Nuggets have a troubling new issue on defense vs. Heat

National Basketball Association

Updated Jun. 7, 2023 2:45 p.m. ET

There was almost nothing good about Denver’s defense in Game 2 of the NBA Finals on Sunday, but when Nuggets head coach Michael Malone sat down to review film from his team’s 111-108 home loss to Miami, he marked down 17 plays in which the Heat were able to convert his team’s mistakes into points.

Botched switches. Poor communication. Silly fouls. Malone tallied up the amount of points surrendered on these plays. It was “over 40,” he told reporters Tuesday, a few hours after showing the clips to his team during a morning film session.

“That, to me, is staggering,” he said.

Forget all the talk about how Miami evened the Finals by turning Nikola Jokic into a scorer. With Jokic taking 28 shots, the Nuggets offense might not have looked as fluid in Game 2 as it has throughout the rest of the playoffs, but they still shot 52% from the field and still finished the contest with a scorching offensive rating of 124.1, a mark five points higher than the league-best one posted during the regular season by the Sacramento Kings.

Offense wasn’t what cost the Nuggets Game 2 and their home-court advantage. It was their poor defense that lost them the game, and it’s their poor defense that has them on the ropes entering Wednesday’s Game 3.

Who wins Game 3: Jokić & Nuggets or Butler & Heat?

Of course, this came just one game after the Nuggets were able to hold the Heat to 93 points, 40.6% shooting and an offensive rating of 100, which — obviously — are all very good marks. Thing is, there might just be some good fortune baked into those numbers.

In Game 1, the Heat misfired on 19 of their 30 “open” or “wide open” 3-point looks, according to NBA Advanced Stats (“open” means no defender within four-to-six feet, “wide open” means no defender within six feet). Had they been able to bang home just a couple more, the results would have been different. Even Malone recognized the budding problem.

“I don’t think we played well in Game 1,” he told reporters on Saturday. “I watched that tape, and they were 5-of-16 on wide-open 3s. As I told our players this morning, the fact that they got 16 wide-open 3s is problematic. And if you think that Max Strus is going to go 0-for-9 again, or Duncan Robinson is going to go 1-for-5 again, you’re wrong.”

It didn’t take long for Malone to be proved prophetic. In Game 2, the Nuggets once again allowed the Heat to get off 30 clean looks from deep. This time, they connected on 16. But the part that should have the Nuggets and their fans concerned is that this is a new problem. The Nuggets might not be a great defensive team, but part of the reason they were able to coast to the Finals is because they had managed to tighten things up on that end of the floor in the playoffs.

During the regular season, Denver surrendered 114.6 points per 100 non-garbage time possessions, according to Cleaning the Glass, a middle-of-the-pack mark. During the playoffs and entering the Finals, that number has plummeted to 108.1. And it wasn’t until the Nuggets ran into the Heat that surrendering open looks from deep became a problem. In their Western Conference finals sweep of the Los Angeles Lakers, they only allowed 24 “open” or “wide open” looks per game, and 25 during their six-game semifinals dismantling of the Phoenix Suns.

“I feel like we’ve had some breakdowns that are uncharacteristic of us,” Nuggets forward Aaron Gordon told reporters on Tuesday.

Many of these were so egregious, you could spot them in real time. Like losing track of Strus on one of the first possessions of the game.

Or, fumbling a pick-and-pop coverage a few possessions later.

Or, letting the Heat real off five straight points in the fourth quarter by running the same play on back-to-back possessions, all because the Nuggets seemed unsure of how they wanted to defend Robinson off a curl.

“What we can do better is just be a lot more disciplined in terms of the game plan, who I’m guarding — most of that stems from communication,” Malone said. “A saying I learned a long time ago: Communication is concentration. For me to communicate, I have to know what the hell to say. If I’m not concentrating, and I’m not focusing, I don’t know what to say. We had way too many examples, for an NBA Finals game, where we had guys not on the same page because of a lack of communication.”

Part of that is a result of the Heat’s shooting depth. Between Robinson, Strus, Gabe Vincent, Kevin Love, Kyle Lowry and Caleb Martin, there might not be a team in the league with a deeper bench of snipers capable of catching fire. Combine that depth with the passing chops and unselfish nature of their two offensive moons — Jimmy Butler and Bam Adebayo — and the whirling offensive designed by Heat head coach Erik Spoelstra, and you can see how defenders can be left reeling. There are so many players to worry about, and so many actions to guard. There are times when the Heat will spend 20 seconds pushing and probing until they get a good shot.

“They run some pretty tough actions to guard,” Michael Porter Jr. said Tuesday. “You know, some unique actions that I think probably only they do.” For example, Porter Jr. said, the Heat have been “playing off of our coverages.”

“They are hearing what we are communicating to each other, and they’re doing the opposite. If we say ‘switch,’ they are slipping out for open 3s and if we don’t say ‘switch,’ they are actually going to set the screen. So they do a really good job of playing off of what our game plan is.”

No one has done more damage leveraging the Nuggets’ game plan against them than Butler. After driving the ball just eight times in Game 1, he recorded 19 drives in Game 2. There’s not much the Nuggets can do about that. Butler is a stud, and as good as anyone at knifing his way into the lane. Where the Nuggets did mess up, though, was in not recognizing that Butler was driving to pass, just as he was against the Celtics throughout the back half of the Eastern Conference finals.

In two games against the Nuggets, he’s dished out to teammates on 50% of his drives, according to Second Spectrum, a 12% uptick from his mark entering the Finals. With that being the case, there’s no reason for the Nuggets to collapse every time he touches the paint.

Or, leave their men open whenever Butler looks at the rim, especially with a stout defender like Gordon guarding him.

“I think [we’re] probably over-helping a tad bit. [Gordon] has been doing a pretty good job limiting his shots, him getting downhill,” Porter Jr. said.

Which is the glass half-full look at this. The Nuggets know what they’ve done wrong, and we can presume they have some thoughts on how they can best fix these problems. But there’s a glass half-empty way to view all this as well.

Based on Malone’s remarks, we can presume the Nuggets had similar conversations after Game 1, as well. Their responses to those talks? One of their worst defensive performances of the season.

Yaron Weitzman is an NBA writer for FOX Sports. He is the author of “Tanking to the Top: The Philadelphia 76ers and the Most Audacious Process in the History of Professional Sports.” Follow him on Twitter @YaronWeitzman.

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