One of the most common coping mechanisms that fans on the internet will deploy when they are upset that a certain team is getting too much good press is to find a way to put an asterisk on that team’s biggest accomplishments (which are usually championships). If you look back through the years people have found ways to discredit almost every championship and if you are fan of a team that has won a championship you should be used to hearing people bringing up key injuries like KD in 2019 and Kyrie in 2015 or weird settings because of Covid like the Lakers bubble ring and the Bucks chip in 2021 (which for a long time I thought was pretty bullet proof but recently I’ve heard multiple people mention it as a fraudulent ring) or even if people just think your team was so good it was unfair like the Warriors when they got KD (I may have tweeted about this a few times) elite haters will even insinuate that the league was rigged to help you get a championship and cite incidents like Draymond being suspended in 2016 or the crazy free throw disparity in the Lakers Kings series in 2001. (Personally the fact that last year the NBA could have had a Lakers – Celtics Finals with Lebron James and Jayson Tatum and instead we got Nuggets – Heat makes it so I have a hard time believing that the NBA is rigged)
Anyway since as a fan you are used to hearing this you can either get used to ignoring it or have a prepared response that negates their argument but sometimes dedicated haters come back at you with well crafted arguments that you weren’t prepared for. This was the predicament that Nuggets fans and I were in when this image gained traction on twitter this week.
The Nuggets path to the finals was against the 8 seed Timberwolves – 4 seed Suns – 7 seed Lakers and then in the finals the 8 seed Heat. Seedingwise it is highly unusual for a championship run to include so many low seeded teams. Because of the NBA’s 7 game series format for all their playoff series it is incredibly rare for low seeds to go on cinderella runs like we see in almost every other major sport. But the Lakers upset both the 2 seed Grizzlies and the 6 seed Warriors and met the Nuggets in the WCF. and the Heat toppled the 1 seed Bucks (which is incredibly rare and is a massive stain on Giannis’s legacy) the 5 seed Knicks and the 2 seed Celtics on their way to the final. So while Nuggets fans were celebrating the haters were preparing their case against the Nuggets title.
People began calling it the easiest path to the championship ever because of the low seeding numbers. The NBA play in tournament did not help the Nuggets case because now the Nuggets detractors could say that they faced 3 play in teams on their path to victory which makes it sound like the teams they faced could have all been 9 or 10 seeds even though the 3 play in teams the Nuggets faced were all 7 and 8 seeds in the regular season. Most of the great championships are battles between 2 top 3 seeds from each conference and it is rare for even or 4 or a 5 seed to make it let alone an 8 seed so it does hurt the Nuggets case that the team they beat in the finals only had 44 wins in the regular season.
The Heat being the team the Nuggets faced in the finals is what really makes this argument. Facing an 8 seed and the 4 seed is the default playoff path for any 1 seed and even though the Lakers were a 7 seed if after beating them the Nuggets had faced the Celtics or the Bucks there would be no mention of this soft path. Normally even if the title favorite gets upset by another top seed who then goes onto to lose in the finals the champions are respected for beating the team that the beat the other great teams in their conference but that little number 8 next to the Heat on the scorebug makes it hard to believe that they truly were best team in the east even though they beat all the best team on their way to the finals.
What worked in the Nuggets favor was the name brands that they faced. When you look at the names Anthony Edwards, Kevin Durant, Devin Booker, Lebron James, Anthony Davis and Jimmy Butler it sounds much better than 8 seed – 4 seed – 7 seed – 8 seed and I think in the future being able to say all those names as you describe the Nuggets run will age very well, but the fact and at the end of the day a championship is a championship and I don’t think Nuggets fans should waste too much time fighting with people trying to discredit their team. I think the comeback of “if it was an easy path why didn’t your team win” is a good enough comeback.
Or so I thought until I saw that tweet about the opposing teams average net rating.
I am not someone who watches the NBA through a spreadsheet, I am not constantly refreshing the NBA Stats and info to see who is leading the league in VORP but net rating is a pretty simple stat that measures do you outscore the team that you play and since scoring more points than you allow is how you win games and winning games is how you determine who is good there is a pretty straight line from good net rating to good team and bad net rating to bad team.
The stat isn’t everything as there can be context that explains why one teams net rating is inflated or another teams is deflated but most of the time those things tend to even out and your net rating is a pretty good indicator as to who you are as a team.
So seeing that the Nuggets opponents had the weakest everage net rating since 1980 (which I really like as a cutoff for modern basketball) did make me do a double take.
Had the Nuggets gotten lucky?
Would future fans look back at the numbers and laugh at a team that won a championship by beating teams that on average couldn’t beat their opponents by more than a point?
These numbers went against what I feel when I think of the Wolves, Suns, Lakers and Heat but the Net Rating said otherwise, these teams simply did not outscore their opponents by much.
Now this tweet did not spark widespread debate about the Nuggets across the major networks because the major networks do the math and debating the historical significance of the Nuggets title run doesn’t get the number that discussing possible Lakers trade targets does.
But even though this topic wouldn’t grace Stephen A Smith’s desk it mattered to me so I decided to investigate to see if I could find some evidence that this stat was misleading.
The Denver Nuggets VS The Minnesota Timberwolves
After losing to the Lakers in the first play in game the Timberwolves beat the OKC Thunder and won the right to face the Nuggets in the first round. Like I mentioned before it is incredibly rare for the 8 seed to upset the 1 seed in the NBA playoffs but that did not stop plenty of people from picking against the Nuggets. Even though the Nuggets last two playoff defeat had been largely because they were extremely injured and at a severe talent disadvantage they had been tagged as playoff frauds and their star Nikola Jokic had been labeled a playoff dropper. Most memorable of the Timberwolves pickers were NBA Twitter mainstay WorldWideWob Perez (super disappointing because his whole thing is he watches the NBA every night and posts highlights from every game and yet you came to the conclusion that the Nuggets would be one and done??), Seerat Sohi from the Ringer who said the Nuggets would lose to either the Wolves or the Thunder and I’m going to throw Nick Wright in there not because he picked the Wolves but because the week before he said that the Mavs would win if they played the Nuggets and the the Mavs missed the entire play in tournament.
The TimberWolves net rating in the 2022-2023 was .2 which is super mid and pretty much what you would expect for an 8 seed.
This had been a super disappointing year for the Timberwolves after making and exciting playoff series that they lost the year before against Memphis they had made an all trade for Rudy Gobert with the hopes that his defensive prowess would lead to them having a strong regular season and set them up for a playoff run (which is exactly what is happening now). For a number of reasons (That I covered in the Timberwolves blog) this plan had not worked out very well though that point. But perhaps the biggest reason was that their All Star big man Karl Anthomy Towns missed a ton of time with injury. Towns is often maligned by fans and media because he has what I would call an odd personality where he comes off as somewhat less than authentic but in the year previous he had been a huge reason that the Wolves had been the 7th seed and if the 2021-2022 Wolves had missed KAT for multiple months they would have been a lottery team. Anyway even missing KAT the Wolves scrapped their way into the playoffs after they made a big trade that shipped out D’Lo and replaced him with veteran Mike Conley. This new look wolves team got KAT back for the last few week of the regular season and started looking much more like the team that was promised when they made the Rudy Gobert trade.
During that stretch the Timberwolves Net Rating was 2.1 a significant improvement from 0.2.
I would argue that the 2.1 net rating version of the Wolves with Mike Conley and KAT in the lineup is much closer to what the Nugget played in round 1 than the 0.2 version of the wolves that started D’Lo and were missing KAT for most of the year.
I will hear you out if you mention that the Timberwolves were missing key wing defender Jaden McDaniels and so that 2.1 net rating might not be most accurate and that would be fair but I still think they would be better than the 0.2 that they were for the whole season.
The Denver Nuggets VS The Phoenix Suns
The Phoenix Suns were favored going into this series. With the Timberwolves series there were a few media voices that tried to put a hot take out there that the Nuggets could lose against the Suns it wasn’t even a hot take that was just kind of a consensus.
In the 2022-2023 season the Suns Net Rating was 2.2 which is a decent number (spoiler alert none of the Nuggets other opponents had a higher rating through the regular season) but the Suns, like the Timberwolves, also made a major acquisition at the trade deadline when they traded for Kevin Durant.
The Suns paid a huge price for Durant but everyone seemed to agree that when you have the chance to get KD on your team you get KD on your team and this trade immediately vaulted them to the status of title favorites in the West.
After trading for KD the Suns Net Rating was 3.8 and Durant seemed to fit in seamlessly and their carried their Western title favorite status into the playoff. Basically exchanging Kevin Durant for Mikal Bridges is a massive upgrade and even if you are missing out on the production from Cam Johnson you can patch that together from other role players the Suns that the Nuggets faced in the second round were much better than a 2.2 rating would indicate. The Suns were the best team the Nuggets faced in that series and they were the only team to take 2 games off the Nuggets. Devin Booker was especially impressive at least up until game 6.
Now you might point out that Chris Paul got hurt in that series and that probably hurt the Suns but they did win their only games of the series after Paul went down so I don’t know how much Paul was changing the math at that point.
The Denver Nuggets VS The Los Angeles Lakers
The Lakers Net Rating during the regular season was 0.7 which similar to the Timberwolves is quite mid. You might be sensing a trend at the point but the Lakers also revamped their team at the trade deadline and immediately started playing like a much better team.
The 2022-2023 lakers started the year with a roster that did not make much sense. Both Russell Westbrook and Patrick Beverly where trying to coexist on the same roster and there was very little shooting to go alongside Lebron James and Anthony Davis.
After quite a bit of pressure being applied from Lebron (as he should) the Lakers made a series of trades and added D’Lo (I know I said getting rid of him was great for the Wolves but he was a positive for the Lakers last year), Malik Beasley, Jarred Vanderbuilt and Rui Hachimuira and from the trade deadline on the Lakers Net Rating was 4.4 which would have been 3rd in the whole league.
The Lakers transformed themselves so much that with just a few weeks before the playoffs when it appeared most likely that the Lakers would be in the play in tournament where if they succeeded they could possibly face the Nuggets ESPN had a segment where they asked a panel of “experts” who would win if the Lakers faced the Nuggets in the first round and every single person on the panel picked the Lakers. EVERY SINGLE PERSON and it was a lot of people (probably bad TV to have a talk show with 7-8 different experts) I tried to find the clip to post a link to it so you could see but I googled and scrolled and searched and I could not find this segment but it is very very real (listen to a Zach Lowe podcast he references this all the time even though he wasn’t on the panel that day) I say this to say that the Lakers at the end of regular season were considered a very potent team.
Now the Lakers won the play in tournament and got the 7th seed so they dodged the Nuggets matchup in the first round and they went on the handle the Grizzlies (who were diminished form injuries but still a good team) and then even more impressively they dispatched the defending champions Warriors.
When it came time for the two teams to face each other both teams were coming off impressive series wins that had proven their doubters at least a little wrong (I might have picked the Grizzlies and the Warriors to beat the Lakers) the Lakers supporters had grown so confident that even after the Nuggets blew them out in game 1 many pundits doubled down on their Lakers over Nuggets takes citing a few good defensive possessions from Rui Hachimuira as the reason that the Lakers would ultimately prevail. This obviously was not the case and Michael Malone was very vocal about how annoying that was so I won’t harp on it any longer.
Even though the Nuggets made light work of the Lakers in the WCF it doesn’t take away from how good the Lakers played in the second half of the season they were a much better team than a 0.7 net rating would indicate.
The Denver Nuggets VS The Miami Heat
Like I mentioned earlier the Heat being the team that the Nuggets faced in the finals is what really drives this narrative in part because they were an 8 seed and in part because their regular season Net Rating was -0.5 which is crazy. If 0.2 is indicative of a mid team -0.5 is indicative of a bad team. In the Net Rating rankings they were sandwiched between the Dallas Mavericks and the Utah Jazz both of whom lost games on purpose and missed the playoffs entirely. So the Miami being in the finals is crazy.
What makes this make more sense is that the Heat’s star player Jimmy Butler is perhaps the biggest playoff riser in NBA history. By that I don’t mean to say he’s a better playoff performer than legends like MJ or Lebron who both took their game to another level in the playoffs but the difference between regular season Jimmy Butler and playoff Jimmy Butler is immense. In the regular season Jimmy Butler misses a ton of games and when he plays you can tell some nights he’s taking it easy. He misses the All Star game and the doesn’t always get All NBA honors but in the playoffs I don’t think there are 5 players you’d rather have than Jimmy Butler.
For this reason I don’t think the Heat’s negative net rating is at all descriptive of who the Heat where when they faced the Nuggets in the Finals. I think it would be more fitting to just look at their playoff Net Rating when Jimmy Butler is actually trying which is 1.9 (still a little underwhelming for a finals team)
The regular season Net Rating paints the Nuggets championship path as very easy but if you look at the numbers after their big midseason acquisitions or once the playoffs start and Jimmy Butler wakes up the numbers look more like this.
Minnesota Timberwolves 0.2 -> 2.1
Los Angeles Lakers 0.7 -> 4.4
Phoenix Suns 2.2 -> 3.8
Miami Heat -0.5 -> 1.9
Which if you are looking at averages looks like this:
.65 -> 3.05 (I’m not sure what the disconnect is but the graphic from Twitter says the opponent averages was 0.8 but my numbers say .65, my numbers come from the NBA site so maybe they are pulling from another site that has slightly different numbers)
3.05 is no 2017 Warriors but it is enough to get the Nuggets off that top 10 weakest playoff runs list so I consider my work here to be done.
One last point though, even if these teams that the Nuggets faced were not very good it’s not like the Nuggets struggled to beat them. They went 16-4 and only 1 team beat them more than once. It was a dominant run.
Now if you are thinking this is insane coping you may also be right, I didn’t mean for this to be so long it was supposed to be a very quick light hearted write up but I got carried away.
The Dishwasher 
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