KISSIMMEE, Fla. – The Western Conference finals that few saw coming will not pit LeBron James and Anthony Davis against Kawhi Leonard and Paul George in a battle royal for Los Angeles bragging rights and conference supremacy.
Instead, the long-presumed showdown between the Los Angeles Lakers and Clippers was spoiled at the last minute, when Nikola Jokic’s Denver Nuggets erased a 3-1 series deficit to knock out the Clippers on Tuesday to set up a West finals that will be a study in stark contrasts.
It hardly takes binoculars or a microscope to spot the many differences between these two franchises and their centerpiece superstars. The Lakers are captained by James, basketball’s most vocal and visible player who boasts 72 million Instagram followers and 47 million Twitter followers. The Nuggets are led by Jokic, a brilliant but soft-spoken center who doesn’t even bother to maintain social media accounts.
James, 35, and Jokic, 25, are perennial all-stars and perhaps the NBA’s two best passers, but their differing personalities and career arcs perfectly symbolize their franchises’ paths to the Western Conference finals. James arrived as a free agency savior in 2018 and pushed for a blockbuster trade that landed Davis, an all-star forward, a year later. After six straight lottery trips for the franchise, James and Davis led an instant turnaround, guiding the Lakers to the West’s best record (52-19) and their first appearance in the Western Conference finals since 2010.
“I am a winner, and I’ve always been a winner, from the first time I ever played organized basketball,” James said after closing out the Houston Rockets in the second round. “I understand the Lakers faithful and what they felt and were going through over the last decade of not being in the postseason and not competing for championships ... and I took that responsibility as well. I’m happy I’m able to be a little bit a part of it.”
Jokic’s Nuggets, meanwhile, took a slow-and-steady homegrown approach. Unlike James and Davis, who were both top overall draft picks, the Serbian center slipped to the second round in 2014. During his five-year career in Denver, he has built himself into an MVP candidate thanks to an all-around game that now includes premier feel, unselfish instincts, proven shot-making and productive rebounding.
Off the court, Jokic has shown no interest in leveraging his talents to leave for a bigger market or pursue a super team. Instead, he has made progress year by year, leading the Nuggets to a winning record in 2018 and a second-round playoff run in 2019 and now delivering a 46-27 record and the franchise’s first Western Conference finals trip since 2009. Denver’s front office has relied heavily on the draft to complement Jokic, nabbing a high-level sidekick in Canadian guard Jamal Murray in the 2016 lottery.
Even within these bubble playoffs, the Lakers and Nuggets have lived opposite existences: cool confidence and cardiac mayhem, respectively.
Los Angeles overcame early turbulence - Rajon Rondo broke his hand, and Avery Bradley stayed home because of novel coronavirus concerns - to breeze through the first two rounds of the playoffs, with James and Davis eliminating the Portland Trail Blazers and Rockets in five games each.
Denver saw Jokic, Coach Michael Malone and other organization members test positive for the coronavirus before arriving in Florida, and Gary Harris didn’t return from a hip injury until Game 6 of its first-round series against the Utah Jazz. Thanks to magical scoring performances by Murray, the Nuggets dug out of a 3-1 hole against the Jazz, narrowly surviving a wild Game 7 sequence that saw Torrey Craig blow a layup and Utah’s Mike Conley miss a potential series-winner at the buzzer. Then, they fell behind 3-1 to the Los Angeles Clippers in the second round, only to erase a 19-point deficit in Game 5, a 16-point deficit in Game 6 and a 12-point deficit in Game 7 to stun Kawhi Leonard, Paul George and Co.
“All y’all better start giving this team some d--- respect because we put in the work,” Murray said after eliminating the Clippers. “We’ve got a resilient team. We shouldn’t have been down 3-1, but to come back from 3-1 against the Clippers is a big achievement. It’s fun just to change that narrative.”
For all their thrilling late-game moments in recent weeks, the Nuggets now find themselves at a major rest disadvantage. Since the NBA’s shutdown following the Jacob Blake police shooting, the Nuggets have played nine games, facing elimination in five of them. The Lakers have played just six times in the past 24 days and, besides falling into a 1-0 hole to the Rockets, have faced little adversity.
This series will be decided by a fascinating set of positional matchups. James and Davis are versatile and imposing forwards who can be expected to overwhelm Denver’s wings and frontcourt. Los Angeles will hope that its defense, which has been the stingiest in the West during the playoffs, can force the Nuggets to turn the ball over, allowing the Lakers to use their athleticism in transition.
Denver will counter with a well-run offense that leans heavily on Murray and Jokic pick-and-rolls. Jokic is the last remaining traditional center of note in the playoffs, and his presence will force the Lakers to use JaVale McGee and Dwight Howard more often than they did against the small-ball Rockets. Davis, too, could find himself battling the bigger and beefier Jokic in the paint. Murray will be guarded by bigger and longer guards as James functions as the Lakers’ point forward on offense.
While the Nuggets have been winning on the strength of their offense - they ranked fifth in the playoffs entering the Western Conference finals - their defense has significantly improved since Harris’s return.
In the first round, Denver conceded two 50-point games by Utah’s Donovan Mitchell and posted a defensive rating of 120.3, an unconscionably bad number and one that would be unsustainable for any team with title aspirations. Against the Clippers, the Nuggets’ defensive rating improved to 107.8, which was only a tick worse than the Lakers’ mark against the Rockets. During its triumphant Game 7 win, Murray exploded for 40 points while Denver held Leonard and George to a combined 24 points on 38 shots and forced the superstar duo into seven turnovers.
“We don’t have pressure,” Jokic said before posting 16 points, 22 rebounds and 13 assists in the Game 7 win. “I think the whole pressure is on them.”
The same will be true in the West finals. The glamorous Lakers have won 16 championships; the easy-to-overlook Nuggets have never won it all since joining the NBA in 1976. James will be playing in his 11th conference finals; Jokic and Murray will be making their first trips. The Lakers are the one seed whose presence here felt preordained all season; the Nuggets are the clear underdogs who cheated death numerous times to ruin the highly anticipated all-L.A. showdown.
Malone, one of the league’s straightest shooters, remains unfazed by those circumstances and his team’s roller-coaster ride, joking Thursday that he “petitioned the league to start [the West finals] down 3-1 to save everybody a lot of time.” During a joyous locker room celebration following their elimination of the Clippers, though, Malone gathered the Nuggets in a circle for a brief speech that was lighter on the self-deprecation.
“I’ve never been around a team like this, man,” Malone said to rousing cheers. “For real. Inspirational group. Love all y’all. We’ve got work to do. Let’s go to the finals.”
James, for his part, is taking nothing for granted after the Clippers’ unexpected collapse.
“[Denver is] very resilient, very confident, very driven, very well-coached,” he said Thursday. “It takes a lot of energy, effort and a lot of desperation to be able to come back from a 3-1 deficit. They did it twice. So the respect level [for them] is out of this world.”
