On every journey where almost everyone you run up against is tying to stop you from reaching the destination, you will eventually come to a river that seems too wide or too swift to cross, a mountain too towering and rocky to climb up and over, or a wilderness to big to find your way out of. The Conference finals, the final four of the NBA, have been where these kinds of almost insurmountable obstacles have been engaged and then the journey ended for dozens of very, very good and some extremely good teams over the decades.
There have been millions who have sworn that they saw NBA Champions never crowned playing and losing in some of the Conference Finals, because they were knocked off by a fluke or by unfair fate in the Conference Final.
How about for example the
2000 Portland Trailblazers, who lost to the
2000 Los Angeles Lakers in game seven of the West finals when the Lakers mounted t
he biggest comeback in a 7th game in history, 15 points, in the 4th quarter no less. And you thought Kobe Bryant and the Lakers had trouble this year with Aaron Brooks, Sean Battier, Ron Artest, and the Rockets? That was nothing compared to having to deal with the 2000 Blazers and their 15 point fourth quarter, game seven lead.
Conference Finals losers can be teams that may have been more talented than the ones that defeated them and that went on to the NBA Championship. They include teams that were proud, with amazing energy, amazing spirit, and amazing will to compete. Teams that were often younger, teams that had a dreamer or two, a player for example like the Nuggets’ Nene, whose dream to come to the United States and be in the NBA playoffs came true. Teams whose players did not have many fat Nike contracts, if any at all. Teams that millions swore were going to win it all. Teams that in a perfect world would never be called “the loser” of the Conference Final, but only maybe “the team that was not chosen”.
Or sometimes the Conference Final loser was and will be the team whose coaching staff did not understand the game of basketball as well as the other staff did.
Now the Nuggets have come to that river, or to that mountain, or to that wilderness. Or actually they have come up to all three at once; the Lakers are that good. They have come up to the Los Angeles “Nine Rings” Lakers. They have come up to the Great Wall of Los Angeles, formed by Pau Gasol, Lamar Odom, Andrew Bynum, and Trevor Ariza. Although probably not the biggest such Wall in NBA history, it’s the kind of wall that ordinary semifinal winners don’t get past.
ON THE QUEST TO DETERMINE HOW TO GET PAST THE WALL
What exactly separates the winners from the losers is what this site is all about. We already have made a lot of progress in identifying the real keys to winning the Quest, but there is a good distance to go still. We will produce as many reports and take as long as needed to find all of the reasons.
In the near future, we will have a page where there will be a summary, Master List of all identified factors that allow teams to win the Quest. We might call it the “How to Win the Quest for the Ring for Dummies Who Don't Have the Time to find out the Whys and the How’s". In other words, there will be a warning at the top that the devil is in the details and just knowing the summary is not going to get you very far, since you have to know how to specifically achieve those things, and since you have to know when you don't have the prerequisites to achieve one or more of them.
A FEW OF THE THINGS THE NUGGETS TAUGHT US IN 2008-09
The Nuggets, those unpredictable devils coached by someone who we sometimes think of as a blood relative of the devil, have helped this site a lot this year, by teaching us, among many other things, that:
1. You can not predict basketball winners or losers, even playoff series, weeks or months in advance. It’s not like if you are an economist predicting the unemployment rate or the gross domestic product that will be revealed at the next report, which is actually easy to get right by comparison. Injuries alone make the whole idea ridiculous, but predicting series far in advance would not work even if there were no injuries.
2. You can get one of the best defensive players in the League for almost no money, as the Nuggets did this year with Chris Andersen. All managers should donate $1,000 to charity as a penalty for not picking up the unemployed Andersen before the Nuggets did. What is wrong with you people, you 29 managements that just stood around with your hands in your pockets while the Nuggets swiped Andersen off the waiver wires for chump change, whereupon Quest made a fool of itself by reporting that the Nuggets could not go very far with Andersen, since clearly the other teams had little if any interest in him.
Well, it turned out that Andersen was the 2nd best total and per game blocker in the NBA this year, behind only Dwight Howard of the final four Magic in first. Since Andersen played only 20.6 minutes per game while Howard played 35.7 minutes per game, the true blocking leader was Andersen by a country mile; Andersen led the NBA by a massive amount in percentage of possessions resulting in his making a block.
For the overall picutre, here are the top 20 defenders according to the
Basketball Reference site:
1. Dwight Howard-ORL 94.6
2. Kevin Garnett-BOS 97.5
3. LeBron James-CLE 99.1
4. Anderson Varejao-CLE 100.0
5. Kendrick Perkins-BOS 100.2
6. Tim Duncan-SAS 100.2
7. Zydrunas Ilgauskas-CLE 100.5
8. Chris Andersen-DEN 100.6
9. Yao Ming-HOU 100.8
10. Rajon Rondo-BOS 100.9
11. Lamar Odom-LAL 101.6
12. Trevor Ariza-LAL 102.1
13. Luis Scola-HOU 102.3
14. Gerald Wallace-CHA 102.4
15. Joel Przybilla-POR 102.4
16. Samuel Dalembert-PHI 102.6
17. Emeka Okafor-CHA 102.7
18. Rashard Lewis-ORL 102.8
19. Chris Paul-NOH 103.1
20. Ron Artest-HOU 103.3
You see how Chris Andersen is way, way up there, in between Yao Ming and Tim Duncan? That is some serious company. To say that Andersen was for real would be a stupid understatement.
The icing on the cake turned out to be that Andersen also converted numerous defensive rebounds to offensive rebounds and scores, by almost literally flying in from 10, 15, even 20 feet out, denying the defensive rebound to the dumbfounded would be rebounder, and stuffing it in for the score.
3. Your fans may forgive you even if you in effect declare that how you were playing the game in recent years was dumb and goofy. Or probably, it is more accurate to say that most of the fans you had back then have moved on to other interests, and now you have a new group of hardcore fans who won't know about or will make excuses about last year, and believe no matter what.
Change your scheme, and you get a whole new fan base, which makes running a sports franchise successfully far easier than I thought it was. Now I guess I know why NBA general managers are not fired all that often: their jobs are not as difficult as I was thinking.
I mean, the Nuggets' manager recently won an award for undoing the stupid mistake he made earlier, for getting rid of Allen Iverson, after he himself made the blunder of obtaining him less than two years earlier. How many awards have you won by undoing your own blunder, laugh out loud?
KARL DIDN'T LIKE HIS OWN TEAM, AND THE QUEST WAS BORN
One such 2008-09 Nuggets "super fan” would be George Karl, and I’ll tell you a secret: this was quite a reversal. Karl was not a big fan of the Nuggets in 2006-07, and he almost hated the Nuggets last year, in 2007-08. He hated his own team, apparently because he had no faith in offense winning a lot of games, and/or in his ability to coach offense.
Meanwhile, and by contrast, Quest was born as a Nuggets site in late 2006, and when the doctor slapped us in the ass and we started breathing as a basketball winning information machine, we were really, really liking the almost limitless offensive potential of those two Nuggets teams.
We followed every game, every move of those teams, and gradually grew to hate the failure of the Nuggets to do much with the offense other than watch Allen Iverson run around and take a lot of shots and make a lot of assists and get to the line a whole lot because the referees have a lot of respect for a Hall of Fame, less than six feet tall, point guard who is playing both guard pisitions at once but no one gives him credit for it since there is no such position.
But that was then and this is now.
GAME ON--TUESDAY MAY 19 2009
So go ahead Nuggets, you go out there and take your best shot against those Lakers with their metro area of over nine million people and with their nine rings. While you have less than three million and zero rings.
Try to confuse the Lakers, Coach Phil Jackson, and the referees, by having two completely different ways of playing. Sometimes you can play according to George Karl’s half insane all defense and fast breaking all the time way of playing, and sometimes you can play some real hoops, like you did in games four and five of the Mavericks series.
It appears that Dallas Coach Rick Carlisle and one of the top ten veteran players in the League, Dirk Nowitzki, were dead serious when they said that the Nuggets can advance to play in the Champjionship, most likely versus the Cavaliers. Endorsements from both the Coach and the best player don’t come along every day.
QUEST VIEW IN JANUARY, AND NOW ON THE EVE OF THE SERIES
While we still don’t think the Nuggets can get to the Championship, Quest is proud of the Nuggets and proud that this site was born as a site dedicated only to them. We’re alright with having been made to look a little foolish by predicting that the team would fall into many of George Karl’s traps, many of which are set up as a result of the man’s lack of confidence about his own teams and about the power of basketball to give the win to those who love to make hoops, regardless of supposed personality problems they may appear to have.
I mean, the man for real falls into his own traps! But the Nuggets players have lately shown some amazing ability to keep away from many of those George Karl traps.
Specifically,
we predicted, way back in January, that the Nuggets would be bounced in the playoffs quickly again. We made it sound so official and authoritative, as if it definitely would happen. We were 100% convinced that the Nuggets would be limited by Karl in enough ways that they would lose again. But against the Mavericks if not before, they did a prison break out of that jail.
So all we ended up doing back in January by making it a foregone conclusion was a good job at setting ourselves up to look goofy. It was as if we were predicting the next number of jobs lost report, which you can do over 98% of the time without looking goofy, because it turns out that it is much easier to predict economics developments than it is whether a team will win a playoff series three months later.
In January we made a list of
sixteen detailed reasons why the Nuggets would lose. In April! Many of the items on that list have not come to pass, as a result of this team being too smart and too athletic to fall into those traps.
On the other hand, if and when, as expected, the Nuggets lose to the Lakers, some of those reasons are sure to be involved.
But damn, all I had to do to avoid looking goofy during this whole "The Nuggets Shock America" thing was to phrase the claim this way: “The Nuggets will lose in the first round if many of the following things happen. And they will win if many of these things do not happen." But no, I had to sound like Nostradamus, laugh out loud.
It's funny how that, as well as Quest botched this up, writers who already have written millions of basketball words over more than a decade, such as
David Friedman, know enough to couch all of their predictions this way: he starts all of his playoff predictions with: (name of team) will win if…, but (name of team) will win if. And he waits until just before a series starts to even do that.
That’s how we will be usually phrasing predictions in future reports, I can assure you. We made a few mistakes during your first million words, what more can I say?
But for the record,
Friedman predicted the Nuggets would not get out the first round also. Laugh out loud; Mr. Five Million Words was wrong too.
Actually though, to be fair to ESPN writers, to sportswriters everywhere else, to Mr. Friedman, and to myself, I think hardly anyone in America other than a few teenagers and a few super fans in Denver predicted that the Nuggets would be playing the Lakers in the West finals this year.
THE NUGGETS' AMAZING SEASON
In the end all this Nuggets season was ever going to be about was whether the tragedy of last year would be repeated, if not in the same way in some other new, twisted way. The Nuggets went down in 2008 as the only 50 wins or more playoff team to not win a single, solitary playoff team!
The questions for this year were: Would the Nuggets quit the Quest again, during a game no less, as Carmelo Anthony realized they did last year? Would it be another sad year in general?
See Carmelo Anthony informing everyone, after game 3 in May 2008, that the Nuggets quit during the 2008 Nuggets-Lakers series, at the end of this report.
Although we knew this season could not possibly be as tragic as last year, we were convinced it was going to be another sad one. We thought that the Nuggets, having run out of money and offensive credibility, were simply not going to have the manpower to compete with teams such as the Hornets and the Mavericks.
THE GANG OF FOUR
We asked for example: is Chris Andersen anything more than a circus act, and who the heck is Dahntay Jones? We usually but not always spelled Jones’ first name right.
Andersen, Jones, the veteran Kenyon Martin, and the not as much of a little kid anymore either JR Smith were the Nuggets’ tough guys this year, the "we are going to get some stops from uncalled fouls and we don’t give a damn about it" crew.
But if that rough attitude you have with a bunch of your players is the only way you can defend, if you don’t have the best of hands for defending without fouling, and if you probably can’t get the referees to give you the calls they give to the well known defensive veterans, then you might as well defend that way, even though you most likely
can not possibly win a Ring by doing that.
Another reason you can’t blame Denver for doing it though is because everyone with half a brain can realize that not all fouls are called in the NBA, and that the more aggressive and energetic a team is on defense, the more uncalled fouls they will “earn” from the zebras.
It’s as if the Nuggets were saying to the refs: “We know you won’t give us rogues many uncalled fouls individually, but we’ll operate our defense in overdrive and get a good number of uncalled fouls as a team. We will swarm you zebras with energetic and rough defending. Because maybe you will not individually but you will respect us as a team. And that will get us some wins”
And that rough and tough way of defending did get the Nuggets wins they would not have gotten otherwise, about 10-15 of them in the regular season. But as
already reported, and as you will see proved in detail in the future, only a tiny number of teams have won the Quest while doing this, and all of them had a higher quality defense to go along with the rough defending.
OTHER 2009 NUGGETS
The Nuggets' center Nene played the whole year for the first time in the history of the World, and as someone who can hardly be stopped. I mean, Tim Duncan is probably happy he didn’t have to go up against the too much like a freight train to stop Brazilian.
We thought that certain players were still going to be little kids, whether or not they were benched by George “The Bencher” Karl.
But there are no little kids on the Nuggets this year, even Dahntay Jones you would hardly call a "little kid," and Karl has not forbidden anyone from playing in the playoffs this year. So the manpower has appeared out of nowhere, as has Karl liking his team for a change.
We were very happy especially that Carmelo Anthony this year proved that he is not a little kid anymore, and that he proved to be a little bit of a rebel, against his Coach to some extent. Being a man and being a little bit of a rebel are two among many prerequisites for winning the Quest. Not to mention that most teams that have won the Quest have had a player who is totally dedicated to and responsible for making hoops, with everything else paling in significance.
For the Nuggets it was not another sad year at all.
It was all just amazing.
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CARMELO ANTHONY AFTER GAME THREE OF LAST YEAR'S 4-0 ROUT BY THE LAKERS OVER THE NUGGETS--THIS SHOULD NEVER HAPPEN ON A PRO BASKETBALL TEAM
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