Over the past few seasons, the Denver Nuggets have developed a reputation for being the NBA equivalent of the bus from Speed: a guaranteed-105-point-a-night fast-break team that bursts into a ball of flaming shrapnel and takes out the nearest cargo plane when forced to slow down into a half-court offence. Teams of that stripe are almost too fun to watch in the regular season, when it doesn’t take much to coax opponents into casting off their plodding game plans and running like a herd of white-tailed deer. But in the playoffs, where defence is king and offensive possessions are cared for like newborns, such teams tend to collapse (the Seven Seconds or Less Suns being both the exception to the rule and Exhibit A). These Nuggets are different, though, I promise.
But first, a couple of ways in which they’re the same:
1. There’s no getting around the fact that Denver is a thoroughbred of a team. They’re first in the league in fast-break points and in the percentage of their plays that end via transition; they’re second in pace and field-goal attempts per game, and third in points per game. Pretty clearly, this is a young, athletic group that likes to run and put up a ton of shots.
2. There’s also no avoiding the hard truth that the Nuggets aren’t suited to a full series of grinding, half-court games. Denver’s outside shooting is streaky at best, seriously hindering their ability to space the floor, and they have the least-efficient post-up game in the NBA. George Karl and his staff have developed a heap of genuinely devious misdirection plays to compensate for these shortcomings, but trickery can only take you so far without a single truly reliable half-court scoring option.
Fortunately for the Nuggets, slowing them down for more than a handful of possessions at a time is a whole lot easier in theory than practice. “Denver never goes on long scoring droughts,” one NBA scout says. “Teams don’t get 10–0 runs or 13–2 runs because [the Nuggets] put so much pressure on your interior defence and one-on-one perimeter defence.”
The source of that pressure is Denver’s ability to get into the paint and finish at the rim. The Nuggets score an insane 57.8 points per game in the paint, more than any team in the past 17 years (as far back as the stat is kept on NBA.com) and nearly 12 points more than their closest competitor this season. Many of those points come from running out in transition, but as a whole, the Nuggets are also excellent at cutting to the basket (and finding those cutters), and they dominate their opponents’ glass, pulling down a league-leading 13.2 offensive rebounds per game. Denver’s interior dominance also helps get them to the line at a top-five rate—another source of consistent easy points.
On defence, the off-season acquisition of Andre Iguodala added an elite perimeter stopper to an already deep and flexible squad. The Nuggets have climbed to 11th in defensive rating this season—up from 19th in 2011–12. They have the personnel to match up against any team in the league and have proven particularly adept at the defensive plays that most directly translate into fast-break buckets, snatching 9.4 steals and forcing 15.3 turnovers per game, good for second and fourth in the league respectively.
Realistically, the Nuggets enter the playoffs as something between an underdog and a long shot. But when starting point guard Ty Lawson said recently that he thought Denver could beat Miami in the NBA Finals, he wasn’t totally off base. “Denver is one of the only teams that can play against Miami’s small lineup and not be uncomfortable,” the scout says. “It’s funny, of all the teams that could come out of the West, Denver may be the one that Miami really doesn’t want to see.” Sure, getting to the Finals is a tall order for any Western Conference team, but if the Nuggets can continue to play their game, they’ll be more dangerous than a bus full of explosives.
