(1) denver nuggets (8) miami heat 2023 nba finals ft the joker and mommy butler

thought about it overnight and decided that nuggets will win the nba playoffs

there's a number of specific things about this match up that really concern me

the heat having 1 big man in particular... as good as i think bam is, being the only guy on your team above 6' 7" who can go up against jokic in a playoff series is a lot to ask of anyone. also unless they change how they play defense, they're gonna force denver's role players to make threes to beat them and i do think it will put pressure on gordon and bruce brown. but the bargain gets a lot tougher when it comes to MPJ and KCP. also they were happy letting second stars like middleton & jaylen brown shoot threes to their heart's content & i'm not sure that's possible w/ murray. the heat are going to be banking on guys who typically shoot well from three to not shoot well from three

murray in particular feels like the key to me -- jokic is gonna do his thing but i think murray is the one where, if this series goes sideways for denver it will be because murray has some bad shooting games & it starts to seep into the rest of his play and he second guesses himself, won't pull the trigger, starts gumming up the offense in crunch time etc. to be clear i don't *expect* this to happen but if we're sitting here and it's somehow 3-2 miami it wouldn't surprise me if murray's play was the big culprit

ultimately there's really nothing on paper that would make you think this series will be particularly competitive, even head to head the heat have had huge issues w/ denver in the regular season recently. but the heat have thrived the entire playoffs on being the underdogs, that they're in yet another series where everyone is laughing off their chances like "yeah the other team in 5 gimme a break" has me feeling good. when they got up 3-0 on boston and everyone had to admit that it looked like they were gonna win the series they completely lost their mojo. having to go win it in boston as the underdogs was actually a far more comfortable position, weirdly, and i think it showed in how they played. i think they'll be ready to attack the series and put some pressure on denver in a way they haven't felt yet in the playoffs. will that be enough? probably not but sometimes we think we know where the finals is headed and it veers completely off course and flies off the side of a mountain. go heat.

It's no wonder why the Nuggets own an all-time home winning percentage of .652. Away from Denver, the Nuggets are a paltry .350 all time. That .302 difference between home and road win percentage is the largest for any active franchise in NBA history, according to ESPN Stats & Information research.

https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/37762170/nba-finals-2023-how-denver-altitude-gives-nuggets-edge

thats even wider than i expected

it's notorious that visiting teams to the mile-high city can't adjust quickly to the altitude, but that's a huge difference.

Jokic, however, believes the Nuggets' play should get more credit for their home-court advantage.

"Maybe, maybe not," Jokic says of whether the elevation impacts the opposing team.

"We think it's us."

fair point

the denver nuggets will win the nba playoffs in five

On paper, it looks like the Nuggets in a walk but the Heat seems to be able to defy expectations. I can't see Miami winning but I would not be surprised if they win 2 or 3.

It's no wonder why the Nuggets own an all-time home winning percentage of .652. Away from Denver, the Nuggets are a paltry .350 all time. That .302 difference between home and road win percentage is the largest for any active franchise in NBA history, according to ESPN Stats & Information research.

I was honestly shocked to learn, though, that over the WHOLE NBA, home teams win 60% of the time. That's a huge advantage! And makes the Nuggets stat not so startling. 65-35 instead of 60-40.

iirc home court advantage has decreased a lot recently

didn't Charles Barkley used to talk about how teams would party all night in visiting cities and play a lot of NBA games hung over

also 65-35 I think is a pretty dramatic split for the not-exactly-historically-great Nugs

nugs are historically fine? they have an all time winning pct slightly over .500, they were only really bad in the 90s

iirc home court advantage has decreased a lot recently

Sure, but the that might be true for the Nuggets HCA too.

yeah they've been decent for a while but I still think that home court split is pretty significant

imo kinda hard to judge the degree to which denver has a special home court advantage nowadays vs the degree to which they have the 2 time MVP who never misses games on their team

it makes sense that altitude especially if you’re just flying in and out would have some effect. but there’s a pretty big fly in the ointment here

speaking as someone who has spent some time in colorado when you come into 5k ft denver from sea level you dont really notice the altitude, until you try to do some exercise and then you definitely notice it, and theres also an advantage for denver going the other way in that if you train at altitude you have more endurance at sea level

isn't that like a Dragonball Z plotline or something

training/living at high elevation then competing at sea level is why kenya produces so many of the top long distance runners in the world

amongst other reasons, its a pretty fascinating situation, if you find running interesting lol

AFTER THE NUGGETS finished 23-18 at home during the 2021-22 season with Murray out with a knee injury, general manager Calvin Booth had a staff member research what the competitive advantage is from playing at elevation and how the Nuggets can exploit it both physically and mentally.

Understanding that exercising at elevation can lead to symptoms of nausea, fatigue and cognitive impairment for those not acclimated, the Nuggets wanted to see when they could strategically push the pace and identify lineups that can play faster to maximize potentially the most influential home-court factor in the league.

"All the teams I've been on, essentially you're definitely going to feel it in the first couple minutes," Booth, who played 10 seasons in the NBA, told ESPN. "Typically, you get your second wind pretty quickly and you stop thinking about it. But now in a high-intensity environment like the playoffs, maybe late in the game it starts to affect you a little bit more."

Booth also wanted to examine how other pro and college teams that play at altitude try to get into the heads of opponents.

By halfway through this season, the Nuggets had devoted the majority of their allotted 30 seconds designated for introducing the opponent's starting lineup to their altitude warning. (It has forced Speller to go through the opponents' starting five as if he is competing in a speed reading contest.)

Speller will also slip an ominous-sounding "5,280 feet" during breaks in the game like he did during one coaching challenge in the fourth quarter of Game 1 of the conference finals.

"He just drops that in kind of subliminally when you can tell a guy is getting a little tired [or] made a bad pass," Craig Dzaman, Nuggets senior director of game presentation, told ESPN.

Don't know if this really makes a difference but it's pretty funny

a good chunk of elite american endurance athletes live in boulder, when i lived there itd be funny to be out running trails and have these guys absolutely shredding past you

yeah ive spent some time at my uncles place in CO which is at like 7200 ft and you dont really notice it until you try to do any exercise at which point it's immediate. ive never been there longer than 2 weeks though so i dunno how long it takes to go away completely but 2 weeks wasnt quite enough for me

i am obviously not an athlete though. if i was then i'd be in the nba instead of posting about it

for me once you go that high its noticeable without the exercise, not uncommon for people to get altitude sickness at 7k ft and have to be taken down to lower altitude, i lived at a little higher than that for a while dont really remember how long it took to adjust maybe at least a few weeks, but you never fully adjust because theres just not that much air up there

friends -- I am in sweden, and my cable logins aren't working. what's the best way to stream the game in high quality? I had no idea VPNs cost money...I'll do it, but is there another way??

I use this sometimes: https://reddit.rnbastreams.com/

it's annoying and you gotta click through some ads to watch (I think the trick is don't close the pop-ups until AFTER the stream starts), but hey, it works. sometimes.

ya that would be a last resort, but I’d ideally like a realiable high quality stream

ESPN+? Does that have the same issue as your cable logins?

i think abc.com might be showing it without having to connect a cable account?

there are definitely some high quality streams on there, you just gotta make sure to full screen it and never ever ever look at the chat box. idk maybe for the finals they'll be a bit more unreliable because so many more people will be on. for random Bucks games they were fine. similarly you can search Twitter for streams, you can usually find something if you're in a bind. I know Twitter clamped down on that for a while but I am guessing that shit is running rampant on Elon Twitter

crackstreams dot biz/nbastreams

stream dot nbabite dot com

nbabite dot to

make sure you have all of the adblockers and preferably a pihole running as well

the bootleg streams were noticably more unreliable/overloaded for the warriors/lakers series lol

yes. there are still plenty of good streams available though. there must be an enormous number of people pirating.

I had to use one for that one game that was on NBA TV or whatever and it took a few tries but eventually you find a good one

ESPN giving Tim Legler air time now because they realized he was the only one watching the Nuggets all this time and could talk about them competently lol

— Voja (@VojaMedic) June 1, 2023

the 2023 nuggets will win the nba playoffs

― methinks dababy doth bop shit too much (m bison), Monday, June 22, 2020 10:52 PM (two years ago) bookmarkflaglink

BISON

salute

hoopstradamus

whoa

YouTubeTV sponsoring the nba finals yet won’t provide its customers with better quality than 720p.

I’m VPNed up baby let’s go

*respectfully taps gloves with j0rdan*

this is an exciting time for a life long nuggets fan like myself

I used to ride my bike to McNichols to see the games back in the 80s. I was there when Alex English got his 20,000th point. Even though I've been away for 30+ years, I'm really excited and emotional about this.

thats awesome

this is an exciting time for a life long nuggets fan like myself

― lag∞n,

as a noted and long-time resident (some even say "the spiritual mayor") of denver, colorado, usa, i'm quite enthused for this series

as the creator of all life including the denver metroplex i am very excited to watch the nuggets play against the team that formed against My will, the heat

matt!

I’m so drunk

we did it!

congrats buds

I'd have to look back at some of Shaq's titles but that really felt like the best a center's ever played in the playoffs

Congrats nuggets crew!

Really enjoyable team. No floppers, no foul baiters. Dudes just hooping playing a fun brand of ball. Love when great players who are fun to watch get it done and show out.

yeah real easy team to root for. also I like the way their roster is constructed, they made a lot of smart moves and picked up a bunch of cool players. obviously Jokic evolving into one of the greatest centers of all-time was pretty lucky but hey, you gotta get lucky somewhere. the Nuggets were barely challenged and I don't see why they couldn't just run it back next year.

I don’t know what to do now

yeah they rolled only bit of luck in there is they never faced a top offensive team so their regular season middling defense held up, they did get pretty torched by the suns two leet players, a team with two great offensive players and also other good players couldve given them trouble, but it did not happen so who cares, maybe next year

the thing about the nuggets defense is their main lineups were actually very good at defense all year, they just did play the deandre jordans thomas bryants bones hylands in the playoffs

they played good defense def but i think a really good offensive team wouldve been able to do some stuff, and then wed have a shootout on our hands

Suns needing a historically great performance from Booker to win definitely a point in favor of the Nugs though

but why was he able to have a historically good performance

he shot 80% from the field in consecutive games sometimes u gotta just tip your cap

i mean hes playing against the other team (nuggets)

obvs he was liquid metal hot but some of thats gotta be on the defense, particularly considering that the suns 3-12 players were giving them basically zero

yeah nuggets defense is exploitable they had the fortune of going up against a very weak offense in the finals tho

think they'll be favorites in the west again next year but a better team is surely gonna come out of the east

don't think Miami would've seriously challenged them either way but Denver were pretty lucky the ECF wasn't a sweep, Butler having to play 7 games really did seem to wear him out. and when Butler's struggling this team can barely get to 90.

miamis shooting came back to earth, their opponents shooting did stay on earth tho

one interesting if maybe not meaningful thing about this year is that out of the nba big man mvp triumvirate the more robotic and predictable embiid and giannis were out in the early rounds while the free wheeling improvisor jokic took home the ring

Kind of soothing to me somehow that I don't think the Bucks would have won these finals

yeah didnt seem like they really had it, overall the nugs were the only team that really had the vibe this year

this bit is so good, we are all the joker now

Nikola Jokic finding out when the parade will be, and saying he wants to go home 😂 pic.twitter.com/8umJGSiu8m

— Shane Young (@YoungNBA) June 13, 2023

nobody likes their job, maybe they do, theyre lying

lmao

uncle champ

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FygHga-WYAA9pje?format=png&name=large

shout out ciderpress jimbeaux and matt armstrong

Back atcha. What a ride.

congrats nuggz and fans!

injury karma shined down on the nuggs in a real way

Congrats to Dan Shimensky, Steve Short, Jason Miller, Felipe Eichenberger, & the rest of the Denver medical team. The Nuggets did not lose a single man game to injury or illness during their entire playoff run!They also finished the regular season with the 6th fewest games lost.

— Jeff Stotts (@InStreetClothes) June 13, 2023

I stayed relatively quiet this NBA postseason as the big bad injury bug stayed away from the final few rounds. Overall the numbers of games lost to injury or illness per the number of playoff games played (2.62) was the lowest it’s been since the 2018-19 season.

— Jeff Stotts (@InStreetClothes) June 13, 2023

Reporter: ...and are looking forward to the parade?

Jokic: When is parade? When is parade?

Off camera voice: Thursday.

Jokic: (holds his head in both hands, then wipes hands down across his face) No. No. I need to go home.

Is.. Denver home for him or somewhere else?

serbia

relative to other nba cities there are probably a lot of horses in the immediate vicinity of denver but its just not the same

https://phantom-marca.unidadeditorial.es/861dc1aa08726c9cf563601407cbfa96/resize/660/f/webp/assets/multimedia/imagenes/2023/06/13/16866429447472.jpg

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_EZW-ODt3ByE/SaworHNXnpI/AAAAAAAABMM/sj03urkjdLQ/s400/Horse500.jpg

I mean

Blucifer!

huh because i didn't consume any news today except some trump bullshit, i missed that denver celebrated in lodo by having a failed drug deal with suspected fentanyl, multiple handguns, 20 shots fired, and nine people injured. so fucked up.

I don’t know what to do now

well in 20 minutes or so you can see the stanley cup awarded

it will be ridiculous if the vegas fans boo gary bettman but i hope they do it anyway

xps ok, realizing that his whole "yay. we won. time to go home" attitude is hilarious