Did The Denver Nuggets Really Get The Shots They Wanted Against The Los Angeles Lakers In Game 1?

If you ask the Denver Nuggets why they lost Game 1 of the Western Conference Finals 126-114 to the Los Angeles Lakers, you’ll get a unified response from all quarters.

“I think it’s obvious for anyone that watched the game,” head coach Michael Malone said after practice yesterday when asked what Denver would need to do differently to win Game 2. “Just getting back. They had 35 transition points.”

“Our urgency to get back has to be much, much higher, and we have to try to force them to play a half-court game,” Malone added. “It’ll have to start and end with that transition.”

After their loss in the series opener, Nuggets center Nikola Jokic, who had a frustrating game after getting into early foul trouble, also pointed to Denver’s transition defense as “the first step” they will need to take to find a way to even it up at one game apiece.

“When we score we need to get back,” Jokic said. “They are attacking us in transition and we know that. We just need to be, mindset needs to be get back, get back, get back.”

On offense, it had seemed the Nuggets were finding the shots they were hunting for early in the game as they won the first quarter by two points.

Given that Denver then lost the next two in a 67 to 41 drubbing which featured not only the Lakers inflicting serious damage on fast breaks but also the Nuggets struggling to find their offense, I asked point guard Jamal Murray if L.A. had changed things up to make their life more difficult.

But even so, Murray also brought the story back to transition defense.

“No, no, we got the shots we wanted,” Murray said. “I just think that the rate that they were scoring, we didn’t put a stand.”

Reiterating a point Malone makes frequently, Murray pointed to Denver’s offensive struggles resulting from their ineffectiveness on the defensive end of the ball.

“When we play defense, we score at a much higher rate as well,” he explained. “Especially with their pace, they get up and down a lot, and they try to make those runs seem a lot bigger.”

But did the Nuggets actually get the shots they wanted?

Some signs would point to the answer being “Yes.”

The statistics website Cleaning the Glass tracks a metric they call “location eFG%,” in which “eFG%” is effective field goal percentage, which accounts for the added value of three-point shots, and “location” refers to the higher- or lower-value spots on the court. The concept that it’s better to take a higher frequency of shots from higher-value spots is often colloquially referred to as “Morey Ball” after Houston general manger Daryl Morey and his embrace of advanced metrics, and as such it’s little surprise that the Rockets led the league in location eFG% this season at 55.3%. The Nuggets were below average at 24th with a location eFG% of 52.8%.

Those figures set a good contextual bar for the chart below, which shows Denver’s shooting distribution and percentages in the 2020 Playoffs. The first three lines show how the Nuggets performed through 14 games in their first two series overall, and broken down by opponent. The last two lines show both their overall numbers in Game 1 against the Lakers, as well as those from only quarters one through three since the fourth, for the most part, ended up being garbage time.

As the chart shows, if part of what Murray referred to as the shots Denver “wanted” included a high-efficiency distribution, they certainly accomplished that with a 55.6% location eFG% which would top Houston’s league-leading regular season mark.

Although a lower percentage of their shots (31.8%) were three-pointers that in the previous two series, a dramatically larger share (46.3% overall, or 40.0% through the first three quarters) were taken at the rim, with a lower share taken at the less-efficient midrange.

The problem, however, can be seen in the hart’s third column, where as opposed to their first two series where Denver outperformed their location eFG% by 2.6%, against the Lakers in Game 1 they fell 4.3% short of what ostensibly was a highly efficient shot distribution.

Rather than the Lakers’ transition offense, the more significant part of the problem here was their size on defense which gave Nikola Jokic headaches and, as mentioned above, getting him into early foul trouble. While Jokic’s 21 points on eight of 14 shooting would frequently be a very positive result for the Serbian big man, he was held to just two assists as the Lakers constantly swarmed him with doubles – and possessed the length few teams have to make that situation problematic.

This in many ways disrupted the Nuggets’ offensive flow, and while they may have finished with a positive distribution on paper, the shots they got off were not always in rhythm or as open to the extent they can be when Denver’s offense is really in a groove.

To this point, tracking data at NBA.com shows that, in fact, relative to the looks they had been getting in their two previous playoff series, far more of Denver’s shot attempts were closely contested against the Lakers than in their first 14 games.

As the chart shows, 49.4% of the Nuggets’ shots in Game 1 were taken with the closest defender either zero to two feet from the shooter (in “very tight” range) or between two and four feet (“tight”). Conversely, Denver’s share of shots that were either “open” (with the nearest defender from four to six feet away) or “wide open” (over six feet away) fell from 56.9% in the first two rounds of the playoffs to 50.6% in the Western Conference Finals opener.

So while the Nuggets may have gotten the shots they “wanted” in terms of finding their spots on the floor, they were contested at a higher rate – and contested shots rather than wide open ones should not be the ones any team wants.

There is currently much speculation as to whether Malone will make an adjustment such as starting backup center Mason Plumlee to help protect Jokic with additional size, but whether it’s that or a different solution, finding ways to free Jokic up to create the quality looks he typically finds for teammates will be – in addition to Denver shoring up their transition defense – an essential key to not only winning Game 2 but the series going forward.