Nuggets sweep Lakers to first NBA Finals

LOS ANGELES – The Denver Nuggets advance to the NBA Finals for the first time in franchise history after a four-game sweep of the Los Angeles Lakers in the Western Conference Finals.

The Nuggets quelled the last gasps of the Lakers, who had kept their season alive for weeks after it supposedly ended. Now Denver is waiting for the winner of the Eastern Conference final, in which the Miami Heat has a 3-0 lead over the Boston Celtics. Game 4 in the East is Tuesday in Miami.

For the Nuggets, Monday’s win was the culmination of a year-long process as their core players grew closer, weathered tough injuries and faced questions about their ability to even compete in the West. Their best player, center Nikola Jokic, won the league’s Most Valuable Player award twice, but was only able to reach the conference finals once.

Denver lost star watch Jamal Murray in April 2021 when he tore the anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee. Nuggets coach Michael Malone said that the day after the injury, Murray tearfully asked if the Nuggets would trade him, calling himself “damaged goods.”

“I hugged him,” Malone said. “I said, ‘Hell no, you’re ours. We love you. We’re going to help you come back, and it’s going to make you a better player.’”

Murray missed the rest of that season and all of the 2021-22 season. In this year’s playoffs, Denver’s patience paid off.

Murray began to look like the player he was before the injury and Jokic continued to play at an elite level, complemented perfectly by Denver’s cast of talented role players.

The Nuggets rose to number one in the West in December and never fell out of the top spot. In the playoffs, they beat the Timberwolves 4-1 in the first round and the Phoenix Suns 4-2 in the second round. Despite Denver’s dominance all season, oddsmakers did not favor winning the championship. The Nuggets embraced that.

“We’re the underdogs,” said guard Kentavious Caldwell-Pope. “We don’t get enough credit for what we do.” He continued: “It’s not talked about much, we take that personally. We just use that energy, keep proving everyone wrong.

Even after the first two rounds, some thought the Lakers were dangerous enough to be the team that finally rocked the Nuggets.

That confidence in the Lakers had only been established during the playoffs.

For a while, the Lakers seemed doomed due to roster issues and injuries to their stars, LeBron James and Anthony Davis.

They started the season with a 2-10 record. In December, as the Nuggets solidified their spot over the West, the Lakers were ranked 13th.

Guard Russell Westbrook, who struggled with the Lakers last season, still didn’t fit into the game and was pulled from the starting lineup after three games. Davis injured his foot on December 16 against the Nuggets and missed 20 games while recovering. Not long after Davis returned, James missed several games with a foot injury that some doctors he consulted said would require surgery.

But changes to the February trade deadline helped. The Lakers shipped Westbrook and brought in role players: Jarred Vanderbilt, D’Angelo Russell and Malik Beasley. They had also traded for Rui Hachimura in January.

They moved up to seventh in the West by the end of the regular season and defeated Minnesota in overtime in the play-in tournament to secure the seventh seed for the playoffs. In the first round, they pacified a rambunctious Memphis team, who had spent most of the season in the West’s top three, beating them 4–2. Then they upset the defending champion Golden State Warriors 4-2 and dominated in the deciding game of the second round.

All the while, Darvin Ham, their freshman head coach, was reminding them how few people expected them to even make the playoffs.

But the Nuggets turned out to be a different type of opponent. They were more cohesive, less dramatic, and stronger in the center than Memphis and Golden State.

In the Lakers’ first two series, their opponents verbally taunted them, whether it was Grizzlies guard Dillon Brooks who called James, 38, aged, or the Warriors who accused them of flopping because of favorable calls. The Nuggets took a different approach and showed deference to the field until the very end.

“I’m not going to say I’m scared, but I’m worried,” Jokic said after Denver’s Game 3 victory. “Because they’ve got LeBron on the other side, and he’s capable of anything.”

James had looked more fallible in this series than he had in the past. He went 0 for 10 from 3-point range in the first two games, made costly mistakes late in Game 1, and was ridiculed for missing a dunk in Game 2. don’t let him do it again.