Role players critical to Nuggets’ Game 6 success
Quay Miller has shown improvement in each season of her college basketball career.
An opportunity to play a bonus season and get even better was too good to pass up for the Colorado senior. In late March, Miller announced that she will return for a fifth and final season, as she hopes to improve her game and help the Buffaloes build on a great 2022-23 campaign.
“I just felt like this was the right place for me to be,” said
Miller, a 6-foot-3 center who played two years at Washington before spending the last two at CU. “If I could go back, I probably would have just been here my whole collegiate career.
“I think what really ignited me to stay was just seeing how far we went and seeing the progress we made from last year with losing major keys. I guess it's my belief in this team to go even further next season. I think that's what just really influenced my decision to come back.”
Miller earned first-team Allpac-12 honors in helping the Buffs (25-9) to a third-place finish in the conference and the program's first Sweet 16 appearance in 20 years.
At Washington, Miller was a role player as a freshman and a full-time starter as a sophomore, but the Huskies went just 20-31 in those two seasons. Although she grew up about 30 minutes from the UW campus, Miller wasn't happy and transferred to CU in the summer of 2021.
At CU, Miller has flourished. She came off the bench for all 31 games of the 2021-22 season, but scored a career-best 10.6 points per game, while averaging 5.1 rebounds. She was named the
Colorado’s Quay Miller drives against Stanford’s Kiki Iriafen in Boulder on February 23.
Michael Malone doesn't throw chairs during film sessions. He leaves it to his players to throw elbows at opposing team owners during games.
“This is not 1980s Bob Knight Indiana, where it's just like, I'm telling our players,” Malone slammed his fist on the table in front of him. “It's interactive. It's players taking ownership. ‘What do you see? What can we do better?'”
In the film session after consecutive playoff losses in Phoenix, several of the Nuggets' role players identified one thing they needed to do better — an adjustment that reflected (in a more effective, on-the-court sense) the spirit of Nikola Jokic's Game 4 skirmish in the stands.
“Let's be an irritant,” as Malone put it after a 118-102 Game 5 win.
More specifically: Make the Suns' red-hot ball of fire work a little harder, and maybe the blaze would lower to room temperature. Devin Booker averaged 41.5 points on 79% shooting — 67% from beyond the arc — in Games 3 and 4. Phoenix won both games at home, evening the second-round series. So as the Nuggets ran back the tape, Kentavious Caldwell-pope, assistant coach Ryan Saunders and Aaron Gordon decided they should guard Booker full-court more often.
“We let him get in a good rhythm, and it turned out bad for us,” Caldwell-pope said. “I just wanted to pick up full sometimes. … I was telling A.G. the same thing with (Kevin Durant).”
“Eliminate some of that space,” Gordon said. “These guys are dangerous because you want to give them a step, because they're so good with their hesitation dribble at getting to the rim. So it's kind of counterintuitive: You've actually got to take that space up.”
NBA fans might tune into Nuggets playoff games to witness the Joker Show, but right now the top seed in the West needs its role players to assemble a road performance as complete as the one Caldwell-pope, Gordon and Bruce Brown supplied at home Tuesday night in a 118-102 Game 5. If that happens, the Suns might finally be toast, even in a series where the home team has held serve every night. Both teams' role players have performed better on home hardwood, a trend that continued Tuesday at Ball Arena.
The film session adjustment shepherded by the two players guarding Phoenix's stars was one example of how the Nuggets are at their best when operating as a synchronized machine. Not as the superstar-dependent team that fell short in Game 4 because the bench only provided 11 points while Jokic dropped 53.
Pac-12’s sixth player of the year, an honor that goes to the best non-starter in the conference.
This year, Miller had career-best averages for points (13.1) and rebounds (8.9). Despite a late-season slump, she dramatically improved her 3-point percentage to .330 (38-of-115) and had the best free throw percentage of her career
(.768).
“I think that I’m most pleased about my approach to the game (this year),” she said. “I think that I had more good games than I had bad games. The main thing that I really want to focus on (next year) is just staying consistent throughout the season. I know that I had a few off games towards the end of the season and … it was just not like me. My spirit was in it, but I can’t really do anything with just having a good spirit and being a good sport. I need to
be able to make shots and finish games and I think that’s just something I want to work on.”
Miller had an uncharacteristic rough stretch late in the regular season. Then, she scored a total of two points on 0-for-16 shooting in the Buffs’ two Pac-12 Tournament games in Las Vegas.
During the three-game NCAA Tournament run, however, Miller got back on track. She had 29 points and 28 rebounds in the last two games and became
just the second player in CU history to record a double-double in consecutive NCAA Tournament games.
Perhaps the biggest step of Miller’s season, however, was in becoming a leader. She put that on display in the Buffs’ final game. She struggled to hit shots early in an 87-77 loss to Iowa, but got extremely aggressive in the fourth quarter, scoring 10 points to help the Buffs cut a 16-point deficit down to four in the final two minutes.
“That’s when I was just like, ‘All right, I gotta take as many shots as I can, regardless of if they go in or not, because I’m the team’s leading scorer,’” she said. “In games like that, where, like, I know I have to step up and be the leader I am, I’m not scared to (compared to) last year when I didn’t want to step on anyone’s toes or my sophomore year when I just didn’t understand enough to do that type of takeover.”
This offseason, Miller wants to improve her ball
handling, footwork and consistency. But, she also hopes to continue as a leader for a team that returns four starters and eight rotational players and has an eye on returning to the Sweet 16 and beyond.
“That’s why I’m staying here for a majority of my summer just so I can get those weaknesses a little bit stronger and so I can improve from where I was this season,” she said. “And, let there be no drop off and just get better from where I am now.”