Kleiza & Company (The Nuggets) Win Big Over Lakers 113-86

You are in your 11th year of an all-Laker basketball all-star career. You are considered by many to be the best guard in basketball, an athlete so skilled, and so much in control of your performance, that you are almost always the most important player on your team and you can sometimes change by yourself the flow and the momentum of a game. You almost never have a truly poor outing, at either end of the court. Last year, you won the scoring title with little problem, with 35.4 ppg versus Allen Iverson at 33.0 ppg. This year, you have only Melo ahead of you in points scored per game, by a trivial amount. Unlike Melo, you are a reliable three point shooter and you can easily pick the best scoring opportunity and get the ball to the right player at the right time. Melo is a forward and forwards pass less than guards. But Melo is more choosy about who he will pass to. Unlike you, Melo worries about an open or cutting player putting up a brick in many a split second, thus missing a few assist opportunities from time to time. You look for the scoring opportunity, whereas Melo looks for the player most likely to make a shot, so Melo's view of the game is a little more complicated than yours, and sometimes a little too difficult to operate well against a great opponent.

Also unlike Melo, you have had many years experience guarding many of the best players in the League, and you have disrupted them enough to help the Lakers set the pace and the tone in countless playoff games. Melo may never win a Championship unless he learns how to explode in a game as you have learned to, unless he learns how to spot likely scores from unlikely players, and unless he can get close to your level of drive and determination to hustle and defend, which won you 9 seasons of many more wins than losses and three NBA Championships. Fans could argue all night whether you or Allen Iverson is the best guard of the past decade, but you would get far more votes, because of all your rings and because of the huge Southern California market you play for.

Great players sometimes do peculiar things, because they operate at a level few ever reach, and sometimes the adrenalin, the exhilaration, and the constant pressure of performing at that level lead you to do things that do not make sense to ordinary mortals or to folks just watching on the boob tube. So the elbow thing is trivial and understandable. Everything awkward, as the Nuggets learned earlier this season by getting the fines and the suspensions that were supposed to end all fines and suspensions, is made more awkward by the bumbling dictators at League Central.

You are, of course, Kobe Bryant.

The Lakers, led by Kobe Bryant, came to Denver battered by injuries and desperately inserting key fowards back into their lineup as soon as possible, which was this game. It may have been too soon for their own good. The Lakers have now lost 7 straight games, a Coach Phil Jackson record, and they have lost 13 of the last 16. Now the Lakers have to play again tomorrow night with their not fully healed up squad, though one can imagine Kobe Bryant getting 40 or more against the Trailblazers, allowing the Lakers to win a close one with a 4th quarter surge.

Luke Walton and Lamar Odom were returned to action for this game against the Nuggets who, the word is out, can be beaten at any time by any decent team if you slow down A.I. and Melo by double covering and by fouling them as a last resort to slow down the tempo, by forcing turnovers, by burying alot of threes with the many open looks you will get, and by charging the hoop if anyone other than Camby is guarding it. SF Lamar Odom, one of the better small forwards, sustained a left shoulder separation injury on March 2 and was cleared to practice 10 days later. Since January 28, Luke Walton, who is supposed to back up Odom at SF, has been dealing with the sprained right ankle from hell.

Odom and Walton are the indispensable Kobe balancers and with those two out, Kobe has become a little unbalanced, especially according to one of the chief assistants of League Dictator David Stern, a guy whose very name sparks hate at the Players Union, Stu Jackson. Jackson has been suspending and fining Kobe over and over again as Kobe has been getting a little too creative with his arm motions.

The Laker centers, Andrew Bynum and Kwame Brown, are both young and have not yet learned how to exactly position themselves and how to hustle for easy second chance clean up scores, as Okur, Duncan, Yao Ming, and Stoudemire have. So when both Odom and Walton were out, the Lakers were practically all Kobe all the time and, of course, as the other greatest guard of the decade, A.I., will tell you, a team can not depend on just one player to get most of the scoring every game. It's just too much to put on one player's shoulders, no matter how great that player is.

Aside from Odom and Walton, much of the rest of the front court roster for the Lakers remains sidelined with serious injuries. FC Chris Mihm, who was supposed to be the wise veteran of the front court, had surgery on his badly damaged right ankle last summer and his recovery was anticipated, but the injury proved to be even worse than was thought. So he had additional surgery in November and is now out for the season. Then Vladimir Radmanovic, who is supposed to start at PF, sufferred a separated shoulder while snowboarding in Utah during the all-star break, a risky non-professional sport that earned Radmanovic a fine for violating his contract. Radmanovic is out until about the end of the regular season. Then on Tuesday of this week, just about the only front court Laker not yet having injury problems, Brian Cook, who is supposed to back up Radmanovic at PF, sprained his ankle in practice and did not make the trip to Denver.

Now you know why the Lakers have been falling; it has nothing to do with Kobe Bryant.

So the Lakers had two small forwards rushed back after injuries, to cover for two power forwards still out injured. Just about everyone has been beating up on these devastated Lakers lately, and even the Nuggets, who haven't really beat up on anyone this season, buried the Lakers in the second half and won the game to become a winning team again, at 32-31, by the score of 113-86. Allen Iverson's shots were not falling, Melo was off a little, Nene didn't get the ball much, Najera was not shooting as usual, Reggie Evans was benched, Yakhouba Diawara was benched, DerMarr Johson was extremely benched, and J.R. Smith was almost benched.

That leaves Camby, Blake, and Kleiza, so the Nuggets lost the game because there is no way all of these three could possibly have nice shooting games on the same night, right? Wrong. All three did have good nights offensively, with Kleiza by far the best. With the Nuggets shooting this season, there is an occasional feast to break the famine. Kleiza had his best career game ever for the second time in 5 days. After scoring 24 points on 8/11 shooting on Sunday at the Kings, he scored 29 points on 10/13 shooting in this one. For the two games combined, Kleiza made 9/13 3-pointers, thus more than making up for the absence of J.R. Smith. Now George "Scrooge" Karl, who gave Kleiza only 16 minutes on Tuesday, has no choice but to make sure Kleiza plays at least 24 minutes per game for at least the next two weeks, or else that will be a reason to fire him at the end of the season.

The Western Conference is "big shot country" and many young players who play in the West go through a three-point shooting trial by fire. Rookie Diawara failed his trial this year and DerMarr Johnson failed early in the season and ended up in Karl's doghouse, from which it is almost impossible to get out. But now Kleiza, the backup who has the least doghouse time this season, has succeeded, and the West has another newly minted three point shooter. Watch out West, if Melo ever learns how to shoot threes, or J.R. comes back to full strength, the Nuggets may finally have enough three point shooting to compete in big shot country.

Aside from Kleiza's individual success, the massive imbalance of the Nuggets between A.I., Melo, and Camby on the one hand and everyone else on the other hand has now been treated by a heavy dose of Kleiza. The Nuggets were two teams separated by a grand canyon but for now there is much more unity, because Kleiza is a member of the greater squad and also of the lessor squad at the same time. Now that A.I., Melo, and Camby have learned that it is possible to get alot of help from somebody else on the roster, the next thing that needs to fall into place is for George Karl to calm down and loosen up enough to give every one of the large crew on the bench adequate opportunities to get off it, because Denver isn't going to be able to beat the top teams of the West with that many players sitting on the bench for the entire 48 minutes.

Najera played for 21 minutes and was 2/2 for 4 points, and he had 5 rebounds, 2 assists, and a steal. Nene played for 23 minutes and was 3/4 and 2/4 from the line for 8 points, and he had 4 rebounds and a steal.

Steve Blake played for 30 minutes and was 5/8, 3/4 on 3's, and 2/2 from the line for 15 points, and he also had 3 assists, a steal, and a block.

Kleiza played for 36 minutes and was 10/13, 5/6 on 3's, and 4/5 from the line for 29 points, and he also had 6 rebounds, an assist, and a steal. If this keeps up, the Nuggets will have to play the Lithuania national anthem at the home playoff games along with the American anthem. It better be a catchy tune.

Marcus Camby played for 33 minutes and he was 5/10 and 1/3 from the line for 11 points, and he also had 14 rebounds, 3 steals, and an assist. Ok, so our center doesn't score as many points as Yao Ming, but he leads the NBA in blocks, and gets alot more blocks and steals than Yao. So there you go.

A.I. played for 40 minutes and was 4/15 and 6/6 from the line for 14 points, and he had the 13 assists and a steal.

Melo played for 36 minutes and was 10/20, 0/2 on 3's, and 6/8 from the line for 26 points, and he added 8 rebounds, 5 assists, and a steal.

The next game is Saturday, March 17 in Denver to play the Suns at 8 pm mountain time.