LOS ANGELES — It’s been a Murphy’s Law kind of season for the Nuggets at the end of games. They outdid themselves in Los Angeles, getting caught on the wrong end of perhaps the wildest play of the NBA season.
Protecting a 118-115 lead, Denver intentionally fouled Austin Reaves with 5.2 seconds left in regulation Saturday night. It was properly executed, a low-risk foul while Reaves’ back was to the basket so that he couldn’t feasibly go into a shooting motion. The Lakers guard stepped to the line for only two free throws — decidedly not enough to tie the game. Or so the Nuggets thought.
The one thing that could go wrong did go wrong.
“That’s one in 100 in the NBA,” coach David Adelman said after a 127-125 overtime loss. “It happened. You give them credit.”
Reaves made the first free throw then intentionally missed the second, launching a bullet off the front of the rim. The ball caromed to the left, beyond the reach of Denver’s two players stationed on the low blocks, and Reaves chased down his own rebound. Collecting the ball in stride, he buried a game-tying baseline runner with 1.9 seconds left to force overtime and eventually steal the season series from Denver.
“I mean, it’s a really good play. A perfect bounce,” a frustrated Nikola Jokic told The Denver Post. “He got the ball off his rebound. He made a floater.”
In the NBA, teams can only have three players inside the perimeter for an opponent’s free throw. Spencer Jones was the third in this case, but he was on the right side of the lane, while Jokic and Aaron Gordon were down low. Reaves had a step on Jones, if he could engineer the perfect miss into the empty space.
“JJ (Redick) told me to tell AR to miss right,” Luka Doncic said. “So, he missed left.”
“When I had kind of relayed instructions, it was to miss it to the right side because that was the single side at the time,” said Redick, the second-year coach of the Lakers. “It ended up being the left side was the single side, so they all gave me crap in the locker room. But AR made the right play. He missed it on the single side. It’s a hell of a basketball play.”
From the Nuggets’ vantage point, it was half cruel serendipity, half self-inflicted wound to not box out Reaves more urgently.
“He’s a really skilled player,” Aaron Gordon said. “He’s a talented guy. So it’s just in the flow of the game. It worked out for him. So tip your cap.”
“It’s a tough thing to do, to execute that like they did,” Cam Johnson said. “For us, it’s just, we’ve gotta kind of get a body on everybody and make it a little bit more murky. And that includes the shooter. So it’s a really tough play to make, but we gave it up.”
The Lakers could have chosen to make the free throw and extend the game with another foul; it would have guaranteed them one more opportunity to hoist a potential game-tying shot before the buzzer, down by three at worst. But they were out of timeouts at 5.2 seconds to go, which would’ve prevented them from advancing the ball and drawing up a play. They would’ve had to go the length of the floor, with the looming risk of another intentional foul by Denver.
What they did instead by intentionally missing was a play call itself, with multiple moving parts. Lakers center Deandre Ayton was on the left block. He allowed Jokic to get into ideal box-out position between him and the basket, then pushed the three-time MVP farther into the paint, clearing space on the left side for Reaves to pursue the rebound. Johnson and Jamal Murray were outside the 3-point line, trying to prevent LeBron James and Marcus Smart from crashing the glass.
The element of surprise on the intentional miss wasn’t a factor, according to Adelman, who pointed out that Smart’s lack of rebound attempt took another Nugget out of the play.
“We were expecting them to miss it,” he said. “We could see them saying ‘miss it.’ That’s why Spence came in. Spence is our best free-throw third rebounder. Had AG, had Nikola down there. Cam was dealing with LeBron coming from half-court, so he’s gotta stand him up. I think Jamal thought Marcus Smart was gonna crash, and he held, which gave Reaves an angle. And obviously, Ayton screened it in. … A wild play to force overtime.”
Jones made his initial motion toward the basket, a split-second decision that cost him the ability to get in front of Reaves and deny him the ball. Reaves was beelining for it as soon as it touched the rim.
“That’s a tough one, especially when we’re loaded up on the other side,” Jones told The Post, “and he’s able to get it off the rim to the opposite side where he might have a little bit of an advantage getting to it. … He put it in the right place where he had the best chance of getting it, and he got it.”
When asked if Doncic’s “miss right” instruction to Reaves threw anything off for Denver, Jones said no, noting that “either way, if we wind up on the (left) side, he would’ve tried to miss the other way.”
In a season of missed opportunities and clutch conundrums, this might’ve been Denver’s most painful stinger yet. Players were openly frustrated with defensive inconsistencies in the locker room after blowing a 106-98 lead with 5:13 to play. The end of regulation also included a missed free throw by Gordon with 9.9 seconds left that would’ve extended the lead to four.
Instead, it set up a stunning sequence that doubled as a fitting encapsulation of both teams’ seasons. Denver fell below .500 in games involving clutch time. Los Angeles improved its NBA-best clutch record to 18-6.
The Nuggets fell back into sixth place in the West. With a win, they would’ve been alone in third . Now if they finish the season in a two-way tie with the Lakers, the higher seed will belong to Los Angeles by virtue of head-to-head advantage.
“There are just so many ways we could have won the game tonight,” Johnson said. “We were in the driver’s seat for a lot of that fourth quarter. So for us, it’s just about closing games more effectively. And come playoff time, that’s really what it is. Playoff time is all about fourth-quarter execution. So we just have to be better.”