This is the online version of our daily newsletter, The Morning Win. Subscribe to get irreverent and incisive sports stories, delivered to your mailbox every morning. Here’s Mike Sykes.
The Western Conference Finals is far from over, but the Nuggets do have a 2-0 lead. It hasn’t necessarily been a dominant one, no. But it’s clear to see that the Nuggets are the better team.
It was kind of hard to tell that after Game 1, though. Not because the Nuggets didn’t look better, but because everyone was too busy caught up in a single adjustment the Lakers made to cut a 21-point deficit down to 3.
The build-up to Game 2 was all about how the Lakers found something in switching Rui Hachimura onto Nikola Jokic for a whopping *checks notes* six possessions where he had help behind him. A chunk of the national talk was about how the Lakers should feel good after falling down 1-0 because they cut a deficit, not about how good the Nuggets were despite Nikola Jokic’s historic performance with a 34-point triple-double.
Even after Game 2 where the Nuggets came back to win after adjusting to the Lakers’ adjustments, it feels like people are mostly talking about what the Lakers need to do to get back in the series and not about how good the Nuggets and Nikola Jokic has been.
Michael Malone sees that. He sees you. He knows how badly we all want the narrative swing for LeBron James and the Lakers and he’s absolutely not having it.
He spent his postgame press conference calling everyone out on it while heaping a bunch of praise on Jokic, who is very much cementing himself as the best player in the world.
“He’s got 13 triple-doubles now. Third all-time. What he’s doing is just incredible, but the narrative wasn’t about the Nuggets. The narrative wasn’t about Nikola. The narrative is about the Lakers and their adjustments. So you put that in your pipe, you smoke it, you come back and you know what, we’re going to go up 2-0,” Malone told reporters.
Folks are going to say that he’s just gassing things up here. They’ll point out that the Lakers are betting underdogs and say Malone constructing a “we believe” narrative for his No. 1 seeded team that should be confident in their talent anyway.
But, y’all. Come on. We know better.
People are talking about the Lakers more because they’re the Lakers. That’s definitely a thing. And it’s not necessarily because they hate the Nuggets — most of them just haven’t watched Denver play. They’re not familiar with the team so there’s no respect or familiarity.
But I’ll tell you what — you’d better get familiar. Because this Denver team is rolling. And it’s possible it might be our next NBA champion.
Let’s collectively pull our best Lakers’ impression and adjust our coverage accordingly.
Quick Hits: A 4 OT thriller had Wayne Gretzky salty … BANG! … and more.
— PLAYOFF HOCKEY IS THE BEST. The 4 OT thriller between the Canes and Panthers was epic and, best of all, Charles Curtis writes, it left Wayne Gretzky salty.
— Calling your own Mike Breen “BANG” in the middle of a game is bold. Our Bryan Kalrbosky got Jamal Murray doing exactly that.
— Why does Austin Reaves look like an Abercrombie & Fitch model circa 2008?
— Cory Woodruff has some suggestions for what Disney should do with that expensive Star Wars hotel it’s abandoning.
Enjoy the weekend, folks!
