After dropping their first home game of the 2023 postseason, the Denver Nuggets rebounded with a 109-94 road win against the Miami Heat to regain the edge in the NBA Finals on Wednesday night.
The road team has won back-to-back games in the series, and Denver takes a 2-1 series lead, just two wins away from its first NBA championship.
“We’re a resilient group, and we’re a very prideful group,” forward Aaron Gordon told the media in a postgame press conference. “We didn’t like the way we played in Game 2. It was an opportunity to bounce back, hold ourselves accountable, and play to the standard that we’ve been playing all year long.”
After the Game 2 loss, Denver Coach Michael Malone lamented his team’s effort and challenged his players to play more physically and urgently. The Nuggets responded by outrebounding the Heat 58-33 and outscoring them 60-34 in the paint.
“I felt, by far, this was our best game of the series,” Malone said as he met the media after the win. “I loved our energy, our effort, our urgency, [and] our discipline. I thought we were where we needed to be tonight, and we’ll have to be even better come Friday evening.”
After finishing the first quarter knotted at 24, Denver grabbed a five-point lead at the half and took control of the game in the third quarter — leading by as many as 21 as Jamal Murray and Nikola Jokic asserted themselves.
“It’s a great duo,” Heat head coach Erik Spoelstra acknowledged when asked about the two Denver stars after the game. “Their games really complement each other. You have one guy who can score in a lot of different ways and another guy who’s setting great screens or handoffs and, if the ball gets back to him, can get a bunch of people involved.”
Jokic had 41 points in Game 2, but the rest of the team struggled to score. On Wednesday night, Jokic and Murray became the first teammates in NBA Finals history to record triple-doubles while each scoring at least 30 points in the same game.
“For him [Murray] and Nikola to do what they did tonight in a game that we needed to regain control and homecourt advantage in this series was special to watch,” Malone reflected. “But it wasn’t just those two.”
Denver also got an 11-point, 10-rebound, and five-assist effort from Gordon and a 15-point performance from rookie Christian Braun.
“I have to give Christian a lot of love,” Malone admitted to the media postgame. “I felt Christian Braun’s play was fantastic. [He] did not look like a rookie. [He was] aggressive, strong, physical, and confident, and his 15 [points] and four [rebounds] off the bench in 19 minutes were very, very, impactful.”
Miami eventually trimmed the lead to single digits late in the fourth quarter, but Denver was still too far ahead and sank its free throws to seal the deal.
The 2023 NBA Finals continue with Game 4 at 7:30 p.m. CT on Friday.