Nuggets Fall in all Spur's Traps, Lose 96-91

The Spurs defeated the Nuggets in Denver 96-91, to take a 2 games to 1 lead in the best of 7 playoff series. The second game in Denver will be Monday, and the Nuggets can earn a third game in Denver, which would be game 6 in the series, simply by winning game 4 of the series Monday night, so all is not lost just yet.

I am going to tell you how the Spurs shut down the Nuggets for most of the game and had a lock on the game the whole way through, unless J.R. Smith or Kleiza had been on the court long enough and had been able to hit some threes. So if you want to know why the Spurs won over the more talented Nuggets, and why the Nuggets could not match what the Warriors are doing against the Mavericks, read on. Because this was a textbook game on how the Spurs win against more athletic and talented teams, and all of their strategies were used almost perfectly in this game. I know exactly what those strategies are. The Spurs treat basketball almost as if it were a chess game, where if you are experienced and know all the right moves and the right positions for your players (or chess pieces if it's chess) you win the game, even if your younger opponent is actually more talented than you are.

The first thing you have to understand is that the Spurs enjoy a big basketball intelligence advantage, not only against the Nuggets, but against every team in the League that I can think of, with the possible exception of Jeff Van Gundy's Houston Rockets. The Spurs in general and their Coach, Greg Popovich, in particular, understand the game inside and out, so they play in such a way as to make their winning likely regardless of exactly how well they are shooting. Not only do they take full advantage of the rules, they take full advantage of every aspect of the game, including such aspects as clock management, timeout management, defensive rotations, offensive set plays, optimum player minute allocation, and so on and so forth.

The most important thing they do, the thing that sets the stage for everything else, is that they play a physical, harassing defense, which accomplishes alot of objectives at once. First, it forces inside misses. In game 2, in San Antonio, the Nuggets missed a staggering 21 of 37 layups. In this game, they missed 7 of 17 layups, which is at least 3 too many. The Spurs missed only 3 of 16 layups. So you have an 8 point Spurs advantage just on the layups alone.

The Spurs have their second string players commit as many of the fouls as possible, so that they usually avoid foul trouble for most of their starters, as they did tonight.

When they physically contest a layup, the Spurs may or may not commit a foul, but more often then not, they do. Only a certain percentage of those fouls is going to be called a foul by the refs, though. The refs are going to occasionally miss contact, and they are occasionally going to "let 'em play" with some contact allowed. When a foul is called, the Spurs know that their opponent is almost always going to miss between 1/5 and 1/3 of all free throws. So by initiating heavy contact in the paint, the Spurs are able to squeeze out some stops where no foul was called even though there was a foul, and then they squeeze out a few more points from the other team's total from missed free throws.

In this game, there was a total of 20 fouls called against the Spurs, and 16 against the Nuggets. But a much greater percentage of the Spurs fouls were shooting fouls, which is exactly what the Spurs want. The Nuggets had more than twice as many free throws as the Spurs did. The Nuggets were 22 of 30 from the foul line and the Spurs were 13 of 14 from the line. But the apparent 9 point advantage for the Nuggets is not really an advantage, if the free throws are mostly replacing shots that would have gone in had the Spurs not disrupted them.

Actually there were probably 13 or 14 shots prevented by the Spurs, not 15. The non-shooting foul free throws were technicals or "plus 1's," where the shot counts and a foul is called. Have you noticed that neither Melo, A.I., Nene, nor any other Nugget is getting any plus 1's to speak of in this series?. That's because the Spurs are so intelligent, that they can usually judge in an instant whether a given shot is going to go in or not if they do not foul. They won't foul if they know the shot is not likely to go in, which they determine based on instinct, but they will frequently foul if they know by instinct that the shot is likely to go in. They avoid the plus 1's by making a decisiion instantly on whether to disrupt the shot, and then, when they foul, by making sure that their foul is hard enough to prevent the ball from going in.

Aside from the physical stops and the free throw math that works out in their favor, the Spurs will usually get more blocks from playing this way than their opponent. Ironically, the Nuggets have the best blocker in the NBA, Marcus Camby. But Camby's philosophy is the opposite of the Spurs; he tries to avoid fouling his man, even at the cost of surrendering shots. Camby probably does not understand how fouling to disrupt can work out in your favor, as long as your teammates are on the same page for that strategy. So in this game, you had the best blocker in the NBA playing for the Nuggets, but he picks and chooses his blocks carefully, whereas the Spurs are using the all-out smother strategy in the paint, so that some of the Spur's blocks are actually fouls that were not called. The Spurs buried the Nuggets in blocks 9-4, with Duncan getting 5 blocks and the playoff master Robert Horry getting 3. For the Nuggets, Camby made 2 blocks, Nene made 1, and J.R. Smith made 1.

The overall damage report from the Spurs hounding and roughing up in and near the paint is that the Spurs ended up scoring more points in the paint, but the Nuggets needed alot more points in the paint than the Spurs did. The Nuggets did not have the jump shooting and especially the perimeter jump shooting capability the Spurs had, because there was a big drop-off in jump shooting on the Nuggets that George Karl played, beyond A.I. and Melo. Camby did his best during the season to develop a jump shot, but it did not fully pan out. When the dust had settled, the Spurs had scored 38 points in the paint, while the Nuggets had scored 36 points in the paint, and the 9 more free throw points that the Nuggets had was only about half as many as were needed.

Another result which shows the damage done by the Spurs to the Nuggets is that the Nuggets had just 19 assists, not enough for a team that relied on quick offense to get the vast majority of their wins during the season. Blake had 7 assists, Iverson was held to just 4 assists, Nene had 3, and Melo and Camby had 2 each.

When the Spurs use heavy contact in the paint, they slow down the game so that their opponent can not get many fast breaks. They want their opponent slowed down and contained. Tim Duncan likes to use the expression "keep everything in front," meaning that the Spurs want to always have their backs to the basket, and have the players they are covering in front of them. By heavy contact in the paint, the Spurs slow down the other team, disrupt it's flow, and foul up it's set plays. The Nuggets do not have many set plays anyway, and the flow they had early in the season has been mostly destroyed by the heavy emphasis on defense in the last two months. So in the case of the Nuggets, sad to say, there wasn't that much for the Spurs to disrupt.

With the foundation of heavy contact in the paint, the Spurs then branch out and use a whole lot of other strategies to make sure they win, no matter who they are playing. By frustrating their opponent first and foremost in the paint, and to a lessor extent outside it, the Spurs can then catch guards off guard, and get more steals than the other team. In this game, the Spurs decimated the Nuggets in steals, 7-3. To the Spurs, stealing the ball is an important team objective, especially in the playoffs. Incredibly, 5 different Spurs had a steal and Robert Horry, the ultimate win in the playoffs veteran, had two steals. Meanwhile, a team like the Nuggets usually gets steals only by chance and in desperate situations late in the game.

Once the flow of their opponent is disrupted and the Spurs have more steals, they will have fewer turnovers overall than their opponent most of the time. The Nuggets, to their credit, kept their overall turnover count within reason, as they at least respected the fundamentals of basketball and did not go crazy trying to do the impossible. But the Spurs inevitably won the turnover battle, 14-11. It almost goes without saying that the Spurs almost never lose the turnover battle in an early playoff series, and they almost never have more turnovers than the average for an NBA game, which is about 14 1/2. Only 4 teams had fewer turnovers than the Spurs did this season, including the two teams that were, at the beginning of the playoffs, the popular favorites to meet in this years Championship series, the Pistions and the Mavericks. The only other two teams slightly more careful with possessions than the Spurs were the Raptors and, surprisingly, the Wizards.

Since the Spurs force so many misses, the team they are playing will usually out rebound them, but this is meaningless and the Spurs know it, so they don't worry too much about rebounding per se.

Now I will reveal the real secret of winning for a team like the Spurs. Almost everything they do, starting with the physical contact, and including all the fouling, stealing, blocking, attention to detail with the ball, and good set plays on offense, lead to more shots on goal for them. This is the real secret of defensive teams like the Spurs. What they do does not directly give them a likely win, but it indirectly makes their winning likely, because they end up with many more shots on goal than the other team has.

And another direct advantage from fouling is that when a shooting foul is called, the possession is over, so there are almost never second chance 3-pointers made on the Spurs, as you have been seeing the Spurs make on the Nuggets a few times in this series.

So the net result of all of the Spurs non-scoring activities was that they had 86 shots on goal versus just 77 for the Nuggets. With that kind of an advantage, the Spurs can shoot worse than the other team and still win the game. In this game, both squads had the same exact shooting percentage, 43%. The Spurs made 37 of 85 shots, while the Nuggets made 33 of 77 of theirs.

Opposing teams fall right into the traps when they go all out to try to play better defense to "match up" better with the Spurs. The correct strategy is to try to defeat the Spur's strategy by having a good passing game which gets the ball again and again to the open man who has the best chance of making the shot. That is more difficult to do than it sounds, but the Warriors are doing it right now as they seek to shock the Mavs. If you try to copy the Spurs, or become as "mentally tough as them," as George Karl wants to do, you lose almost for sure. Yes, the Spurs are "mentally tough," but, more importantly, they are also mentally loaded with knowledge on how to put a stranglehold on a basketball game.

On offense, the Spurs rely on set offensive plays and on three point shooting more than anything else. In a classic West Conference throwdown, the Spurs buried the Nuggets in threes in this game. They made 9 of 21 of them, for a percentage of 42.9%, whereas the Nuggets made only 3 of 12, for a percentage of 25%. In many other game reports, I have warned that George Karl, by not giving his good 3-point shooters from the bench enough playing time, was setting the Nuggets up for inevitable disaster.

I have been all over Mr. Karl since the all-star break for this and other transgressions, so you need only read any number of other game reports to find out about the faults of George Karl. I am not going to review the Karl stuff here, except that I will say that the absence of Kleiza in this game was even more of a crime than the absence of J.R. Smith in other regular season and playoff games was. Kleiza played for only 5 minutes, leaving the Nuggets basically defenseless to the onslaught of 3-pointers from the Spurs. For the Nuggets, Melo made a nice 2 of 3 threes, Blake made 1 of 3, but both Iverson and the rusty from bench sitting J.R. Smith were 0 for 3 from long range, and that sealed the deal for San Antonio.

The bottom line is that the Spurs treat basketball as if it were a science instead of a game. If you mix the right ingredients in the right way, you get a win, no matter which particular team you are playing. And the talented but youthful Nuggets were led to the slaughter by a Coach who means well but can not understand that the Nuggets only way to win is to hit shots that are not covered in and to play players who are not mentioned in the Spur's textbook.

You know, Greg Popovich looks more like a college professor than a former basketball player. And his team showed tonight that it is better to play like a bunch of scrooges than it is to have a scrooge for a head coach.

Najera played 20 minutes and was 0/2 for 0 points, and he had 10 rebounds, 1 assist, and 1 steal.

Kleiza played 5 minutes, did not take a shot, and had 1 rebound. I kid you not.

Blake played 36 minutes and was 3/6 and 1/3 on 3's for 7 points, and he had 7 assists and 1 rebound.

J.R. Smith played 16 minutes and was 4/10, 0/3 on 3's, and 4/4 from the line for 12 points, and he had 3 rebounds, 2 steals, and a block.

Nene played 37 minutes and was 7/11 and 4/4 from the line for 18 points, and he had 7 rebounds, 3 assists, and a block.

Marcus Camby played 38 minutes and was 2/7 and 2/2 from the line for 6 points, and he had 10 rebounds, 2 blocks, and 2 assists.

A.I. played 45 minutes out of 48, or virtually the whole game, and was 7/20, 0/3 on 3's, and 6/9 from the line for 20 points, and he had 4 assists and 2 rebounds. The Spurs are so stingy that even one of the best all time playoff thiefs, Iverson, has not been able to get alot of steals in this series yet. He made 1 steal in game 1, 3 steals in game 2, and no steals in this game.

Melo played 44 minutes out of 48, or virtually the whole game, and was 10/21, 2/3 on 3's, and a disappointing 6/11 from the line for 28 points, and he also had 12 rebounds and 2 assists. He made up for missing a few free throws by making the three-pointers, a job that was left to J.R. Smith in the good old days early in the season. On the other hand, Melo has been known to be perfect from the line, and had he hit every free throw, it might have been just enough for overtime. But let's face it, overtime would only have prolonged the misery.

The next game, which will be game 4 of the series, will be Monday, April 30 in Denver at 7 pm Mountain Daylight Time.