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Yesterday, we talked about the Heat changing defensive focus in light of the fact that they can’t actually stop Nikola Jokić, with Game 2 of the NBA Finals going so differently than Game 1 as Miami gave the two-time MVP more shooting options and fewer passing lanes.
Today, we visualize that… here’s a graph of Jokić’s games this season, including playoffs, with assists going up as you go left to right and points going up as you go bottom to top.
You can see, even without the axes labeled (sorry), that there’s a fairly basic principle here of “if we can keep Jokić from racking up the assists (the center line is 10), we’ve got a fighting chance.” That one game all the way on the right, Jokić’s 17-assist game, it took 39 points from Kevin Durant and 47 by Devin Booker for the Suns to beat the Nuggets in Game 3 of the second round. Miami does not have Kevin Durant and Devin Booker.
Obviously, it’s not a be-all, end-all, as the Nuggets won plenty of Jokić low-assist games. You can also see why, after getting worked so badly in Game 1, the Heat made the adjustments they did. Steve Kerr and Draymond Green chatted about it, too, and that conversation is definitely worth a listen.



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Watching Nikola Jokić dominate Game 1 of the NBA Finals the other night sparked the following thought on Twitter:
miami doesn't have any way to handle jokic, and doubling him only opens up options for him to make easy passes... i think their only hope is to make him take more shots, and then bury ton of threes at the other end. maybe that gets them a game.
Well, they got themselves a game. Changing their defensive approach, the Heat stopped trying to silence Jokić as a scorer, instead clamping down on the passing game that makes him so special. The two-time MVP scored 41 points with 11 rebounds, but only had four assists, and attempted 28 of Denver’s 75 shots. That’s six and a half fewer assists than Jokić had been averaging in the playoffs, and seven and a half more shot attempts.
And, indeed, the Heat buried 17 three-pointers, on only 35 attempts, to steal the game they so desperately needed to steal on the road, 111-108.
It might be counterintuitive, but the Nuggets are now 4-4 in the playoffs when Jokić scores 30 or more points, and 9-0 when he doesn’t. During the regular season, they were 16-5 in Jokić’s 30-point games, and 32-16 when he scored less.
For assists, the Nuggets are 8-2 in the playoffs when Jokić is in double figures, compared to 5-2 when he has fewer than 10. In the regular season? Denver was 34-4 when the best-passing big man alive had 10-plus assists, but only 17-14 when he didn’t get there.
Not to mention, Jokić had five turnovers in Game 2, marking only the third time all season that he had more turnovers than assists in the game, the other occasions being a 21-point loss to the Rockets and an 11-point loss to the Magic.
And when it comes to getting him to shoot more, Jokić’s season high was 26 attempts in a game. When he’s met or exceeded that in the playoffs, the Nuggets are now 2-3.
It’s very odd to need a team’s best player to shoot less, but that is what the Nuggets need because Jokić’s passing is what sets him, and them, apart. How Denver adjusts to Miami’s adjustments will tell the story of whether this year’s NBA Finals turn into something special, or if I was right that letting Jokić go off as a scorer would simply be the Heat’s route to avoiding a sweep.



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At least Max Strus has a whole rest of the finals to try to make a three-pointer. When John Starks went 0-for-11 from downtown in 1994, it was in Game 7, and the Knicks losing by six points, well, it’s still haunting 29 years later.
Strus and the Heat got beat by the Nuggets in Game 1 last night a lot worse than the 104-93 score suggested. Strus was 0-for-10 overall, but his 0-for-9 on threes put him right behind Starks on the all-time list for ouch games shooting from distance in the NBA Finals.
Along with Strus? Stephen Curry was 0-for-9 on three-pointers in Game 5 last year, a game that Golden State still won by 10 points because Andrew Wiggins scored 26, Klay Thompson added 21, and Curry still went 7-for-13 on two-pointers, plus a pair of free throws.
And that’s it. Starks, then Strus and Curry. Ray Allen (2010) and J.R. Smith (2015) had 0-for-8 games on three-pointers, and four more players (Sam Perkins, 1996; Scottie Pippen, 1998; Kyrie Irving, 2017; and Devin Booker, 2021) have had Finals performances of 0-for-7 three-point shooting.
All of those players, though, scored points. Strus’ 21 minutes are far from the record for most scoreless time in a Finals game — that was Byron Scott on 0-for-8 shooting in 43 minutes in Game 3 in 1991 — and also not a Heat team high, as Chris Bosh did not score in 28 minutes of a 95-88 win over the Spurs in Game 7 in 2013.
But Strus did set a record: 10 field goal attempts, zero points. The previous NBA Finals record had stood for 20 years. Malik Rose went 0-for-9 in the Spurs’ 77-76 loss to the Nets in Game 4 in 2003, a game in which San Antonio, as a team, shot 29% from the field including 4-for-18 on threes. Speedy Claxton almost bailed out a team that got a combined eight points from Tony Parker, Stephen Jackson, and… well… also Rose.
The Spurs won that series, so Rose got a ring to soothe the pain of a scoreless Finals game in which his team lost by a single point.
There’s only been one time that a player went 0-for-7 or worse and their team won, out of 10 occurrences in Finals history: in Game 4 in 1953, Lew Hitch shot 0-for-7, but the Minneapolis Lakers got 27 points and 19 boards from George Mikan, and the Knicks did not have a nice night shooting at the 69th Regiment Armory, connecting on just 29% of their shots to lose, 71-69, the third of four straight New York defeats after winning Game 1 in Minnesota.



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We had a lot to talk about in this episode that we recorded last night, a lot of negative feelings to get through about Baseball, because as much as we love the game, the institution… well, as Britt says, a big part of our podcast, in general, is about loving something that maybe doesn’t love you back. It’s been a pretty lousy week on that front.
And then Mark Canha, on the first day of Pride Month, goes out and hits a home run and wears the Willets Pen LFGM Pride shirt during his postgame interview…
It matters. We saw it in hockey this season that there were players who wriggled out of wearing so much as a team-issued warmup jersey for Pride Nights, hiding behind claims about religion that do not withstand any kind of real scrutiny. Could Brooks Raley get away with the stuff he pulled in Tampa, now that he’s in New York? The Rangers sure did over the winter. Clayton Kershaw did in Los Angeles (as we discuss on this episode, sigh). Canha putting on a shirt that some weird niche website sent to Flushing? It really does matter.



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The NBA Finals pit the 53-win Denver Nuggets against the 44-win Miami Heat, which means that we’re going to see a second all-time NBA champion with a specific regular-season win total. The only question is whether it’s going to be for the first time in nearly 70 years, or the second time in a row.
53-win NBA champions: 2021-22 Golden State Warriors (53-29)
44-win NBA champions: 1956-57 Boston Celtics (44-28)
The 1948-49 Minneapolis Lakers also won 44 games, losing just 16, but they weren’t NBA champions. They were BAA champions, the forerunner league for the NBA, beating the Chicago Stags and Rochester Royals in the Western Division playoffs before a six-game triumph over the Wasington Capitols in the Finals.
Should be a good time.



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Last night was one of the best pitched games of the season, not just for the Mets, but in all of Major League Baseball. Kodai Senga’s seven innings of one-hit shutout ball, with nine strikeouts and no walks, has been matched this year only by Michael Kopech of the White Sox in a 2-0 win over the Royals on May 19, and veteran Drew Smyly, now with the Chicago Cubs, in a 13-0 pasting of the Dodgers on April 21.
It was such a clean, crisp performance, with such ease, and with that little Kody Clemens single in the third inning that plopped in front of Tommy Pham, you might not think of it as so great, especially without the round number of 10 strikeouts, but here’s the list in Mets history of pitchers who, according to Stathead, went 7+ frames of one-hit ball (none of these Mets was pulled after seven innings of a no-hit bid), with nine or more strikeouts and no walks…
* Tom Seaver, July 9, 1969 vs. Cubs (the Jimmy Qualls game)
* R.A. Dickey, June 13, 2012 at Rays (9-1 win, unearned run after an error in the ninth)
* Matt Harvey, May 7, 2013 vs. White Sox (no-decision, Mets won in 10 innings)
* Jacob deGrom, May 21, 2015 vs. Cardinals (Matt Carpenter first-inning single)
* Senga, last night vs. Phillies
Embrace the power of the Ghost Fork. Senga said he wanted the Phillies, he got them, and he took care of them in devastating fashion.



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