John Daly If they’re to bounce back from a second narrow loss to the Los Angeles Lakers, they’ll also have to play to the
rim tonight (8 p.m., ESPN) and not the crowd as they did in Game 3. The Nuggets didn’t spend their Sunday lamenting Trevor Ariza’s deja vu steal during the final minute to help the Lakers snare a 2-1 lead in the Western Conference finals with a 103-97 victory. Instead, they talked about how they tried too hard to rile up their crowd, an ill-suited strategy that resulted in them missing 22-of-27 shots from outside the arc and shooting a playoff-low 39 percent while losing at home for the first time in 75 days. The Nuggets’ three-best 3-point shooters were all off the mark: Carmelo Anthony was 1-for-7, Chauncey Billups 2-for-7, J.R. Smith 2-for-10. Kenyon Martin said he couldn’t believe the Nuggets fired up that many 3-pointers, “but we were trying to put them away.” “We’d go up seven, eight points and trying to get the building to erupt,” Martin said. “We’ve done that so much during the season and throughout the playoffs. So, we figured that’s the way it was going to be. And it’s not always going to be that way. You’ve got to grind it out sometimes, take the tough two or get to the line and score points that way.”
Billups agreed the Nuggets “shot some bad 3-point shots at bad points of the game, just taking chances, trying to hit the dagger,” and vowed that would change for Game 4.