Before the Nuggets faced the Rockets a month ago in Houston, first-year head coach David Adelman tried to drive home the importance of the occasion to his players by widening the lens.
“This is a chance to go up 1-0 in a three-game series,” he remembers telling them. “This is a huge game.”
In the back of his mind, a separate train of thought was interrupting.
“Well,” he thought, “unless we don’t make the Cup. Or maybe we’ll play them (again) in the Cup.”
One year ago, Denver’s original regular-season schedule included three meetings with the Clippers. The Nuggets lost the first two in November, quickly clinching the season series for Los Angeles. But when both teams were among the 22 eliminated from the NBA Cup in its group stage, a fourth head-to-head matchup was added.
The league’s only way to account for unknowable variables in the in-season tournament — who makes the quarterfinals and who doesn’t — is to create a schedule with about 10 open days built in. Everyone plays two regular-season games during that December stretch every year, but the specifics are decided at random, at the last minute. Those two games might be NBA Cup knockout stage showdowns, or they might be “replacement games” against other eliminated teams.
The luck of the draw worked out for Denver in 2024. The season series ended 2-2. Both teams finished 50-32 in a fourth-place tie, setting up a first-round playoff series between them. But the head-to-head tiebreaker had been taken away from the Clippers. Game 7 was played in Denver instead of Los Angeles, thanks in part to the randomness.
That’s where the Clippers’ season ended.
This time, the luck of the draw could give Houston extra life. Monday’s game between the Nuggets and Rockets wasn’t on the original schedule, but it now serves as a fourth meeting between the two Western Conference powers, who are within a game of each other for second place. One head-to-head win is no longer enough to clinch a potential tiebreaker for Denver (18-6).
“It’s good for them, let’s just put it that way,” Adelman said. “For me, you can’t control it. It is what it is. On the flip side, we got Sacramento when they’re really beat up. So you can look at it two different ways. This whole (NBA Cup) thing, we’re just all trying to get used to it. It’s so different than it used to be. You just take on the games they give you.”
This is the third year of the NBA Cup’s existence, which introduced new peculiarities to the league calendar. Most of December has been a lull for the Nuggets. They’ve played once in the last seven days entering this rematch with Houston — a 31-point rout of Sacramento in their other replacement game. As noted by Adelman, the Kings were missing stars Domantas Sabonis and Zach LaVine.
Out of that lull arrives a pivotal week, with Kevin Durant and the Rockets visiting twice. They pose a few specific challenges that distinguish them from most teams in the league.
They like to play huge, with two centers (Alperen Sengun and Steven Adams) and two 6-foot-11 forwards (Durant and Jabari Smith) in the starting lineup.
They play a lot of zone defense, like Denver.
And they pulverize their opponents on the offensive glass, the main source of their 121.4 offensive rating, which ranks third in the league.
“I would say the offensive rebounding is the most concerning thing,” Adelman said. “Sometimes what Durant does, you can’t control. Obviously, we can bring second bodies to him. … But I think it’s the extra possessions, because it shortens the game. And that’s how they want to play. It’s almost like playing football, if you have a great running game, you have the ball the whole game. That’s how they play.”
The Nuggets neutralized the “run game” for the first quarter when they visited Texas in November. But throughout the night, Houston’s size and crashing steadily made them bleed out on the glass. It wasn’t quite enough to cost them in a gritty 112-109 win, but the margin in second-chance points still ended up being 22-9.
The Rockets attempted 17 more shots than Denver.
They’re 10-3 this season when they take more than their opponent.
“They’re a really talented team,” Nuggets center Jonas Valanciunas said. “… Playing physical in the post, setting screens. So we’ve gotta match the physicality. We’re physical too.”
Indeed, Adelman tried playing Valanciunas and Nikola Jokic together for eight minutes during the win in Houston. He’ll be without Aaron Gordon and Christian Braun again for the next two occasions. Peyton Watson is likely to continue shouldering the Durant matchup when the Nuggets are in man-to-man.
“I think we came into that game seeing it as a must-win,” Watson said Sunday.
Adelman’s pregame observation helped them see it that way. Now, he’ll have to rinse and repeat the same speech twice this week.
