Spilled Milk: How Denver Lost To Wemby

A breakdown of a clutch breakdown and why we didn't ask about the timeout

Karolina Grabowska on Unsplash

Tough loss to the Spurs on Friday night.

It was an incredible game featuring a battle between the current best big man in the NBA, Nikola Jokic, and the future best big man in the league, Victor Wembanyama.

As always, a loss in an NBA game doesn’t come down to one thing or another. The biggest blame has to go on the bench and the four-minute scoreless stretch. The Nuggets were +4 in Jokic vs. Wemby minutes and -13 in Wemby vs. the bench.

However, if the Nuggets were +6 in the Jokic vs. Wemby minutes, they win the game. If they were +8 in the Jokic vs. the Spurs bench minutes, they win the game. Jokic didn’t lose Denver that game (he almost never does), he just didn’t win it either, going 15-of-36 from the field.

Jamal Murray is a bigger problem with 14 points on 17 shots after a promising run of games, but then the second-half defense they had hung their hat on also wasn’t good and Russ was mostly invisible.

Second-chance points, turnovers, lots of things can be pointed to. Denver lost a game where they had fewer turnovers, more points off turnovers, made and attempted more threes¹, and made and attempted more free throws. Denver was 40-5 in such games since the first playoff season, 2018-19 when they did those things.

But the final play was really interesting and I wanted to diagnose it because Joker very graciously was great at the podium with my questions about it.

Here’s what Joker said about it postgame:

"I mean it was an ATO handoff with me and Jamal usually works good, getting the ball at the nail. Maybe I should have shot it right away. I tried to shoot a little fadeaway but I think he would have blocked it.

Maybe I should have let him block it and hopefully the ball would be there off the bounce. I threw theball away, bad turnover."