Watch Utah Jazz @ Denver Nuggets live on Sky Sports Arena in the early hours of Wednesday morning (1:30am)
Wednesday 2 September 2020 06:38, UK
The NBA playoffs are said to create stars. Thanks to his scoring feats in the Nuggets' first-round series with the Utah Jazz, Denver's Jamal Murray is the latest.
In his post-game comments after their Game 6 victory in their first-round series against the Utah Jazz, Denver Nuggets point guard Jamal Murray let it be known he thinks his team is a legitimate title contender, and not one to be slept on.
What he did not need to say was that, if that is to be true, he himself will be a huge part of the reason why. He had already told us that with his play.
For Denver to make the leap from very-good-but-not-unduly-threatening regular-season team to a possible championship winner, someone was going to have to make a significant leap offensively in the postseason. Nikola Jokic can only do so much, especially as a big man.
Someone on the perimeter was going to have to emerge alongside him, to capitalise on the threat that he draws, to do all the stuff he cannot. Other Nuggets players, however, had been falling short of expectations, leaving the vacancy unfilled.
Will Barton has had a decent overall bounce-back season after a spotty 2018-19 campaign, yet he is also tapped out, a veteran at the apex of his game and some ways short of stardom. Gary Harris, meanwhile, has still not returned to his best, two years after his significant injury.
Many commentators and fans quite logically figured Michael Porter Jr would continue the quick offensive development that he has shown in his first year of NBA court time, and, certainly, he has been pretty good, averaging 12.3 points per game in the playoffs so far.
But it is Murray who has dragged the Nuggets to Game 7 and possibly beyond that. Offensively, he has been putting on a Damian Lillard-style one-man show.
With his 50-point performance in Game 6, Murray set a whole a bunch of milestones. His was only the third 50-plus-point/zero-turnover performance in NBA postseason history. It was also his second 50-point eruption of the series; because of that, Murray is averaging 34 points per game on a sizzling shooting percentage of near-60 per cent over the first six contests.
Twice so far, Denver have had their backs against the wall in must-win games. Across the two, Murray is averaging 46 points per game. Not only is he stepping up in big games, he is also closing them out. He shot 6-for-6 from the field in the decisive final six minutes of Game 6, the first time in 20 years that anyone in the NBA has done that in the postseason.
To put it simply, he has been doing what he wants, when he wants - when his team needs him to.
More impressive than the efficiency of his scoring has been the manner in which he has done it. Murray is an absolute pest off the dribble right now, able to get to his preferred spots on the court with the ball in his hands and make any kind of difficult shot once he gets there.
He is fitting perfectly into the mould of the high-scoring small guard that Stephen Curry forged last decade and that Lillard has increased the limits of over the last couple of years.
If Murray continues playing like this going forwards, he will indisputably join their company. That is to say, elite.
Murray has always been good, averaging 18.6 points per game in the regular season, a career-high mark in his fourth NBA campaign. Yet steady improvement over that span has given way to a truly breakout stretch in the playoffs thus far.
To go from that sub-20 point mark to what he has become over the course of the last fortnight, going shot for shot with Jazz star guard Donovan Mitchell and often coming out ahead, is to see another star being born before our eyes. The playoffs are where stars are created, Murray is the latest.
To put his importance to his team's title hopes into some context, with Murray on the court in this series, the Nuggets are scoring a shade over 130 points per 100 possessions. Without him, they drop down to only 87, and that is with both Jokic and the excellent Monte Morris (a very different type of player but extremely solid point guard) in his stead.
Nobody else on the team can do what Murray does off the bounce; in fact, very few in the league can.
In the interests of fairness, it should be noted Morris is doing so against a Jazz defense that has been slightly-above-average-to-fair this season, while getting worse across its duration. What started out as a decent unit has trended backwards all season, exposing flaws in the personnel making up the playing rotation and overstretching a shortage of reliable depth.
Lacking for size and speed at every position from point guard through to power forward, the Jazz do not have the greatest switching options, in a league that is all about employing switching as the foundation of modern defense.
The Jazz also do not have the most physical defenders on the perimeter, which, when combined with relying so much on Rudy Gobert around the basket, means there are an uncharacteristically large amount of seams to be found in their overall defensive unit.
Nevertheless, it takes talent to exploit those. Brimming with confidence, Murray is a problem right now, a walking bucket, the X-factor in a series he was supposed to be probably the fourth best player in.
They might be title contenders; they might lose Game 7 and not even get out of the first round. Yet whatever the future holds for the Nuggets this season, the experience and the growth for Murray in these hugely important games bodes incredibly well for both his and the team's future.
He got very good, very quickly.
For a long time now, the offensive chemistry between Murray and Jokic and their two-man game in the pick-and-roll has been quite rightly considered to be the future of this incarnation of the Nuggets. As far as that pairing goes, the team goes.
But what we are seeing in this series is that Murray can just change a game himself, if needs be. He is putting himself into the rarefied Lillard-esque air. Nuggets fans will sorely want it to continue for at least one more game.
