Watch out, Los Angeles

The Denver Nuggets just sent a message.

They aren’t the new Cardiac Kids of the NBA. They’re the Cardiac Kids of all-time. They’ve come back from 3-1 series deficits twice this playoffs, which no other team has ever done. They won the lowest scoring game of the entire bubble against the Jazz, and then drove their foot into the neck of the most talented professional team on the planet. Their three comebacks of 15+ points in a single postseason is a feat that they stand alone in accomplishing. Their six elimination game victories are more than any team in NBA history. It’s only been two rounds.

A year ago was the first playoff appearance for the Nuggets as a franchise since 2013. Andre Iguodala led that team with Kenneth Faried and Ty Lawson. Everyone is new here. You can’t tell at all.

17 months ago, Nikola Jokic, Jamal Murray, Gary Harris, and head coach Michael Malone tasted the playoffs for the first time in their careers. They’ve played 28 playoff games and counting since then.

What we saw tonight is unbelievable. Not even Nuggets experts predicted this. You should play the lottery if you thought the Clippers would even need seven games. The Clippers have been title favorites since before the first game of the season. It feels like more people picked them than the Lakers to win it all.

They won’t be going to Disney World. They won’t even be there for the Western Conference Finals.

And the game wasn’t even close! Once the Nuggets got the lead to 10, the Clippers never got it within single digits again. Denver milked the clock without letting off the gas at all. It was a masterful closeout from the universal underdogs. They played their game the entire second half, and the Clippers didn’t have a semblance of an answer.

There have been 137 Game 7s in NBA history. Nikola Jokic is the third player ever to record a triple-double in more than one Game 7. Last year, he became the only player to record a Game 7 triple-double without a turnover. Tonight, he became the first player to ever record a triple-double before the fourth quarter in Game 7 history.

Jamal Murray is the second-youngest player to score 40 in a Game 7. It took him six games to become the fourth player to have multiple 50-point games in the same playoff run. He is the youngest player to ever have four 40-point games in a single playoff run. Against Utah, he had the most points without recording a turnover ever in a two-game playoff stretch (92 points and 85 minutes without giving the ball away). Those records are a mouthful for a duo that is only 23 and 25 years old. It’s only been two rounds.

Most players hit their NBA peaks between ages 27 and 28. The average age of the All-NBA teams has been within a year of 27.7 in all of the past 21 seasons. And the Nuggets deserve to be here already! If Jokic and Murray’s careers are movies, this is the opening credit. When Anthony Davis, Kawhi Leonard, and Paul George landed at LAX, we expected to see at least 3 years of a Los Angeles battle for supremacy. The Denver Nuggets are the biggest immediate and imminent threat to that.

They’ve made this 2020 playoff run in large part without Gary Harris, and entirely without starting small forward Will Barton’s efficient 15.1 points, 6.3 rebounds, and 3.7 assists. They have Jokic, Murray, Barton, Harris, and Michael Porter Jr. locked up. Coach Malone as well.

The oldest locked up player listed is Barton at 29. The other four are 26 or younger. That strikes utter terror in the city of the team that was just knocked off by Denver’s current iteration.

What happens against the Lakers, we don’t know yet. Anthony Davis and Nikola Jokic are the two best big men on the planet. LeBron James is the best player in the world. Jamal Murray has been the best scorer of the entire playoffs. In the unpredictability of the bubble, what we saw tonight was the craziest thing yet. It’s only been two rounds.