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What a joke. Or is it The Joker?
All the Denver Nuggets had to do Thursday night was win one game in Minnesota and they would have shed themselves from this annoying Timberwolves team, but instead missed and they set a record, missing 279 shots and losing by 479 points – both all-time sports records.
The Nuggets have now backed their behinds into a furnace, needing to win on Sunday at home to advance to the NBA’s Western Conference Finals.
They played putridly after playing with such pizazz and aplomb in the previous games to take a 3-2 lead punctuated by a Game 5 by Nicola Jokic so spectacular it had sports bloggers gushing with mindless drivel about his everlasting supernatural powers. They need to calm down.
This athletic embarrassment happened after those same prone-to-over exuberance bloggers wrote of Joker and the Nuggets, after laying two rotten eggs in Games 1 and 2, declared Joker’s reign as the NBA’s emperor was over and the Nuggets’ run as champions was short-lived. Bye-bye.
All this reckless see-saw-ing in one basketball series by everyone involved has been tedious. After the first games, there was complete and utter banishment of a team for choking so badly that there was no way to think anything other than the Timberwolves were just better in every way. Then three straight games when the exact opposite story played out.
Then, a Rocky Mountain High free-fall by the Nuggets into the basketball abyss again with one of the worst playoff performances by any NBA team ever.
Atrocious they were last night, the Nuggets. World-beating looked Minnesota.
These were the most dramatic swings in the quality of performances by both teams of any NBA series since James Naismith invented the peach basket. Nuggets blow. Wolves great. Nuggets great. Wolves ineffective.
But none of the highs or lows for either team matched the low the Nuggets plummeted to last night. Horrible at shooting, and defensively inept, it was a troubling thing to watch. There is no way you could see that and be optimistic they could re-gather themselves from this oblivion and play well in Game 7. Nothing about Game 6 gave you any reason to believe that.
So it all comes down to one guy, The Joker. Can he summon the forces he called upon in Game 5 that cemented his all-time great one status? It seems implausible.
It seemed implausible after the Game 2 travesty. You should come away from last night again thinking Minnesota is just better and will dethrone the defending champs. Last night the Wolves double-teamed Joker more than in any other game in the Series. They’re convinced they can’t beat him defending with one guy – true that is — and you can be sure they’ll do the same thing doubling up in Game 7.
You can’t have any faith that Jamal Murray, Michael Porter, and Aaron Gordon are good enough shooters to pull out this deciding game on Sunday. They missed a million shots in Game 6 and will be feeling even more pressure to convert on Sunday. Shooting under extreme pressure tends to lower conversion rates. They’ll be tight and continue poor shooting while Ant-Man will become Spiderman and Superman and dunk a bunch of times and the Wolves will be loose and shoot a higher percentage. They know they can beat the Nuggets. They’ve done it three times and one time – last night – by so many points it’s a joke.
They’ll do it again.
And the joke will be on all the armchair athlete sports bloggers who coronated The Joker after Game 5 the greatest basketball player of all time. That was premature, overstated, and emotionally unstable. That stability will be further exacerbated after the Joker loses Game 7.
Rooster will blame Sportface for jinxing his team.
And the Joker will have gotten old.
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Sammy Sportface, a sports blogger, galvanizes, inspires, and amuses The Baby Boomer Brotherhood. And you can learn about his vision and join this group's Facebook page here:
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