Kyle Lowry got an education in the 2016 Eastern Conference finals, and those lessons, when Kawhi Leonard showed up in 2019, assisted change the Raptors from a playoff unreliable to a postseason star.
LeBron James, the most reputable playoff gamer of his generation– and perhaps ever– ended up being that in large part through his brutal efficiency and late-series abdication in the 2011 NBA Finals versus the Dallas Mavericks. Dirk and the Mavericks, by the way, discovered their own lessons mostly, and ironically, from Dwyane Wade and the Miami Heat a couple of years earlier, when they blew a Finals cause that team.
We could do this all the way back through the NBAs history of champion teams forged often by failure before the breakthrough: The Pistons getting swept in the 2003 Eastern Conference finals before winning everything the next year … Johnsons Spurs routed by Utah in 1988 … Michael Jordan and the Bulls losing to the Pistons in the 80s … those lessons, and losses, Magic and Bird put on Isiah and Detroit.
Specifically now, as Isiah Thomas stated, that at the hands of the Lakers theyve gone to school.
Denver might have won that game. They shot better than 50 percent from the field, were within 3 with 3:28 to go in the game and within 4 with 28 seconds left. The could have won Game 2, too.
Denver wants a Finals berth and an NBA champion this postseason. Most teams have to go to school first, informed by heartache, close calls, best-of-seven-series beatdowns and the up-close look at an actual champion.
( The) loss in 1998 was the springboard for us in 1999! We had to get harder, smarter, craftier, more unselfish and play thru misfortune!!!,” Avery texted me.
Denver wants a Finals berth and an NBA champion this postseason. Naturally it does. But most teams have to go to school initially, informed by heartache, close calls, best-of-seven-series beatdowns and the up-close look at a real champ.
There was, unlike in Game 3, an absence of physicality by the Nuggets that speaks with how tough it is to summon such energy and momentum, over and over, in the playoffs, and especially against LeBron-led teams..
There was the Lakers turning Game 3s rebounding route into a 41-33 advantage on the glass. There was, in the end– in another close video game, in which Denver again had a shot at removing a double-digit lead– LeBron stepping up to guard Nuggets phenom Jamal Murray and teach the 23-year-old a first-person lesson about the level of trouble of making, let alone winning, an NBA champion.
” Helluva player,” LeBron informed TNT postgame about his choice to secure Murray down the stretch. “Hes one of the hottest gamers we have in the bubble left today. Simply using my length, using my athleticism and likewise being smart. Ive remained in this for a long period of time, and the worst thing you can do is put a great shooter on the free-throw line. Simply high hands, hope he misses out on a few.”.
The Denver Nuggets, down 3-1 to the Los Angeles Lakers in the Western Conference finals, do not, in fact, have them right where they desire them.
They may, in the years ahead, look back at this series and see an important catalyst in their leap forward from good-team-with-a-great-story to a great group whose tale really ends in a champion.
We are always– in sports, as fans, in a nation at large crazes small and huge– focused on the minute, the now, the immediate. However its the long video game– what Erik Spoelstra poignantly called Wednesday night the underestimated power of “months of work, grind and sweat”– that generally highlights actually, lasting success.
And on Thursday, in Denvers 114-108 loss to LeBron & & Co., you saw all of that: The work, the sweat, the grind, and the months of more of all of those things ahead for Denver, blended with the bitter tablet of the so-close-but-not-close-enough truth they will battle with for months, if they do not pull another 3-1 wonder comeback.
Isiah understands what hes discussing: Sometimes, unpleasant though it is, you require an education..
Denver could have won that video game. They shot better than 50 percent from the field, were within three with 3:28 to enter the game and within 4 with 28 seconds left. The might have won Game 2, too. A LeBron James shutdown on Murray, and an A.D. dagger, has made another return extremely, extremely unlikely.
That is a painful, harsh, horrible, insomnia-inducing truth for Denver..
Which is simply why it might prove so valuable in the years ahead.
Murray and Nikola Jokic are stars. Michael Porter Jr., for all his inconsistencies, can be part of a Nuggets Big 3. What Mike Malone has been preaching has worked, and will resonate ever more strongly in the locker space moving forward. A group with a vision and a strategy– that know who they are, and believe what they can be– have everything.
It might not feel like it now, but LeBron deciding– and requiring– to use his experience and smarts and skills to close down Murray, and doing it effectively, bodes well for Denvers long-lasting future, if clearly not its instant one. And though Denver would definitely have actually taken the win, NBA history says theyre getting something almost as important: An education, one that most previous NBA champions needed to get to that future they longed for..
This is something Hall of Fame player and two-time NBA champion Isiah Thomas talks about often, consisting of when he and I visited this summer season, after “The Last Dance.” Hes a huge follower in the lessons that come with losing to achievement, and seeing, first-hand, and learning, painfully, just what the line is between good adequate and practically sufficient.
” The credit that we offer to the Lakers and the Celtics– and me myself to Bird and Magic– from learning was so important,” he stated. “Thats how we improved. We needed to go to school.”.
