1 NBA Finals team gets a trophy. But will either get respect?

The Denver Nuggets’ mascot, Rocky, an anthropomorphic mountain lion with a lightning bolt for a tail, dragged a pickaxe as he charged around, trying to figure out where all the chatter was coming from. He had to silence the voices. They did not respect his team.

For weeks, the Nuggets dominated the NBA playoffs. And for weeks, they thought, no one in the news media had done them justice. Not when they defeated Minnesota and Phoenix in the first two rounds. Not when they beat the Lakers in the Western Conference Finals.

Now Rocky was ready to avenge them – at least figuratively – in a movie the Nuggets played on Thursday night during an intermission in Game 1 of the NBA Finals.

In an audio montage of expert disdain, Nuggets coach Michael Malone complained about national sports coverage during the conference finals. “And all everyone was talking about was the Lakers!” he said just before Rocky found a television in a room and smashed it with his pickaxe. He continued smashing items until the video showed a framed photo of an unidentifiable Lakers player lying shattered on the floor.

Denver’s final opponent, the Miami Heat, didn’t fare much better going into Thursday’s championship round. The Nuggets led by 24 points and won 104-93. They entered the series as heavy favourites, an unfamiliar position.

“Even when we win, they talk about the other team,” said Nuggets guard Jamal Murray. He added: “It feeds us a little bit more and will be sweeter when we win the chip.”

Neither the Nuggets, the top seed in the West, nor the Heat, the eighth seed in the East, feel their abilities are fully respected this postseason, and both teams have used that as motivation. Turning perceived disrespect into fuel is a common technique in the sport, even if the disrespects are merely imagined, or perhaps even deserved.

Michael Jordan made disrespect a theme of his speech when he was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 2009, bringing up a time when he was dropped from the varsity team at his high school. Later in his career, Jordan engineered a moment of disrespect from an opponent named LaBradford Smith, who he said mocked him after scoring 37 points in a game for Washington against Jordan’s Chicago Bulls in March 1993. With the intention of Smith to humiliate, Jordan scored 47 points against Washington the following night.

Hall of Fame center Shaquille O’Neal often told a story about Spurs great David Robinson turning him down for an autograph when O’Neal was young. He said snub motivated him in his playing career, but later admitted it never happened.

“David, I want to apologize for making that rumor up,” O’Neal said during an NBA video conference in May 2020, nine years after O’Neal retired. Robinson, who was on the phone, burst out laughing.

As Jordan and O’Neal made up offensive stories, the Miami Heat saw a scorn that was real.

Miami slid into the postseason, which is why few expected to make the run they did. They lost their first game in the play-in tournament before winning the second game by sudden death to enter the playoffs as the eighth seed.

During the Eastern Conference Finals, when Miami faced the second-seeded Boston Celtics, Heat Coach Erik Spoelstra objected to the news media coverage his team received during the regular season.

“I don’t think anyone is really paying attention,” said Spoelstra when asked why the team continued to believe in itself even as it struggled. He added: “Whether that turns into confidence or not, sometimes you don’t have the confidence. But at least you have that experience of going through things and you understand how hard it is.

The Heat defeated the top-seeded Milwaukee Bucks in the first round of the playoffs and upset the Celtics in the conference finals, winning the deciding Game 7 on the road in Boston.

Even during that series, they showed why people had doubts. They raced to a 3-0 series lead against Boston, which led to the Celtics treating themselves as underdogs. But then the Heat dropped three straight games as they turned the ball around and struggled offensively — which is what you’d expect from an eighth seed against an accomplished team like the Celtics, who went to the NBA Finals last season.

On the other hand, the Nuggets have held up to their strengths – the all-around play of Nikola Jokic, who has won the Most Valuable Player Award twice; Murray’s dynamic scoring and passing; the fluid attack and bustle of role-players like Aaron Gordon and Kentavious Caldwell-Pope. They have been the best team in the West since December.

But even then, as Malone and Murray said, they felt that much of the attention of the news media and basketball fans had been on, well, everyone else. Like the Lakers.

Therein lay another example of the ubiquity of using perceived disrespect as motivation: the Lakers did it, too. Lakers coach Darvin Ham often reminded his team that few believed they would make the playoffs early in the season. He omitted that the lack of belief in their ability was not based on bias, but on achievement. The Lakers started the season 2-10 and only played better consistently after reviewing the roster in January and February.

The motivational technique worked all the way until they met the Nuggets in the conference finals.

The Heat has undergone an even sharper turnaround. Their best player, Jimmy Butler, is known for taking his game to the next level in the postseason, and round after round they defied odds to reach the finals.

It may be why the Nuggets don’t give the Heat a chance to feel disrespected by them.

“Who Said We’re Favorites?” Jokic said that on Wednesday. “The media?”

He was told that the Las Vegas betting counted the Nuggets as favorites.

“I think we’re not the favourites,” said Jokic, who was more comfortable being the underdog. “I think there are no favorites in the final. This will be the hardest game of our lives, and we know it.”

Usually it wasn’t the hardest match of their lives. The Nuggets had a 24-point lead going into the third quarter and used their size advantage to disorient the Heat.

But as the Nuggets expected, Miami fought back. The Heat cut the Nuggets’ lead to 9 points with 2:34 left in the game. Miami used a mix of defensive techniques that helped them win back wins at other points in the postseason just when their opponents felt safe turning them down.

“We knew they were going to do that,” said Murray. “That’s how they play and that’s how they win games, in that sense it’s just ruthless.”

Often fueled by disrespect for themselves, the Nuggets understood the dangers of disrespecting an opponent.