Best Actor: The man from the inside to the outside

First point, Porter Jr.'s height can still provide the role of frame protection and rebounding. Although he has a poor three-pointer feel, he is the kind of shooter player who has a low touch and no matter how sluggish his opponent dares to completely empty his opponent. As long as he is present, he can play a positive role in the Nuggets' offensive space.

The second point is that you should have enough confidence for the three-point shooting of a character player, and even more so for shooters like Porter Jr. Referring to Gordon and Westbrook, both of them were treated as non-space points before the playoffs started, but it was precisely because of the enough trust and right to fire given by teammates and coaches that the Nuggets were qualified to reach their current position.

Lastly, and most importantly, even if the Nuggets don't want to use him, Adelman doesn't know who can play and make stable contributions. Instead of enabling other high-risk and low-reward role players, the high-risk and high-reward Porter is an acceptable choice.

Back to the defeated Thunder side, they set up a double tower lineup at the beginning without surprise, hoping to use the combination of Homegren + Harten to limit the Nuggets. But from the perspective of the competition, what is the final actual effect?

The Thunder Towers played together for a total of 20 minutes in this game. Perhaps to some extent, it did make Jokic more worried at the low post, and even turned to make more outside three-pointers on the offensive end. But in fact, in terms of the state of this game, putting two big men with high overlap in the offensive end and also hurt the team's space actually caused the Thunder's offensive efficiency to decline a lot.

As for this game, during the Thunder's double towers, the team's shooting efficiency was 9 of 26 shots, with a shooting percentage of only 34.6%, and the three-point shooting percentage was 0 of 8 shots that could not be watched directly. Of course, the main factor of this sluggish data is that it is not able to get the short rotation bonus facing the Nuggets' connection. Despite this, the damage caused by the Thunder's Double Towers to the team's offense has actually been known from the regular season.

Even though the Twin Towers played at the same time in this game for so long, the Thunder were still crushed on the rebound, but even so, both of them still made trouble for fouls in the fourth quarter. Does that mean that it would be better to use the double tower less in the future? This is indeed possible that the Thunder can adjust in subsequent series.

If I were to ask me what the key to winning the Nuggets in this game is, I personally understand that I would say that even if Jokic was caught in five offenders, he was still not afraid of physical confrontation. In the end, the Nuggets bet right, not only did Jokic give enough confrontation but never ended up with the sixth foul, but also caused him to hit the Thunder Twin Towers into a foul trap.

This is the basketball IQ of a top-level player in the league. Jokic knows very well that if he can't threaten this point, it will naturally be difficult for the Nuggets to get the final chance of reversal. Therefore, he risked that he was very likely to be blown off and continued to fight with Chet and Harten in the penalty area, and the final reward was worth it.

Of course, judging from the content of the game, the Thunder seemed to be tentative. This sentence does not mean that the Thunder was letting go, or they did not play hard enough, but the Thunder did not give too many problems other than regular season performance in this game to test the Nuggets. Even the expected attacks before the game were done very little. The biggest change may be that the strategy of the stake has achieved good results, but they themselves cannot maintain the Nuggets' strategy of the game.

Judging from the trend of the series, the rotational soldiers, more Thunders are likely to take the initiative to change their moves in the next game. At least for Jokic's double-teaming, the Nuggets should be prepared in advance on this link.

From the perspective of the Nuggets, stealing the next victory away has already achieved the goal of the first two games of the series, but if they can also win the next game and let the Thunder go to the home court of the plateau with a 0-2 backward, the Nuggets' advantage will be quite large.

However, the opponent is the leader in partitions after all, and it is not easy to do this. As we said above, Jokic scored explosive data in the first game, but his performance was not good enough. If he wanted to take the lead in the series, in terms of these exposed shortcomings, Jokic and the entire Nuggets need to focus on changing.