After the Denver Nuggets defeated the Los Angeles Clippers 120-101 in Game 7 of their first round series, there appeared to be a sense that the abrupt dismissals of Michael Malone as head coach and Calvin Booth as general manager contributed to the result. The Nuggets were floundering towards the start of the playoffs and appeared to rally around interim head coach David Adelman.
“I think the owner … wanted to change something, to change the energy, and probably he did,” Nikola Jokic said after Game 7. “He got the result he was looking for.”
“If we don’t make the changes, there’s no way we’re even in a Game 7,” a Nuggets executive told ESPN.
The Nuggets received key performances from role players Christian Braun and Russell Westbrook.
“Last year, obviously the team had a missed opportunity, but I felt like we should have won,” Braun said, referring to the Nuggets’ Game 7 loss to the Minnesota Timberwolves in the second round. “Obviously, they were a better team that night. But I just felt like there was opportunity left on the table, and I felt like I wanted to be a part of it. [Saturday’s performance] was exactly what I wanted, and those guys trusted me — they have all year, but they trusted me in that moment.
“So, this is the exact moment I was looking for, and I’m just glad that it went our way.”
The Nuggets achieved strong balance when they won the championship in 2023, which they also did in Game 7. No player had more than 22 points with six players in double figures.
“I thought it reminded me of the year we won it,” Adelman said of the balance his team found in Game 7. “There’s a lot of humble confidence in there. You have to go into these games with great respect for who’s across the hall here, what those guys are capable of doing. But you also can’t go into the game not thinking that, ‘Yeah, we can get this done.’ We’ve done this, we’ve seen this, we’ve been through this before and we’ve succeeded.”