The Denver Nuggets and Oklahoma City Thunder split a pair of games on back-to-back nights, with Denver winning Monday night's game 140-127. Nikola Jokic had 35 points, 18 rebounds and eight assists in the win while Shai Gilgeous-Alexander had just 25 points after scoring 40 in OKC's win the previous night.
After holding the Nuggets to 103 points on Sunday, Denver's offense was unstoppable last night. The Thunder did everything they could to slow down Jokic, including something that the competition committee is probably going to have to discuss this offseason—the permanent sub.
In order to slow down the Nuggets, OKC coach Mark Daigneault had rookie Dillon Jones stand at the scorer's table as if he was going to go into the game, but instead of checking in, he stayed on the sideline. Daigneault explained the strategy after the game.
"The ball goes out of bounds in the NBA, the officials are the ones in charge of the pace of how fast the ball gets inbounded," said Daigneault. "Jokic is savvy. If I was coaching Jokic I'd appreciate him doing this too, but he gets the ball very quickly, you know. And he starts the fastbreak. And the officials start the fastbreak for him because he demands the ball and they hand it to him and he zips up the floor."
Daignault also explained where he got the idea.
"We had a situation a couple years ago where we're at Golden State," he continued. "We had a sub up and they missed the sub, they inbounded the ball so fast. And so I put a sub up tonight and I was like hey, you're going to have to call him in every single out of bounds in order to slow the game down if you guys are going to give them an advantage by handing the ball fast. They delay of gamed that. I don't know if there's a rule against doing that. I think you can have a sub up there and choose not to put him in the game."
Who knew that Jones, who didn't actually ended up entering the game until there was just 1:46 remaining in the fourth quarter, would be such an integral part of the strategy to slow down Jokic? It just goes to show you that a player doesn't always need to get in the game to get off the bench.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as OKC Coach Mark Daigneault Found a Creative New Way to Slow Down Nikola Jokic.
