The funny thing is, I am in a kind of overtime coverage of the Nuggets, because I honestly wanted to have been more moved on to the Cavaliers and Lakers by now. But how can you ignore the Nuggets these days? A team like the Nuggets, which is loaded with talent and unpredictable to boot, is not the kind of team that comes along every year.
About a week ago, we complained in this report that the Nuggets were in effect trying to change basketball by bringing a defense in overdrive to the NBA, a too rough defense that is not concerned at all with how many fouls it commits. A kind of defense that, were it adopted by other teams, would not only lead to too many free throws in games, but also to a big increase in flagrant fouls and even fights.
But on the other hand, the Nuggets did get a lot of traction from that kind of defense against the badly banged up Hornets and the slightly banged up and defensively challenged Mavericks. And much more importantly, it was not long before it was remembered that this year's defending Champion, the Boston Celtics, had a high fouling rate when they defeated the Los Angeles Lakers 4-2 in the 2008 Championship.
So what in the name of LeBron James is going on here? Were we wrong about our presumption that high fouling rates are almost always a bad idea?
Well, when the going gets tough, the tough get going. So we quickly launched a research project to determine how easy or difficult it is to win a Ring with a high fouling and a kind of high but not extremely high quality defense.
It turns out it is apparently very close to impossible. This was a big relief, let me tell you. My instincts are very seldom wrong, and I defintely didn't want that one to be wrong.
Here are the facts in fast break form, to be proved in greater detail later:
1. Basketball is a truly great sport because, unlike most other sports, it is split right diown the middle between offense and defense. It is almost exactly as easy to win a Ring by having a great offense and a very good defense as it is by having a great defense and a very good offense. Most other sports are biased either in favor of offense or in favor of defense.
For important details about this subject, check out this very important recent report, and there will be more on this subject in the near future as already indicated. Note to anyone who already read that report: it has been slightly rewritten to emphasize better than before that a high fouling defense is much worse than a low fouling defense for winning a Ring.
2. Among teams that have won or tried to win a Championship, by emphasizing defense and by putting on the court a great defense, it has been far easier for a low or medium fouling team to actually win the Ring than for a high fouling team to win it. The lower the fouling rate, the better.
The 2008 Boston Celtics win was literally the exception to the rule. So in the Stop the Nuggets Before They Change Basketball Report, I didn't realize it at the time, but now I do: The Nuggets are both a team that will be copied should they get into the Championship, but they are also already this year's monkey see, monkey do team. They are the team that, consciously or not, is copying some of the Celtics defensive policies from 2008.
The problem, as explained in detail here, is that the Nuggets are lacking some of the necessary prerequisite ingredients to be able to actually win the Quest for the Ring with a high fouling defense. The Celtics did have those prerequisites.
Instead, the Nuggets face the same fate that the overwhelming majority of high fouling teams have suffered over the years: they will be defeated in the Quest for the Ring with this kind of defense.
WHAT ABOUT GAME 5, AND THE RETURN OF THE OLD CARMELO ANTHONY?
But wait. Now the Nuggets have possibly thrown another big wrench into the machine. In their semifinal series with the Dallas Mavericks, following the massive number of fouls in game 3, which included Chris Andersen fouling out, in games 4 and 5 the old Carmelo Anthony appeared and, even more shocking, the Nuggets defied George Karl and trashed Karl's rough and high fouling defending and all fast breaks all the time on offense script in exchange for a reasonably good defense and a not very organized but very, very high octane offense.
The Quest for the Ring was left in relative shock, and was reminded that in sports, unlike in politics and economics, things that you do not expect can and will happen sometimes. That's what makes covering sports more fun than covering politics or economics.
Or so I tell myself, laugh out loud.
THE DEFENSES OF THE LAKERS, THE NUGGETS, AND THE ROCKETS
Using the regular season as the measure, the Rockets in fact have the best defense between the three remaining West teams by a good margin. Not only is the Rockets' defense (104.0 points allowed per 100 possessions) better than both the Lakers' defense (104.7 points allowed per 100 possessions) and the Nuggets' defense (106.8 points allowed per 100 possessions) but the Rockets foul far less (18.9 fouls per game) than do both the Lakers (20.7 fouls per game) and the Nuggets (22.9 fouls per game) In total, the Rockets committed only 1,553 fouls this season, versus 1698 for the Lakers and versus 1,875 for the operating in overdrive Nuggets.
LAKERS-NUGGETS WEST FINAL
So when Dallas Coach Rick Carlisle said that the Nuggets could win the Quest for the Ring outright, he might have actually been thinking that instead of just saying what every coach who has been hammered in an NBA semifinal has to say. Because the Nuggets could very possibly be truly dangerous if they could run both a high octane defense and the very high octane offense they ran in games 4 and 5 against Dallas in the West final or even in the Championship.
Of course, as already explained, the Lakers are a better defensive team than are the Nuggets, whether the Nuggets elect to heavily foul or not.
So even if the Nuggets roll out a kind of blend between the Karl extreme and what was seen especially in game 5 of the Mavericks-Nuggets series, if they in other words use a dangerous (to the other team, that is) offensive blend of fast breaking and a roughly organized but high octane offense against the Lakers (with Nene, Carmelo Anthony, and Chauncey Billups all on point) they will probably fall short in a 6 or 7 game series against Los Angeles, since the Lakers have a very high quality, medium fouling rate defense.
Not to mention that the main Lakers' claim to fame this year, as it is in most years, is one of the very best offenses in the NBA, an offense so good that it should not matter how high the Nuggets' fouling rate is, they are very likely to be exposed by the Lakers regardless of how rough they choose to be.
So if it is Lakers-Nuggets in the West finals, I don't see how the Nuggets can win whether they bring their normal high fouling defense and fast breaking style, or whether they try to confound George Karl by bringing the high octane offense of games 4 and 5 versus Dallas. In other words, regardless of how much the Nuggets go against George Karl, I see the Lakers defeating the Nuggets in the West final.
ROCKETS-NUGGETS WEST FINAL?
But wait. It's even more complicated than that with respect to speculating as to whether the Nuggets could earn a match with LeBron James in the 2009 Championship. Because the Rockets, with the very best defense of the three teams remember, and with a bunch of Rockets hitting shots they simply didn't make in the regular season, have pushed the Lakers to a game seven tomorrow in Los Angeles.
Should the Rockets defeat the Lakers in game seven, all bets are off as to what will happen in the West final.
Keep in mind that it is science fiction if the Rockets beat the Lakers, because they are lacking the two players who most everyone thinks are the best players on that team: Center Yao Ming, and Shooting Guard Tracy McGrady. So if it is Rockets-Nuggets, any unbiased person would have to predict that the Nuggets will win that series.
Were this to be the series, the Rockets storybook season would probably come to an end, with all those suddenly hot shooters becoming not so hot again. All the Nuggets would have to do to shut down these Rockets shooters would be to simply roll out their intimidating and disrupting defense. Veteran shooters can overcome that type of defense but not big surprise streak type of shooters
Meanwhile, defensively, the Rockets can only go so far without Yao Ming. They are not the 4th best defense in the NBA without Yao Ming, I can assure you. Without him, the Rockets are probably not in theory even as good a defensive team as are the Nuggets.
The Rockets' biggest problem would be the same biggest problem that the Maveircks had: how do you contain the inside scoring machine Nene with no dominant in the paint, quality defending center or at least power forward? You can't do it, which sets up the easy way for the Nuggets to shift into a ragged, mostly disorganized, but very high octane offense with three excellent scorers: Carmelo Anthony, Chauncey Billups, and Nene.
It would probably be roughly an instant replay of the Mavericks-Nuggets series.
The bottom line is that as long as the Nuggets keep showing a healthy disrespect for the instructions of George Karl, I just don't see how the Rockets with no Yao Ming defeat the Nuggets if they play in the West final.
About the only way for the Rockets to win would be if the Nuggets start using the George Karl script heavily again, and over rely on rough defending and fast breaking. If they did that, and the referees stood up for the game more than they did in games 1 of 2 of the Dallas series (which was hardly at all) the Rockets might have a chance. Otherwise, I don't like the chances of Houston with no Yao and no Tracy McGrady to beat Denver.
No one has every claimed that George Karl's "system" is worthless. And if you have a bunch of really, really good players who are smart enough to realize that his system is limited, so they blend it with some real basketball, you have a team that is probably too good for Houston with no Yao and no McGrady.
Game on people.
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