The NBA regular season wraps up on Sunday, and the Denver Nuggets are in a fight for the top seed in the NBA Western Conference.
Unfortunately, the Nuggets don’t yet know if they’ll have stars Nikola Jokic and Jamal Murray for their regular season finale against the Memphis Grizzlies.
Jokic is questionable for the game with left hip inflammation, and Murray is questionable with swelling in his right knee.
The Nuggets’ path to the first seed in the Western Conference was laid out perfectly. With a monster win over the Minnesota Timberwolves on April 10th, all the Nuggets had to do was win their final two games of the season against the San Antonio Spurs and Memphis Grizzlies and the first seed would be theirs. Unfortunately, the Spurs would play spoiler. Thanks to a converted floater by Devonte’ Graham with 0.9 seconds remaining, the Spurs would beat the Nuggets 121-120 on Friday night.
The loss was incredibly disappointing, as they were the heavy favorites to win the game. At one point, Denver even had a 23-point lead. It even looked like the Nuggets offense was toying with the Spurs. But Jokic and the rest of the team would get complacent and allow the Spurs to score an astonishing 71 points in the second half.
“We didn’t defend at all,” Nuggets head coach Michael Malone said. “… The very few times they did miss in the fourth quarter, we gave up eight offensive rebounds for 13 points. So give San Antonio a ton of credit. They stayed with it. We were up by 23 at one point, and just, too many blow-bys, too many 3s, too many leaving our feet on shot fakes. Just a lot of things that I would say did not go our way down the stretch.”
Can the Nuggets claim the Western Conference’s top seed?
With the Nuggets’ loss, they have fallen into a three-way tie with the Minnesota Timberwolves and Oklahoma City Thunder. While Denver’s hopes of landing the first seed are now slim, it’s not necessarily impossible. First and foremost, they will have to win their game against the Memphis Grizzlies. If the Dallas Mavericks beat the Thunder, and the Phoenix Suns beat the Timberwolves, the Nuggets will reclaim the Western Conference’s top seed.
Last season, the Nuggets were able to somewhat cruise through the final weeks of the regular season as they had the first seed locked down. Despite having command of the West, the Nuggets would still lose some games as they closed their regular season out.
While the Nuggets are still likely considered the favorites to come out of the Western Conference, they have now made their path possibly a little more difficult with the loss to the Spurs.
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