I know it’s hard to see, since Jamal Murray’s blinding radiance is obscuring everything else that the Nuggets are doing, but there are other players in Denver who are stepping up and providing good performances as role players! You’ll just have to take my word on this one. Most people, they’ll see that Murray had 50, and that’s all they’ll be able to see. Meanwhile, DownToBuck has the opposite problem: he can’t see that Murray had 50 at all. I didn’t even realize until later, after the game was done, because I was too busy watching to see what Monte Morris and Torrey Craig were up to.
And Jerami Grant. He’s one of the highest-end role-players that the Nuggets have, and it’s always good to pay special attention to him to see how he’s doing. Whether that thing is splashing threes, blocking shots, or not rebounding the ball for some reason even though he’s tall and has good athleticism (can you believe he didn’t have a single double-digit rebounding game the whole season?????). He hasn’t been super great in these playoffs so far, on account of too large a proportion of his shot attempts being high-variance three-pointers, but the potential for high impact is always there.
Before I get away from the point entirely: he only had 1 rebound in this game. Why can’t he rebound? I have never gotten a satisfactory answer to this question.
Grant would be less prone to having poor games like he had in the ‘Ggets three losses if they could just somehow figure out how to get him easy buckets all the time like they did with Kenneth Faried. I’ve made this point before, repeatedly, but I feel like I have to make it again. Faried wasn’t even good, apparently, but he would dunk it all the time. Is Grant spending too much time floating around the three-point arc to reliably dunk it? Is Grant reluctant to use his athleticism because it is so much better than Nikola Jokic’s that he doesn’t want to make him feel bad?