Mudiay returns to help at point
NUGGETS 95, HORNETS 92
For at least one quarter Sunday night, Emmanuel Mudiay looked as though he had never left. In fact, he hadn’t played in a month.
He flirted with returning to the lineup from an ankle injury a few days earlier, but he couldn’t. Yet he was right on time when the Nuggets needed him against the Charlotte Hornets.
First off, the Nuggets wouldn’t have had any true point guards without him. And while they had gotten by with just one point guard in his absence, zero at the position would have been difficult to endure.
But there he was, starting after missing 14 games, and he was on fire early. Mudiay made his first three shots, scoring seven points, and that got the Nuggets off to a good start in what became a 95-92 victory at the Pepsi Center.
“It felt good,” said Mudiay of the ankle injury that had sidelined him since Dec. 11. “I came back and played. That’s the main thing: I just wanted to get out there again and see how I felt, and I felt pretty good.”
The game wasn’t without its pitfalls.
The second quarter was rough again.
“Second quarter, I felt we came out and played as individuals,” Nuggets coach Michael Malone said.
The Nuggets had scored just
five points in the first 7:20 of the quarter and were outscored 21-2 in one span of 4 minutes, 37 seconds. The Hornets, who had been down by as many 13 points in the quarter, erased the entire deficit and took a six-point lead. The Nuggets saved themselves a deeper deficit by outscoring Charlotte 12-9 to end the quarter and go into halftime down just three.
The Nuggets settled into a better defensive posture in the third, holding the Hornets to just 31 percent from the field. And with a firm foothold, they settled in and just played in the fourth.
Mudiay, who had been mostly eliminated from finishing games before he got injured, was on the court in the fourth quarter and in the mix of the game.
With 9:26 left, Mudiay stole the ball from Jeremy Lamb, then sprinted out as the loose ball fell to the Nuggets. Mike Miller hit him on the break, and Mudiay finished with a dunk. It was the highlight of a 9-2 run that gave the Nuggets enough separation to hold off Charlotte the rest of the way.
“In the second half, we held that team to 36 points and 24 percent from the field,” Malone said. “I thought our defense was terrific.”
The win snapped a fourgame home losing streak and was exactly the way the Nuggets wanted to start this season-long, eight-game homestand. The Hornets were struggling coming into the contest, and the Nuggets sent them to their seventh consecutive loss, but there have been no gimme games for the Nuggets this season. They’ve had to earn each of their wins. And so they’ll take it. Mudiay finished the night with 11 points, six assists and four rebounds. Danilo Gallinari continued his aggressive play, scoring 27 points on 7-of-18 shooting.
“It was an ugly win at the end, but I’ll take it,” Gallinari said. “We needed one. We needed this one to open up the homestand.”