One suspects Michael Malone isn't surprised by what he sees.
The Denver Nuggets coach was taught firsthand about championship-level defense by his late father Brendan, a veteran player and longtime assistant coach with the Detroit Pistons. He was a part of Chuck Daly's staff on the 1989 and 1990 championships. Most importantly, Brendan Malone was the defensive brains behind “The Jordan Rules,” the Pistons' plan for find out how to stop Michael Jordan from dominating playoff games the way in which Denver's Nikola Jokić is now doing.
The rules were actually pretty easy.
Detroit Hall of Fame guard Joe Dumars, among the finest ball defenders of his era, would do anything to maintain Jordan from reaching his favorite spots on the sphere. Contest as Jordan rose for a jumper. If Jordan beat Dumars or other Detroit defenders off the dribble, they’d funnel Jordan into the box, where loads of leggy and testy Pistons defenders were waiting: Bill Laimbeer, Rick Mahorn, John Salley, Dennis Rodman, James Edwards. They would run towards Jordan like a pack of jackals, They force him to shoot your entire length of them. If Jordan tried to rise up, a number of of them would throw him to the bottom.
Over the course of a six or seven game series, the plain physicality would wear Jordan down. If Jordan didn't get offensive help from elsewhere, the frustration between him and his Bulls teammates would only grow. It took years of failed playoff appearances for Chicago until it finally defeated Detroit in 1991.
Accordingly, Michael Malone knows thoroughly the psychology behind what the Minnesota Timberwolves did to his reigning NBA champion Nuggets in the primary two games of their Western Conference semifinal series.
Not only did Minnesota win the vital moments in the primary two games in Denver, securing a 2-0 lead heading back to Minnesota, where a raucous Target Center crowd awaits on Friday and Sunday nights. The Wolves also captured the Nuggets' hearts, just because the Pistons – and ultimately Jordan's Bulls – used defense to demoralize and unnerve their opponents.
“You can’t lose the game in a fight. You have to win one of them,” Denver’s Reggie Jackson said after Game 2.
There were the long, seemingly limitless arms of Minnesota's Jaden McDaniels and Nickeil Alexander-Walker, who jumped on Denver's Jamal Murray at midfield in Game 2 and attacked him with relentless energy and movement – without dirtying it. They forced a 24-second violation early within the second quarter on Monday night.
There was Rudy Gobert's defensive performance in Game 1, before Gobert missed Game 2 to be along with his girlfriend for the birth of their first child, and before he won his fourth NBA Defensive Player of the Year award. In Game 2, without Gobert, the Wolves didn't let up for a second, with Karl-Anthony Towns and Naz Reid, neither of whom were referred to as shutdown defenders before this season, each physically protecting Jokić throughout the sport.
For someone who has lamented the NBA's surgical, years-long campaign to remove all but probably the most rudimentary defensive elements from the sport, culminating in unseen All-Star Games lately while watching the Wolves harass the Nuggets and disturbing was wonderful. It's like putting a VHS tape right into a cassette Panasonic PV-V4522Watch out NBC's acclaimed Thursday night lineuplike “A Different World”/“Cheers”/“LA Law,” and wash down dinner with one Bartles and Jaymes cooler.
Mom, I'm home.
In the NBA you continue to play defense for those who're allowed to.
The undeniable fact that the league now not attaches importance to warding off even the smallest contact, as those responsible did in the primary half of the season, has not harmed the sport within the postseason. In fact, the playoffs were spectacular and featured loads of offensive magic, starting with Minnesota's Anthony Edwards. But there was also Jalen Brunson, Luka Dončić, Kyrie Irving, Donovan Mitchell, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Tyrese Maxey, Paolo Banchero, Tyrese Haliburton…need I’m going on?
Minnesota has dominated and won its first six playoff games with its strong defense, similar to Oklahoma City and Boston. Minnesota's defenders don't push or shove or hack; They move their feet, push the nuggets to their preferred spots on the ground, and don't surrender those spots easily. The wolves don't do anything dirty. They only cause obvious harm to their opponent.
This was Denver's second possession of Game 2.
“He threw it away,” Kevin Harlan, TNT’s all-world play-by-play man, said of Jokić. But Jokić didn't throw him away – Kyle Anderson knocked the ball out of Jokić's hands along with his offhand just because the Joker began his post-up move.
This Denver possession lasted three minutes into the sport.
Murray is restricted resulting from his calf injury. But like all Nuggets, he feeds on opponents who beat Jokić twice. That's what Denver is all about: Jokić's ball-handling brilliance, slicing up defenses along with his 360-degree view of what's happening on the sphere. This time, Towns inhaled Murray's drive while guard Mike Conley hit the ball from deep.
David Adelman, who was Michael Malone's right-hand man as a top assistant coach, has actually seen this before.
His father, Hall of Fame coach Rick Adelman, had to steer his great Portland Trail Blazers teams, led by Hall of Famer Clyde Drexler, to attempt to surpass the Pistons and Bulls within the 1990 and 1992 NBA Finals. Portland got each Detroit's best defense and the Bulls' revered “Dobermans” – the nickname for Chicago's defense conjured up by Bulls assistant coach Johnny Bach.
Jordan, Scottie Pippen and Horace Grant were initially seen among the many Dobermans. As Grant headed to Orlando after Chicago's first three-peat in free agency, Chicago reached out to Rodman – who by then had already worn out his welcome in San Antonio. Rodman elevated the Bulls' defense even further in a very different way than Grant; Chicago led the league in defensive rating in his first season (1995–96), and the Bulls finished in the highest five in each of his three seasons there, all of which ended with championships.
Especially originally of his profession, Jordan stood out for his defensive anticipation. He was Defensive Player of the Year in 1988, He uses his long arms like a scythe and cuts the ball away from opposing ballplayers.
However, Pippen made Chicago impenetrable.
His size, intelligence, physicality and skill to leap passing lanes made him among the finest defenders of all time. Chicago used him in all places, against everyone from Magic Johnson to Charles Barkley.
The Wolves played just like the Pistons and Bulls teams. They have made it difficult for his or her opponents to do what they need. They didn't give an inch. The game is at its best when an easy query is answered: Who can use their talent, will, training and toughness to beat their opponent's physical objections?
Minnesota's defense was sophisticated in its planning and well-executed in real time. Like other teams within the Jokić era, Wolves often don't protect him with their center.
In Game 1, they put Gobert in a roaming position in front of Denver's power forward – often Aaron Gordon – and had Gobert drift to guard the front of the ring. That led to Gobert, who could have been the deciding play in Minnesota's win on Saturday, having the liberty to steal a Jokić lob from the dunker spot on Gordon With three minutes left, the Wolves are holding on to a five-point lead. The Wolves got here out in transition and Edwards was fouled, causing him to miss twice from the free throw line. What might have been a three-point game was as an alternative a seven-point game.
Minnesota had one of the best defense within the league all season. It allowed the fewest points within the league (106.5 points per game) and was No. 1 in opponents' effective field goal percentage (51.5), which explains the added value of three points.
Different web sites have alternative ways of determining statistics like defensive rating. Regardless of the source, wolves rank first on this category.
StatMuse has Minnesota No. 1 in defensive rating at 109.0, a lead of greater than two full points over second-place Orlando (111.3). According to StatMuse, that is the biggest gap between the highest and second-place defenses on this category in eight years, for the reason that San Antonio Spurs had a 2.4-point lead over the second-place Atlanta Hawks in 2015-16 (101.4). According to NBA.com calculations, Minnesota had one of the best defensive rating this season at 108.4, 2.2 points ahead of the Boston Celtics. Basketball-Reference.com has Minnesota at the highest in each unadjusted and (scheduled) adjusted defensive rankings.
You can’t implement “The Jordan Rules” now; The NBA has removed many of the underlying physicality from the sport. That's high-quality. Everything has to evolve. But the relentless defense of mind and body that was the center of Detroit's — after which Chicago's — championship teams still stands. Minnesota shows in today's game that it may possibly sustain with the incredible offensive talent.
It's a fight. Metaphorically speaking, in fact.
Required reading
image credit : theathletic.com