The last time the Nuggets were in the playoffs, George Karl was the coach, Masai Ujiri was the GM, and their best scorer, Ty Lawson, averaged 16 points per game, and their best feature was the incredible lob chemistry between Andre Miller and JaVale McGee. That team lost in the first round to the Warriors due to the betrayal of one Andre “The Mole” Iguodala.
Everything is different now. The arena is the same, I think, and they still have those corny commentators, but everything else has been replaced. New jerseys. New coaches. New front office people. New players. A Nuggets fan from that 2012-13 season when the playoffs were last reached, hypothetically teleported to the present day, would find his team unrecognizable, and would be incredulous that the team’s best player is a flabby 7-foot Serbian point guard. As they say, “the times, they are a-changin'”.
That flabby 7-foot Serbian point guard just put the team on his back yet again, dragging his team to a game seven victory over the Spurs with yet another triple-double. This was a tough, grind-it-out sort of game, with the intensity building until it was literally too much for me to take and I passed out a little bit. I did recover in time to see the confusing ending, which you get to see here in its entirety. If you zoom in really closely, you can see his confused facial expression as LaMarcus Aldridge fails to foul him even though Popovich had run over to the PA system microphone and was screaming into it for someone to take the foul.
So the Nuggets go on to the next round, where they face the Trailblazers. While the Rockets and Warriors duke it out in a second-round bloodbath, the Nuggets’ path to the WCF Conference Finals is clear. If Enes Kanter can’t play due to his shoulder, and Jusuf Nurkic doesn’t use Vlach Magic do heal his mangled leg and miraculously return to exact vengeance on the guy who forced him out of Denver, who the hell is going to stop Jokic? The center trio of… Zach Collins, Meyers Leonard, and… Skal Labissiere? Jokic is going to average a 40-point triple-double.