At lunchtime on April 22, Beijing time, the veteran announcers Duan Ran and Yang Yi, who had been in the battlefield for a long time, also had a little panic. As they were about to enter the final minute, the Nuggets trailed the Warriors by three points and had 10 seconds left in their offensive round when Will Barton took a three-point shot from the 3-point range against Draymond Green's defense.
Duan Ran: "Vomit directly Patton to three points!" Then, Jie Barton... Is it time to suck...? ”
Yang Yi: "... Well, yes, there's 1 minute left in the game..."
There was 1 minute left in the game, but in the next two rounds, Curry accelerated the layup in front of Jokic's eyes, turned his head, and Jokic made a mistake in the pursuit of dreams. The game is actually over at this point, there is no more drama of infighting in the team, there is no plot to complain about the referee, and the matter has come to an end, Jokic is at the bottom line, holding his knees down, silently waiting for the final whistle.
"0-143" is a string of mysterious codes that have no meaning anywhere except the basketball court, symbolizing a tried-and-true conclusion: there have been 143 series in league history in which the big scores of 0-3 have been made, and the trailing side has lost 143 series. Now that the Nuggets are about to become the 144th or 145th or 146th team, the reason why the numbers will be different depends on whether the Raptors and Hawks will meet this fate before or after them, but although the numbers are different, the result is already doomed: this series.
It's over.
When the game entered the final 3 minutes, Jokic shook off the dream layup and scored the last 2 points of his own 37 points, 18 rebounds, 5 assists and 3 steals in 38 minutes, ending the previous 110-second free throw war, breaking the deadlock, and the Nuggets led by 2 points. This was the Nuggets' last lead of the game.
Then came the three rounds that Wiggins decided to play: shooting a bottom corner three-pointer, fending off a Jokic layoff, and grabbing a frontcourt rebound.
Three games down, the Warriors you perceive, all back, splash four old, death five small, passing and empty cut, three-pointer, conversion, twisting hips, noisy crowd, beautiful back pass and small forwards who can't shoot three points into the bottom corner.
But it's not 2016, it's 2022, it's not the Finals, it's just the First Round in the West, and this time Wiggins hit that three-pointer. A three-pointer destined to be forgotten, a first-round game destined to be forgotten, a round of ordinary sweeps destined to be forgotten. Some people may remember that the Nuggets successfully completed the first black eight in history in the first round of 1-3 in 1994, but few people remember that the Nuggets won 1 point in game 4, won 8 points in game 5 double overtime, and won 3 points in game 6 after falling behind 0-3 against the Jazz in the second round, and they became the team closest to 0-3 to turn over. The reason why such thrills are all forgotten is only because they eventually lost the series.
If you lose, you will be forgotten, let alone lose in the first round, let alone lose 3 games in a row. Some could argue why can't this Nuggets break through to make history out of themselves? All I can say is friend, if you scratch the lottery ticket and scratch out a "thank you" word, you really don't need to continue to scratch down.
After the Nuggets' last lead, Kerr called out a timeout, and the camera was given to Malone's side, "This is our game, fight, fight, rush duck!" It seems like a scripted copy of the Pelicans coach Willie Green's speech that encouraged the team to play in the playoffs a few days ago, and I don't know if he passed the original review.
After the game, Malone said: "I'm proud of the players. I love the hard work today, we didn't give up, and that attitude was what we needed. ”
I'm not in the Nuggets locker room, and I don't know if listening to these words too much will make me sick to my stomach, but I guess that when Jokic hears such remarks after the game, most of them will feel like they will be extremely tired and see "listen to me say thank you."
Seven years. Malone's American chicken soup has been boiled for seven years, and as always, it exudes a silky smooth and smooth and slightly spicy taste of Ma Yinglong's hemorrhoid cream. Ma Yinglong came to the Nuggets at the age of 44, now 50 years old, I don't know if he will regret it, just this month, the final stage of the regular season, his team lost at home to the Timberwolves, and then lost to the Spurs at home, Sheng Sheng lifted the Jazz to fifth, himself fell to sixth. Zhuge Malone may have made some calculations, chasing dreams for half a year, Klay did not play for two years should be back to the light, Curry sprained his ankle injury again, and there may be a big picture of "never let the Lakers enter the playoffs", in short- our opportunity to nugget the Golds has come!
The organs calculated too cleverly, but they mistook Qingqing's life.
Now there is only one last question left about this series:
So what do we think of Jokic?
Behind this question is Embiid's gloomy eyes, our almost dusty MVP candidate for the 2021-22 season, standing on the bottom line, hanging his head and accepting the third loss since the playoffs and the possible sweep, while his biggest rival Embiid is preparing to sweep the opponent.
There are 66 MVPs in the history of the league, of which 23 have won championships, 9 have lost the finals, 20 have fallen to the divisional finals, 8 have been eliminated in the divisional semifinals, and 5 have been eliminated in the first round. As for the MVP being swept, MVP Magic Johnson was swept in the Finals in 1989, MVP Moses Malone in the first round in 1979, MVP Abdul-Jabbar in the Western Conference Finals in 1977, and Wes Unseld in the first round in 1969.
If we lose the next game, we will become the first MVP in history to be swept for two consecutive years, including one year in the first round.
This is likely to be an unprecedented "achievement". We can still find some reasons for Jokic, his regular season performance of two consecutive MVP is indeed good enough, his helpers around him are indeed insufficient, he has taken the team to an undue position; on the other hand, MVP is still a regular season award, the selection criteria are not set by Jokic himself, throughout the history of the league MVP voting, the way of selection is changing, the people participating in the selection are changing, the most fundamental, the values of the selection are also changing, the 1975-1976 season Jabbar won the MVP, His Lakers didn't even make the playoffs.
But now you look back at these MVPs, look at these great names, think about the same 0-to-3 letter brother in 2020, think about Nowitzki who was blackened in 2007, a tragic experience of "ascending to the top and falling heavy", which may also become the beginning of the next good experience. And everything that has happened in the past, year after year, people coming and going, good and bad, are real beings, and every kind of happiness or unhappy present is the starting point of a happy or unhappy future. No one will really embrace the imaginary future, and no one can really erase the reality of the present, because there are always people who are willing to be employed by real memories, the Internet age, the game video is there, you are difficult to delete clean.
Two consecutive MVP Joky Wizards is only 27 years old, played a total of 7 years, only played 4 years of playoffs, and honestly, his career has just reached its peak. The Nuggets certainly didn't have to rush to break up so early, because they did have a good reason to explain it all, and most obviously, they had two top-salary contract players sitting there unable to play, and when you watched Morris, Barton, and Gordon unable to shoot or afraid to shoot three-pointers, when you looked at the Nuggets' top three-point shooting rate in the regular season, Morris, who averaged 4.2 shots and 39.5 percent per game, you certainly miss healthy Murray and Porter Jr., who are not just the Nuggets' other two big contract starters They averaged 41 percent of their 6.6 three-point shooting per game last season and 44.5 percent from 6.3 three-point ranges per game, and one of them is 24 years old and the other 23 years old, and the word "healthy" will of course return to Denver Heights, and when the word "healthy" returns to Denver Heights, the Nuggets will still be a championship-winning team.
But you know, when things don't really happen before your eyes, all positive predictions about the future can only be the beauty of the loan. The world is changing too fast, Booker is injured, Middleton is injured, Simmons is going to come out to save Gotham, it's easy for a team to improve every year, because the athletic league is not your child, it's not easy to be satisfied with a "just go beyond yourself", there are at least 7 or 8 other teams in the league trying to go further, and the standard for all people to improve is always to go further than the competitors. That layer of window paper does not become easier to break as your stable personnel grow healthier, in fact, often miss a year, you have to miss more years, and when you look back at this layer of window paper, you will find that it has become reinforced tempered glass.
But these are only in terms of the Nuggets, from the perspective of Mr. Yo, it may be a different face, he did say that he would prefer to win the championship in the Nuggets, but his contract is only 1 year left, the renewal negotiations have not yet been put on the agenda, and rumors have spread all over the Denver Plateau. Although 27 years old is young, it is already an awkward age in the contemporary era, the good news is that About Teacher is a European player, European players everyone understands, better to grasp, more broken feelings, replaced by Yankees, 26-year-old James has arrived on the South Coast, 26-year-old Pepper and Leonard have been ready to change teams, 26-year-old Irving has gone to the third team, as strong as Durant, but also only stayed up for one more year.