by jonthefon on Mon May 04, 2009 5:52 pm
I love how everyone seems to be reading into a sweep after one game. Home court, home cooking for the Nuggets, and the final score does no justice, the game was close until midway through the fourth.
FT disparity was more than just home cooking, it was terrible officiating at times. The Nuggets were getting calls for touch fouls, and at the other end, the Mavs were getting screwed where someone would get hacked driving the lane and the refs would swallow their whistles. Four or five times during that second quarter, I'd watch Dirk or Terry or Howard draw a lot of contact, get no call and then think "obviously Melo gets the call". Of course home cooking is always one of those "invisible" factors but Dallas made a pretty good effort to be aggressive and go inside, but they didn't get the calls even more than usual.
Still even with the shitty officiating, the Mavs played pretty badly. 20 fucking turnovers, Kidd had 8 of them: quite a few of them were completely unnecessary. Denver weren't planning to play D until Dallas forced them to and they didn't do enough. The bench was non-existent, Howard's ankle injury was troubling him again.
Much credit to Denver though. They came out and executed a pretty damn good gameplan on both sides of the court, they let Dirk have his and generally put the clamps down with their aggressiveness. Their bench stepped up in a huge way when Melo got in foul trouble and with Billups limited. Jones, Carter, Andersen, Smith all played big parts in the win.
The way things are turning out, the Mavs will need to catch some serious breaks to steal one from the Mile High City. If they can't, Nuggets in 5 or 7.