For the first time in their 47-year history, the Denver Nuggets won their first NBA Championship on Monday night and became NBA champions, downing the Miami Heat. They ultimately held on for 94-89 at Ball Arena in Denver to take Game 5 of the NBA Finals.
The Nugget game was fierce, but they won after a tense fourth quarter. Two-time MVP Nikola Jokić led the way for the Nuggets with a game-high 28 points and 16, and he was unsurprisingly named Finals MVP.
He told ABC after the game, “It was an amazing effort by the team.”
“It was an ugly game. We couldn’t make shots but in the end, we figured out how to defend.”
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All year long, the team did it defensively. Critics, pundits, and Jokic skeptics waited for Denver’s defense to be exposed, but that never happened in the postseason. Denver rounded up the postseason with a 110.2 defensive rating, which would have been good enough for second in the regular season. Jokic continuously troubled Miami at the rim while his teammates on the perimeter hounded Miami’s shooters.
Michael Malone, the head coach, said, "We achieved something this franchise has never done before," "We still have a lot of young talented players in that locker room, and I think we just showed through 16 playoff wins what we're capable of on the biggest stage in the world."
A few hours after the game, at least nine people were injured in a mass shooting in downtown Denver, where crowds gathered to celebrate the city’s first NBA championship.
The Serbian star player man was voted as Most Valuable Player of the NBA Finals and is the first center to win the award named after the late Bill Russell since Shaquille O’Neal of the Lakers in 2002
The League is Now After Nikola Jokic
No doubt, Nikola Jokic is a fireball on the mountaintop, and any team working to win a championship needed to figure out how to solve all the problems he presents. He can’t be exploited as much as people wish he could be.
His two-man game with Murray is offensively by far the deadliest action in the world right now. The Nuggets are on standby for long-term success. And all contenders need to start planning how they can topple Denver this summer, a team that sometimes hardly seemed to break a sweat in the playoffs.
Jokic and the Nuggets, particularly, had answers for everything thrown their way this postseason. No defensive shelter could slow down Jokic and Jamal Murray, and no offense was strong enough to outscore them consistently. The Suns needed historic Gaming performances from two of the best scorers ever, only to squeal out two wins.