George Karl’s heart went out to Nuggets coach Michael Malone this past Monday night. All 50 million pieces of it.
“When that stuff happens, you just get a heaviness — your stomach gets ugly,” Karl, the former Nuggets coach told The Post when asked about Jamal Murray’s gruesome knee injury.
“Those moments, you have trouble speaking. It’s just like it freezes you, and it’s hard to say anything. It hurts.”
He’s been there. On April 4, 2013, Karl’s Nuggets experienced a shock to the system similar to when Murray went down Monday night at Golden State. It was eight years earlier that Nuggets forward Danilo Gallinari blew out his left knee during a home win over Dallas. Like Murray, the Italian was the Nuggets’ second-leading scorer at the time of his injury.
“(Murray) was the man,” Karl said of the Nuggets’ star guard, who tore his left anterior cruciate ligament while driving to the hoop, a fall that ended his season. “He and (Nikola) Jokic took turns carrying the team, and that’s what great players do.
“I respect players that win in the playoffs, that’s the ultimate respect. I joke all the time that the NBA plays an 82-game exhibition season. And there are a lot of great games in that exhibition season, a lot of great performances, but Broadway is the NBA Playoffs. Only the best go to Broadway.”
And the Nuggets are still on track to earn a spot on the NBA’s biggest stage. But without the services of Murray, who averaged 21.2 points this season, where should the bar be set? And where should Malone and his staff turn now?
“I think the fans have got to understand that this team still can be dangerous,” said Karl, whose Nuggets in the spring of ’13 clinched the No. 3 seed in the Western Conference but were upset by the sixth-seeded Warriors, led by a young Steph Curry and Klay Thompson, in the first round. “Putting expectations on winning it all now are really low, but they still can make noise in the playoffs.”
How much noise? That depends, Karl noted, on four factors:
1. Finding the best combo to replicate Murray’s stats
Murray accounted for 24.6% of the Nuggets’ scoring, 23.5% of their field-goal attempts and 26.8% of their 3-point makes in the postseason bubble last summer.
As Malone already stressed, publicly and privately, a quarter of your offense isn’t going to be immediately addressed by one player. For Karl, it’s a question of which players, or which combination of players, are best-suited to help pick up the slack.
“I always believe you’ve got to do it by committee,” Karl said. “I think Coach Malone has got to figure out maybe how to tighten his rotation to where he figures how to get more effective play from everybody. I don’t know if that means extending his rotation, or cutting back his rotation. And you’ve got 17 games left, that’s enough time to tinker with kind of how you want to play it.”
The slack has to be found in terms of 3-point production and free-throw makes, two Murray specialties. Which means the remaining wings are going to have to pick up the flag.
“With Murray, you have a guy that can go for 40, a guy that can make six treys (in a game),” Karl stressed. “So you’re probably looking at a 3-point shooter, so it would be (Will) Barton or (Michael) Porter Jr. I don’t think you can look for anybody else from the standpoint of explosiveness.
“It’s hard for me to say that you’ve got to ask more from (Nikola) Jokic, because he’s been magnificent. I mean, how could you ask for more? But there will be games in the playoffs that he’s going to have to do more.
“And you’ve got an opportunity for (MPJ) to help a little bit. He’s probably got to help a little bit more. … in preparing for Denver without Murray, I think Jokic is going to have maybe more difficulty because there’s going to be more of a focus on him. And then MPJ, now he’s going to have the best (wing) defender on him, instead of the second-best defender.”
2. Finding another playmaker (or two)
Point guards Monte Morris and Facundo Campazzo were stellar in this past Wednesday’s home rout of Miami, combining for 19 points, seven assists, one turnover and three treys over 52 minutes. Malone and the Nuggets will likely need that kind of production consistently, or something close to it, once the playoffs start.
“Right now, their playmaking is what I worry about, how guys are going to make plays for somebody else,” Karl said. “The Joker is a genius as a playmaker, but he’s a center. A guard who has the freedom to go anywhere on the court has the ability to be more successful (there).
“With Jokic, if you can get into his chest and you pressure him … he’s a great passer because a lot of times, he doesn’t have pressure. But I think, in the playoffs, there’s going to be more scouting and more preparation and there are more concepts and, ‘We don’t want Jokic to do this.’ I think if you take Jokic’s playmaking out of the game and make him a scorer only, I think that might be something that somebody in the playoffs might think about doing.”
3. Not worrying about home court
Because the coronavirus pandemic has restricted crowd size and capacity and the variance of those capacities across the league, fans — and the home-cooking mojo they create — aren’t expected to be the “sixth man” that they usually are in the spring and summer.
San Francisco’s Chase Center, for example, the home of the Warriors, will open up the building for attendance at 35% of capacity starting with the Nuggets’ next visit there on April 23.
“First of all, getting home court had always been the most important thing, and I’m not sure if that’s the case anymore,” Karl said. “In California, they’re going to have (only a few thousand).
“The fan thing is weird because fans are a big part of playoff basketball and lot of coaches think home-court has become a disadvantage this season, because you don’t have fans, you don’t have the (atmosphere), so the visiting teams feel kind of powerful.”
4. Avoiding the (healthy) Lakers
The Nuggets went into Friday night’s visit to Houston as the No. 4 seed in a potential Western Conference bracket, 1.5 games ahead of the Lakers, a potential No. 5 seed. Denver trailed the Clippers by three games for the No. 3 slot and led Portland, the current 6 seed, by 3.5 games in the standings.
Only seeds 1-6 are guaranteed in the 2021 bracket. The NBA is following the NCAA Tournament model for the seventh and eighth seeds in each conference by having four teams — those with the winning percentages ranked seventh through tenth — play a two-round, two-game mini-tournament in order to determine the final two entrants in the eight-team conference field.
“I think Portland’s going to have to worry about going to (the) 7 (seed),” Karl said. “No one wants to go to 7, I would think. You don’t want to get into that one-game (situation).”
The Lake Show has struggled without the services of injured mega-stars LeBron James and Anthony Davis. But both franchise pillars are expected to be ready to roll once the playoffs begin in late May, making any draw that includes the defending champs a daunting one.
“It just looks like it’s going to be (the Lakers),” Karl said of the Nuggets’ probable first-round foe.
“I looked at the schedules, and the Clippers look like they know what the heck is going on. I think they know they want to stay away from the Lakers.
“With Murray out, I don’t think that Denver can catch the Clippers. So does Denver want to go to the 6? Would Malone play that game? I don’t know. I think those things are being talked about.”
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Jamal Murray-less Nuggets “still can make noise” in NBA Playoffs. But how much? - The Denver Post
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