the point and J.R. and Kleiza share the shooting guard spot.

With regard to the third mistake, to me, that mental toughness thing sounds like more of a coaching thing than a player thing, but I will try my best here. The term brings to mind whether you can make quick decisions based on knowledge, and make those decisions in tough situations. So with players, the mental toughness thing would be whether they can execute in high pressure situations or not. If they know what to do and do it, then they are mentally tough. However, if they don't know what to do, but are ready to do what they think is the right thing to do, then they still would be "mentally tough," but not ready to play the Spurs, because they don't know what to do to beat them. In other words, mental toughness sounds like it is, at best, half of what is needed. So why does George Karl use the term "mental toughness" over and over again? I don't know, because it's only a small part of what is needed, and harping on that without talking about and adding in the knowledge, strategy, and tactics that should go with that seems very lame. The strategies and tactics are the cake and the mental toughness is the icing.

Fourth, in response to his Coach's worry that he was too obsessed with scoring and was not doing enough of the other things, Melo did everything he was instructed to do and look where it got him. Nowhere. He's in the same boat as the other years, a very quick first round exit. But if Denver's objective was to make Melo seem mature and ready to contribute and fit in well on another team, they could not have done a better job.

Melo ramped down his shooting and often looked to pass the ball to someone who looked open, at least at the moment he passed it anyway. He rebounded more, played some defense, went after some steals and loose balls, and brought on his 3-point shot very late in the season to replace some of the 3-point shooting that J.R. was making earlier in the season.

As I warned several weeks ago, Melo was not going to be available at crunch time under the George Karl approach and, sure enough, he was not available to dominate in the 4th quarter in this game. In the 4th, Melo made a jumper, missed a jumper and a three, made an alley-oop dunk, and was blocked by Bowen. In accordance with instructions, Melo was sharing the wealth with A.I., Blake and the bench rusty J.R. Smith, but without the kinds of set plays and rhythm that might have made sense out of that approach. Karl removed Melo as the dominant option on offense, but did not fully construct an offense to utilize the combination of players he wanted to use, which was A.I., Melo, Nene, Camby, and Blake at point guard.

Melo, unlike Iverson, doesn't understand that some coaches don't really know what they are doing in some respects. Yet.

I have described the fifth big mistake, deciding that the bench is worthless in advance, many times in prior game reports, so I am not going to repeat myself here. I just want to remind folks that the flip side of not playing your bench much is that your starters have to play with very few breathers, which will usually leave them more tired than the other team's stars in crunch time. Sure enough, many who saw the game were in agreement that A.I. and Melo looked pretty weary when the game was on the line in the 4th quarter, compared with Parker and Duncan.

Why would you play anyone over 40 minutes but not want them to try to dominate a game? It's either one or the other, isn't it? If you don't want a player to try to dominate a game, you don't play him for 40 or 45 minutes!

Meanwhile, Don Nelson, Coach of the Warriors, told Baron Davis to dominate and, by golly, Baron Davis is dominating. Nelson is playing Davis, Stephen Jackson, and Jason Richardson for more than 40 minutes a game, but he makes room for 4 players in the 20's for minutes and Al Harrington's minutes are in the teens. So he has 8 players in the active rotation, whereas the Nuggets have had basically 7 players in the active rotation. And the Nugget's 7th man keeps changing, which is a killer. Just as or more importantly, Nelson has not tried to limit or contain how his players like to play, let alone tried to get them to play like the team that is supposedly so much better than they are. As a result, the Warriors are in fact playing the way they want to, which is most of the time the best way to play. The Warriors could not care less about trying to copy how the Mavericks play, whereas Karl has the Nuggets engaged in a ridiculous effort to play more like the Spurs and less like the Nuggets played during the very successful early days of this season.

I was just listening to Denver sports radio, and they warned their listeners that they would look down on anyone who called in and tried to blame the Nuggets flame-out on the Coach. The sportscaster claimed that anyone who thinks that way is being too simplistic. Well, if you can explain the mistakes that the coach has made in detail, and you don't see other coaches doing those things, then I would hardly call it too simplistic to blame the Coach. The real reason they don't want callers to blame the Coach on the radio is that they know that George Karl is untouchable, and will be coaching the Nuggets next year come hell or high water. And their station is owned by "The Lincoln Financial Group," which sounds like the kind of company that would be closely associated with the real estate and sports companies run by the very rich owner of the Nuggets.

The owner of the Nuggets, Stanley Kroenke, is a successful business person, and he is not known for second guessing his decisions. His decision was to give a multi-year contract to George Karl, and Kroenke is not a basketball expert per se. So we are most likely stuck with Karl for at least another season, and likely for several more seasons, until Karl himself puts himself and the Nuggets out of their misery and retires. The Denver front office, which takes it's cues from the owner, would probably not be able to persuade Kroenke to fire Karl unless the Nuggets were to become a major losing team. When the Nuggets were 35-36 after they were blown out in Phoenix with the starters playing almost all of the minutes, I was half expecting that they would miss the playoffs and finish with a losing record and that, with some luck, Karl might be fired, leading to a fresh opportunity for a huge season for 2007-08. But then the talented Nuggets caught a bunch of teams with injuries, and/or slumping, and/or with a poor coach or two, and won 10 of their last 11 games, which destroyed any chance for Karl to be fired this year. I am afraid we are stuck with him, just as much as Mr. Karl will forever be stuck with a goose egg next to his name in the number of titles won chart.

There is a a pro football coach who, like Karl, wins often in the regular season, only to inevitably lose in the playoffs because his team is playing too conservatively or, in other words, playing not to lose instead of playing to win. His name is Marty Schottenheimer. He is now a former pro football coach, because the feisty owner of the San Diego Chargers, who is probably even more rich than the owner of the Denver Nuggets, bought out Schottenheimer's contract after Schottenheimer's Chargers bowed out in this past season's NFL playoffs in the first round, even though they were one of the 2 or 3 most athletic and talented teams in football and were projected to go to and probably win the Super Bowl. Getting rid of Schottenheimer cost the Charger's owner 4 million dollars, but winning or at least getting to the Super Bowl is so important to that guy that he was willing to pay that price to bring in a new coach who is not so timid and dogmatic. (The Chargers have Norv Turner as their head coach now, who is about as different from Schottenheimer as you can get.)

The Nuggets might win game 5, because they are loaded with talent, but I no longer see how they can win this series unless there is a miracle. So, most likely, all that is left this season for fans of the real Denver Nuggets style is to root for the Golden State Warriors, or the Phoenix Suns if you want to be a snob about it.

Najera played 15 minutes and was 3/5 and 0/1 on 3's for 6 points, and he had 3 rebounds and 1 steal.

Kleiza played 17 minutes and was 0/2 and 0/1 on 3's for 0 points, and he had 3 rebounds and 1 assist. Although Kleiza won about 4 games for the Nuggets this year, he has been largely a non-factor in the series due to limited minutes, due to not having the green light to take alot of 3-pointers, and due to the lack of set offensive plays that involve him.

Blake played 35 minutes and was 1/6 and 0/2 on 3's for 2 points, and he had 4 assists and 3 rebounds.

J.R. Smith played 14 minutes and was 1/5 and 0/4 on 3's for 2 points, and he had 2 assists, 2 steals, and 2 rebounds. The stranglehold that was put on Smith's minutes since the all-star break led to a huge waste of his talent and abilites in this series. Smith's post all-star break playing time was starved just enough to render him unable to resurrect, in brief minutes in this series, the big scoring punch he provided in November and December. The Nuggets were 2 of 16 from beyond the arc in this game, with only Melo connecting from there, while the Spurs were 8 of 25.

Nene played 40 minutes and was 7/9 and 4/5 from the line for 18 points, and he had 7 rebounds, 3 assists, and 1 steal.

Camby played 35 minutes and was 5/8 for 10 points, and he had 17 rebounds, 4 blocks, and 3 assists.

A.I. played 45 minutes, virtually the whole game, and was 9/15, 0/3 on 3's, and 4/5 from the line for 22 points, and he had 7 assists and 1 steal.

Carmelo Anthony played 38 minutes and was 11/18, 2/5 on 3's, and 5/6 from the line for 29 points, and he had 6 rebounds and 3 assists.

The next game, which will be game 5 of the series, will be in San Antonio Wednesday, May 2 at 6 pm Mountain Daylight Time.

Nuggets Fall in all Spur's Traps, Lose 96-91

The Spurs defeated the Nuggets in Denver 96-91, to take a 2 games to 1 lead in the best of 7 playoff series. The second game in Denver will be Monday, and the Nuggets can earn a third game in Denver, which would be game 6 in the series, simply by winning game 4 of the series Monday night, so all is not lost just yet.

I am going to tell you how the Spurs shut down the Nuggets for most of the game and had a lock on the game the whole way through, unless J.R. Smith or Kleiza had been on the court long enough and had been able to hit some threes. So if you want to know why the Spurs won over the more talented Nuggets, and why the Nuggets could not match what the Warriors are doing against the Mavericks, read on. Because this was a textbook game on how the Spurs win against more athletic and talented teams, and all of their strategies were used almost perfectly in this game. I know exactly what those strategies are. The Spurs treat basketball almost as if it were a chess game, where if you are experienced and know all the right moves and the right positions for your players (or chess pieces if it's chess) you win the game, even if your younger opponent is actually more talented than you are.

The first thing you have to understand is that the Spurs enjoy a big basketball intelligence advantage, not only against the Nuggets, but against every team in the League that I can think of, with the possible exception of Jeff Van Gundy's Houston Rockets. The Spurs in general and their Coach, Greg Popovich, in particular, understand the game inside and out, so they play in such a way as to make their winning likely regardless of exactly how well they are shooting. Not only do they take full advantage of the rules, they take full advantage of every aspect of the game, including such aspects as clock management, timeout management, defensive rotations, offensive set plays, optimum player minute allocation, and so on and so forth.

The most important thing they do, the thing that sets the stage for everything else, is that they play a physical, harassing defense, which accomplishes alot of objectives at once. First, it forces inside misses. In game 2, in San Antonio, the Nuggets missed a staggering 21 of 37 layups. In this game, they missed 7 of 17 layups, which is at least 3 too many. The Spurs missed only 3 of 16 layups. So you have an 8 point Spurs advantage just on the layups alone.

The Spurs have their second string players commit as many of the fouls as possible, so that they usually avoid foul trouble for most of their starters, as they did tonight.

When they physically contest a layup, the Spurs may or may not commit a foul, but more often then not, they do. Only a certain percentage of those fouls is going to be called a foul by the refs, though. The refs are going to occasionally miss contact, and they are occasionally going to "let 'em play" with some contact allowed. When a foul is called, the Spurs know that their opponent is almost always going to miss between 1/5 and 1/3 of all free throws. So by initiating heavy contact in the paint, the Spurs are able to squeeze out some stops where no foul was called even though there was a foul, and then they squeeze out a few more points from the other team's total from missed free throws.

In this game, there was a total of 20 fouls called against the Spurs, and 16 against the Nuggets. But a much greater percentage of the Spurs fouls were shooting fouls, which is exactly what the Spurs want. The Nuggets had more than twice as many free throws as the Spurs did. The Nuggets were 22 of 30 from the foul line and the Spurs were 13 of 14 from the line. But the apparent 9 point advantage for the Nuggets is not really an advantage, if the free throws are mostly replacing shots that would have gone in had the Spurs not disrupted them.

Actually there were probably 13 or 14 shots prevented by the Spurs, not 15. The non-shooting foul free throws were technicals or "plus 1's," where the shot counts and a foul is called. Have you noticed that neither Melo, A.I., Nene, nor any other Nugget is getting any plus 1's to speak of in this series?. That's because the Spurs are so intelligent, that they can usually judge in an instant whether a given shot is going to go in or not if they do not foul. They won't foul if they know the shot is not likely to go in, which they determine based on instinct, but they will frequently foul if they know by instinct that the shot is likely to go in. They avoid the plus 1's by making a decisiion instantly on whether to disrupt the shot, and then, when they foul, by making sure that their foul is hard enough to prevent the ball from going in.

Aside from the physical stops and the free throw math that works out in their favor, the Spurs will usually get more blocks from playing this way than their opponent. Ironically, the Nuggets have the best blocker in the NBA, Marcus Camby. But Camby's philosophy is the opposite of the Spurs; he tries to avoid fouling his man, even at the cost of surrendering shots. Camby probably does not understand how fouling to disrupt can work out in your favor, as long as your teammates are on the same page for that strategy. So in this game, you had the best blocker in the NBA playing for the Nuggets, but he picks and chooses his blocks carefully, whereas the Spurs are using the all-out smother strategy in the paint, so that some of the Spur's blocks are actually fouls that were not called. The Spurs buried the Nuggets in blocks 9-4, with Duncan getting 5 blocks and the playoff master Robert Horry getting 3. For the Nuggets, Camby made 2 blocks, Nene made 1, and J.R. Smith made 1.

The overall damage report from the Spurs hounding and roughing up in and near the paint is that the Spurs ended up scoring more points in the paint, but the Nuggets needed alot more points in the paint than the Spurs did. The Nuggets did not have the jump shooting and especially the perimeter jump shooting capability the Spurs had, because there was a big drop-off in jump shooting on the Nuggets that George Karl played, beyond A.I. and Melo. Camby did his best during the season to develop a jump shot, but it did not fully pan out. When the dust had settled, the Spurs had scored 38 points in the paint, while the Nuggets had scored 36 points in the paint, and the 9 more free throw points that the Nuggets had was only about half as many as were needed.

Another result which shows the damage done by the Spurs to the Nuggets is that the Nuggets had just 19 assists, not enough for a team that relied on quick offense to get the vast majority of their wins during the season. Blake had 7 assists, Iverson was held to just 4 assists, Nene had 3, and Melo and Camby had 2 each.

When the Spurs use heavy contact in the paint, they slow down the game so that their opponent can not get many fast breaks. They want their opponent slowed down and contained. Tim Duncan likes to use the expression "keep everything in front," meaning that the Spurs want to always have their backs to the basket, and have the players they are covering in front of them. By heavy contact in the paint, the Spurs slow down the other team, disrupt it's flow, and foul up it's set plays. The Nuggets do not have many set plays anyway, and the flow they had early in the season has been mostly destroyed by the heavy emphasis on defense in the last two months. So in the case of the Nuggets, sad to say, there wasn't that much for the Spurs to disrupt.

With the foundation of heavy contact in the paint, the Spurs then branch out and use a whole lot of other strategies to make sure they win, no matter who they are playing. By frustrating their opponent first and foremost in the paint, and to a lessor extent outside it, the Spurs can then catch guards off guard, and get more steals than the other team. In this game, the Spurs decimated the Nuggets in steals, 7-3. To the Spurs, stealing the ball is an important team objective, especially in the playoffs. Incredibly, 5 different Spurs had a steal and Robert Horry, the ultimate win in the playoffs veteran, had two steals. Meanwhile, a team like the Nuggets usually gets steals only by chance and in desperate situations late in the game.

Once the flow of their opponent is disrupted and the Spurs have more steals, they will have fewer turnovers overall than their opponent most of the time. The Nuggets, to their credit, kept their overall turnover count within reason, as they at least respected the fundamentals of basketball and did not go crazy trying to do the impossible. But the Spurs inevitably won the turnover battle, 14-11. It almost goes without saying that the Spurs almost never lose the turnover battle in an early playoff series, and they almost never have more turnovers than the average for an NBA game, which is about 14 1/2. Only 4 teams had fewer turnovers than the Spurs did this season, including the two teams that were, at the beginning of the playoffs, the popular favorites to meet in this years Championship series, the Pistions and the Mavericks. The only other two teams slightly more careful with possessions than the Spurs were the Raptors and, surprisingly, the Wizards.

Since the Spurs force so many misses, the team they are playing will usually out rebound them, but this is meaningless and the Spurs know it, so they don't worry too much about rebounding per se.

Now I will reveal the real secret of winning for a team like the Spurs. Almost everything they do, starting with the physical contact, and including all the fouling, stealing, blocking, attention to detail with the ball, and good set plays on offense, lead to more shots on goal for them. This is the real secret of defensive teams like the Spurs. What they do does not directly give them a likely win, but it indirectly makes their winning likely, because they end up with many more shots on goal than the other team has.

And another direct advantage from fouling is that when a shooting foul is called, the possession is over, so there are almost never second chance 3-pointers made on the Spurs, as you have been seeing the Spurs make on the Nuggets a few times in this series.

So the net result of all of the Spurs non-scoring activities was that they had 86 shots on goal versus just 77 for the Nuggets. With that kind of an advantage, the Spurs can shoot worse than the other team and still win the game. In this game, both squads had the same exact shooting percentage, 43%. The Spurs made 37 of 85 shots, while the Nuggets made 33 of 77 of theirs.

Opposing teams fall right into the traps when they go all out to try to play better defense to "match up" better with the Spurs. The correct strategy is to try to defeat the Spur's strategy by having a good passing game which gets the ball again and again to the open man who has the best chance of making the shot. That is more difficult to do than it sounds, but the Warriors are doing it right now as they seek to shock the Mavs. If you try to copy the Spurs, or become as "mentally tough as them," as George Karl wants to do, you lose almost for sure. Yes, the Spurs are "mentally tough," but, more importantly, they are also mentally loaded with knowledge on how to put a stranglehold on a basketball game.

On offense, the Spurs rely on set offensive plays and on three point shooting more than anything else. In a classic West Conference throwdown, the Spurs buried the Nuggets in threes in this game. They made 9 of 21 of them, for a percentage of 42.9%, whereas the Nuggets made only 3 of 12, for a percentage of 25%. In many other game reports, I have warned that George Karl, by not giving his good 3-point shooters from the bench enough playing time, was setting the Nuggets up for inevitable disaster.

I have been all over Mr. Karl since the all-star break for this and other transgressions, so you need only read any number of other game reports to find out about the faults of George Karl. I am not going to review the Karl stuff here, except that I will say that the absence of Kleiza in this game was even more of a crime than the absence of J.R. Smith in other regular season and playoff games was. Kleiza played for only 5 minutes, leaving the Nuggets basically defenseless to the onslaught of 3-pointers from the Spurs. For the Nuggets, Melo made a nice 2 of 3 threes, Blake made 1 of 3, but both Iverson and the rusty from bench sitting J.R. Smith were 0 for 3 from long range, and that sealed the deal for San Antonio.

The bottom line is that the Spurs treat basketball as if it were a science instead of a game. If you mix the right ingredients in the right way, you get a win, no matter which particular team you are playing. And the talented but youthful Nuggets were led to the slaughter by a Coach who means well but can not understand that the Nuggets only way to win is to hit shots that are not covered in and to play players who are not mentioned in the Spur's textbook.

You know, Greg Popovich looks more like a college professor than a former basketball player. And his team showed tonight that it is better to play like a bunch of scrooges than it is to have a scrooge for a head coach.

Najera played 20 minutes and was 0/2 for 0 points, and he had 10 rebounds, 1 assist, and 1 steal.

Kleiza played 5 minutes, did not take a shot, and had 1 rebound. I kid you not.

Blake played 36 minutes and was 3/6 and 1/3 on 3's for 7 points, and he had 7 assists and 1 rebound.

J.R. Smith played 16 minutes and was 4/10, 0/3 on 3's, and 4/4 from the line for 12 points, and he had 3 rebounds, 2 steals, and a block.

Nene played 37 minutes and was 7/11 and 4/4 from the line for 18 points, and he had 7 rebounds, 3 assists, and a block.

Marcus Camby played 38 minutes and was 2/7 and 2/2 from the line for 6 points, and he had 10 rebounds, 2 blocks, and 2 assists.

A.I. played 45 minutes out of 48, or virtually the whole game, and was 7/20, 0/3 on 3's, and 6/9 from the line for 20 points, and he had 4 assists and 2 rebounds. The Spurs are so stingy that even one of the best all time playoff thiefs, Iverson, has not been able to get alot of steals in this series yet. He made 1 steal in game 1, 3 steals in game 2, and no steals in this game.

Melo played 44 minutes out of 48, or virtually the whole game, and was 10/21, 2/3 on 3's, and a disappointing 6/11 from the line for 28 points, and he also had 12 rebounds and 2 assists. He made up for missing a few free throws by making the three-pointers, a job that was left to J.R. Smith in the good old days early in the season. On the other hand, Melo has been known to be perfect from the line, and had he hit every free throw, it might have been just enough for overtime. But let's face it, overtime would only have prolonged the misery.

The next game, which will be game 4 of the series, will be Monday, April 30 in Denver at 7 pm Mountain Daylight Time.