Pounding by Pelicans flattens Nuggets
The thunder sticks began clapping well before the game began. Fans slapped together the plastic noisemakers handed out at the Pepsi Center on Sunday night, eager to provide a playoff-type soundtrack for the home team.
The problem was the Nuggets couldn’t hit a single note, falling more flat than an ill-tuned saxophone.
An atrocious shooting performance and defensive lapses to match doomed the Nuggets in a perplexing and dispiriting 115-90 loss to New Orleans, a major setback in their pursuit of a long-awaited playoff spot.
“This was an embarrassing loss,” Nuggets coach Michael Malone said. “We have (now nine) games to go, in a playoff race, and we show up like the game didn’t matter. That can’t happen. That can’t be us.”
With Portland winning 97-81 at the Los Angeles Lakers, the Nuggets are now tied with the Trail Blazers in the race for the eighth and final playoff berth in the Western Conference. Both teams are 35-38. The Nuggets, who haven’t made it to the playoffs since 2013, begin a fivegame road trip at Portland on Tuesday.
The intensifying, road-heavy schedule and Portland’s edge in the tiebreakers between the teams made victory in their third-to-last home game imperative for the Nuggets.
Instead, the Nuggets shot just 37.9 percent from the field, were bullied by Pelicans star Anthony Davis for the second time this season and fell behind by as many as 35 points on
their home floor in one of their worst defeats of the season.
“We struggled to shoot the ball, but we struggled to compete on the other end,” forward Darrell Arthur said. “We didn’t play any defense, brought no defense to the game. It seemed like they wanted it more than we did. With us trying to make the playoffs, we can’t have that.”
When Alexis Ajinca floated into the key and hit an uncontested jumper that put the Pelicans up 93-62 early in the fourth quarter, Malone angrily called a timeout and boos could be heard greeting the Nuggets as they headed to the bench.
How off the mark were the Nuggets? They began the game by hitting 10 of their first 14 shots. They hit only 26-of81 the rest of the game. Denver made only 6-of-25 shots from 3-point range.
“We’ve been playing good basketball,” guard Jameer Nelson said. “It’s untimely having a loss — not just how it happened but in general.”
The Pelicans began their charge near the end of the first quarter. They closed the period on a 14-2 run, capped by a Davis 3-pointer off an inbounds play with only 0.9 seconds left on the clock. The shot gave New Orleans a 29-26 lead that just kept growing.
Baskets have been easy to produce for the Nuggets for much of the past three months, a stretch that has seen them produce the highest-rated attack in the NBA. The offense has been a fine-tuned machine, with crisp ball movement serving as the key component of a purring engine.
Against New Orleans, the engine coughed and sputtered. The ball stuck, movement stalled and the Nuggets often were found settling for contested, late-possession jump shots.
The Pelicans played without all-star big man DeMarcus Cousins, but it hardly mattered. Davis, who scored 50 points in the season opener against Denver, finished with 31 points and 15 rebounds, shooting 12-of-17 from the field.
“We just have to bounce back,” Nelson said. “We’re a good team. We believe in ourselves. We believe in each other. We have to hold ourselves and each other accountable.”