For a half, the Nuggets made the Blazers look like Thunder. They spent the rest of the day stealing it.
“Anything said at halftime?” I asked Nuggets forward Cam Johnson after Denver’s 128-112 win.
“Yeah,” said Johnson, who dropped 19 points, five 3-point makes, three assists and two steals on Portland on Sunday at Ball Arena. “A lot.”
“No chairs thrown?”
“No chairs thrown,” Johnson replied. “I think the urgency was voiced earlier than halftime — maybe early second quarter, maybe end of the first quarter. But then we’re talking about the schematics and how the effort needs to be within the scheme.”
The Blazers made 29 buckets and turned it over three times in the first half. Portland made only 13 shots and turned it over seven times in the second.
Denver won the final two quarters, 53-43, after giving up 69 points in the opening two periods. When the Nuggets flip a switch defensively, it’s like pure lightning.
It’s just a matter of whether coach David Adelman can find it when the room and the game go dark.
“The first half, I thought we were going through the motions,” Adelman said after his Nuggets improved to 44-28, 21-13 at home. “We were guarding their plays like it was a walkthrough, not a game. So it wasn’t good enough. But I did like the response. I thought the second unit to start the fourth quarter was awesome. They got into people.”
Leading 75-69 at the start of the second half, the Nuggets outscored Portland 23-11 over the next nine minutes. Donovan Clingan’s make got the Blazers to within 90-80 with six minutes left in the quarter. The Nuggets clamped it down from there, turning two Portland misses and a Johnson theft into an 8-0 run and a 98-80 lead. The Blazers shot 33.3% from the floor (8 for 24) in the third period after shooting 53.7% (29 for 54) in the first half.
After a Blazers bucket opened the fourth quarter, the Nuggets strung together three more straight stops, keyed by two of their best stoppers, reunited. Spencer Jones caused a strip that led to a runout by Jamal Murray. On the Blazers’ second possession, Peyton Watson, in his first game back from a hamstring injury, blocked Scoot Henderson’s 7-footer, starting a break the other way that ended with a Bruce Brown layup.
On Portland’s next possession, Watson kept his hands high to force a Deni Avdija miss and set up an alley-oop from Murray to Jones, a two-handed dunk that put the Nuggets up 113-96 with 9:37 left on the clock.
“One thing (Watson) brings to the table, too, is like an extra rim protector, which is really important,” Johnson noted. “And he does it time and time again.”
Adelman’s “small-ball” unit in the third and fourth quarters harkened back to the Nuggets’ lineups during the 2023 postseason, with Gordon at center while Brown and Christian Braun worked to choke off entry points.
“When you know you’re switching, you know you can press up on the ball because if you get hit by a screen, you’ve got another guy coming and then we can almost trap it a little bit like that,” Jones explained. “Bruce and I love to kind of do that.
“So we had a couple of steals (Sunday) and just knowing that when you go small-ball, you can have more defensive guys out there. And so it’s just all about being aggressive.”
Which is a luxury of Adelman having his first full deck to play with since, what, Nov. 12?
“(Which) was a great feeling,” Jones said. “I mean, we were hyped walking out there. The only bad thing is not enough room on the bench. Can’t really stretch your legs as much as you used to.”
Portland tested those legs early, though. What was the difference between the Nuggets’ defense and traffic cones in the opening 24 minutes? Traffic cones occasionally stop people.
The Blazers came into the afternoon ranked 29th out of 30 NBA teams in field-goal percentage, 29th in 3-point percentage, and 23rd in Offensive Rating (points per 100 possessions, with 112.6)
At the half, they were draining 53% of their attempts and 37% (10-27) of their treys.
The Nuggets’ shooters, meanwhile, had blasted out of the gate hotter than a boa constrictor’s backside. Murray made his first four attempts from the floor. Johnson was perfect on his opening four tries from beyond the arc. The Nuggets made seven of their first 10 from deep.
The problem? Portland’s shooting matched the temps outside Ball Arena. With 5:08 to go in the first period, it was tied at 31-31 — Portland made 13 of its first 19 shots and seven of its first 11 treys. Avdija blew by everybody for a layup to tie the score at 31-31, and Adelman called a timeout.
“But if you have (Gordon) at your 5, and you can slide Spence and Payton at your 3 and your 4, that’s a big small-ball lineup,” Adelman said. “But right now, I like the group, (like) the way they’re playing. Enough ball-handling with Bruce out there, defensive intensity and some guys that can play-make behind Jamal Murray, what he provides when they put two people on him. Those are all good things. We just have to keep progressing and working on it as we go.”
Over their last 25 games, the Nuggets are 13-12, the ultimate rollercoaster ride. They’re 8-2 when the opponent shoots 46% or worse from the field. They’re 5-10 when their foes shoot better than 46%. Sometimes, it’s really not that complicated.
“Yeah, I think (that defensive second half) should be at least the minimum,” Johnson continued. “That first quarter is unacceptable. I think the second half should be, baseline, just what we do on a nightly basis.”
The lightning worked like a charm. You just hope, come May, that it’s not the kind Adelman has to try and catch with a bottle.