A Good Ol' Fashioned Jamal Murray Playoff Game

Deadly as he ever was.

Photo by Marcel Ardivan on Unsplash

Jamal Murray’s NBA story had not been easy or straightforward.

Early in his career, he had to battle for rotation minutes and trust. He fought to prove he could be a point guard. Funny enough, he and Jokic didn’t have great chemistry in those early years because both of them were learning not only each other’s games but also their own.

He’s been Bubble Murray. He’s been Playoff Murray. He was Playoff and Olympic Disappointment Murray last summer.

On Tuesday night, he was just Jamal Murray, Nuggets legend.

In the pantheon of Murray games, Saturday’s Game 4 won’t be up there with the 30-point triple-double or any number of dominant performances against the Lakers.

But it was maybe the game that Denver needed most from Murray, and because of what he gave, Game 5 was not the nail-biter, cardiac event that all but two of the games in this series have been.

Nikola Jokic scored 13 points on 13 shots in Game 5, and the Nuggets cruised because Jamal Murray took over.

After the game, David Adelman called some of the shots Murray made “absurd.”

Murray is always nonchalant after big games. He’s effusive, cheery after terrible games, reserved and often snarky after huge games. He wasn’t snarky after this one, just matter-of-fact.

“Just competing,” he said often.

He joked that he gave his daughter, who was visiting on Tuesday, credit for inspiring his performance, saying that he wasn’t thinking about the game before the game and could relax.

"It’s amazing,” he said of the moments he gets to have with the fans at Ball Arena in the playoffs.

The Clippers responded to Jokic’s Game 4 by refocusing on Jokic.

Murray tracked down Harden on switches and used that to lose him off-ball:

Once they got around to Kris Dunn switching back onto him, it was too late.

Murray also just looked explosive. He’s shown this over the last few months, even with the hamstring injury he had late in the season (which he brushed off as long over with postgame). This kind of change of pace and burst vs. Batum was not there last year:

Same deal here when off DJ’s swat of Harden, Jamal puts on the afterburners and outruns Kawhi.

Murray has gotten these looks all series; he’s just missed. His body is in a place for him to get separation and Kris Dunn doesn’t have the size and length of the defenders that can bottle him.

When the series began, I thought we’d get one Harden game, 1.5 Kawhi games (Game 2), two Jokic games (Game 3). I didn’t think that a Murray game would come in a bad Jokic game, and the fact that it did hurts the Clippers’ chances.