Nikola Jokic, Nuggets sweep Lakers to reach first Finals
Nikola Jokic has been as good as anybody in basketball over the past three seasons, and the Denver Nuggets’ big man now will get the NBA Finals stage to show it.
Jokic and his teammates overcame LeBron James, Anthony Davis and the Los Angeles Lakers as the visiting Nuggets advanced to the NBA Finals for the first time in franchise history with a 113-111 victory on Monday and a four-game sweep in the Western Conference finals.
The two-time MVP scored 30 points, grabbed 14 rebounds and dished out 13 assists for his fifth triple-double in his past six games.
He set a record for total tripledoubles in a single playoff run with eight, breaking a tie with Wilt Chamberlain, who had seven for the Philadelphia 76ers in 1967.
Jamal Murray scored 25 points and Aaron Gordon added 22 for the Nuggets, who trailed by 15 points at halftime and weathered a 31-point first half from James.
“We don’t give up,” Jokic said on the ESPN broadcast. “I’ve been saying this the last five years, when we were bad, we were good, we don’t give up. That’s what happened today. They jumped on us in the first half, they were aggressive, they were scoring easy. But in the second half, we turned the page and everybody was
stepping up.” Denver swept the series after losing once in the first round to the Minnesota Timberwolves and twice in the second round to the Phoenix Suns.
The Western Conference’s top
seed will now await the winner of the Eastern Conference finals, in which the Miami Heat have a 3-0 lead over the Boston Celtics. There has never been a pair of conference-finals sweeps in NBA history.