LOS ANGELES – In the end, the Denver Nuggets proved to be too big, too deep, too athletic, and just plain better than the Los Angeles Lakers. You don’t beat a team four straight times in a best-of-seven series by accident.
That’s exactly what the Nuggets did. Denver finished off the Western Conference Finals with a 113-111 come-from-behind win over the Lakers in Game 4 at Crypto.com Arena. The Nuggets, the Western Conference’s top seed going into the playoffs, advance to the NBA Finals for the first time in the team’s history.
“It’s incredible. It’s a lot of fun,” Denver guard Jamal Murray said after Game 4. “It’s surreal. I know we’re going to keep making history. That’s the thing. We want to keep that mindset and enjoy the moment. But we’ve got more work to do, so that’s the mindset right now.”
The mindset for the Lakers right now is in the doldrums, something that can be expected after a flirt with the possibility of being so close to playing in the NBA Finals. The Lakers came into this series needing four wins. They left the same way.
That’s because when center Nikola Jokic wasn’t doing his thing by routinely posting triple-doubles, Murray was going off on scoring binges that the purple and gold could not handle. When they weren’t nailing their 3-point shots, the Nuggets were dominant down low.
Outside in, inside out, it didn’t matter. Denver had more offensive firepower than the Lakers. That proved to be an unbeatable formula for the Nuggets.
“They have scoring. They have shooting. They have play-making. They have smarts. They have length. They have depth,” James said. “And one thing about their team, when you have a guy like Jokic, who as big as he is but also as cerebral as he is, you can’t really make many mistakes versus a guy like that.”
In hindsight of things to come, the Lakers went into halftime of Game 4 with a 15-point lead.
LeBron James had just gone wild with 31 points through the first two quarters (he finished the game with 40 points). But this is the NBA. No lead is truly safe. The Nuggets proved that in the third quarter when they outscored the Lakers, 36-16.
So that huge advantage the Lakers had just vanished. That’s when you knew that the Lakers were in trouble of possibly getting swept right out of the playoffs. When James was denied by Murray and Aaron Gordon on the last play of Game 4 in his attempt for a layup with time running out, this was a done deal.
The atmosphere inside the arena was one of disbelief. It was so quiet you could hear crickets. And just like that the great run the Lakers had was over. The surrealness of it all hit Lakers center/forward Anthony Davis hard. “Obviously it hurts right now, especially the way we lost,” said Davis, who put up 21 points and 14 rebounds in the Game 4 defeat. “Not only to the paint but we gave away two games, three games, and then you add tonight and Game 2 and Game 3 as well. It’s just tough. I mean, credit to Denver, obviously. They are a great ballclub, No. 1 team for a reason. Their players played well throughout the entire series. But it’s tough. It stings.”
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