Dev Johnson

It's always weird.

It's been a long time, mercifully, for the Denver Nuggets where this time of year hits and you don't quite know what your team is playing for.

It honestly, like, if they win, it's devastating.

But that team came out and they wanted to score the basketball.

There was not a lot of, like, really serious defense being played on either side for large portions of this game.

But...

To your point, vote, they did at a certain point kind of lock it up, kind of lock it down.

The Denver Nuggets never stopped scoring, which is a beautiful thing to see.

Obviously, you need the scoring, but we always assume it's going to be there.

It just comes down to that defensive effort.

We saw from David Adleman.

It seems like a declaration at this point that we're going to be going small when it comes to the second unit.

Henceforth, we're not going to see Val.

We're going to be as, I don't know, I guess, sort of positionless in a way with Spencer, P. Watt, guys that kind of move around.

And at first, it looked a little tenuous.

It kind of seemed like Portland was going to be able to have their way just getting alley-oop after alley-oop on the smaller defenders.

But in the end, it worked out, and it worked well.

That second unit, I would suspect, greatly outscored the backup unit from Portland.

But I don't even know who the backup unit for Portland is.

They're all just kind of a backup unit.