PHOENIX – For a distilled glimpse of Denver’s Game 3 Devin Booker problem, look no further than the final seconds of Friday night’s third quarter and opening moments of the fourth.
Booker didn’t so much snatch the lead back from the Nuggets for good, but rather said “thank you very much” when he jogged the ball up the floor off a stoppage in play, realized Kentavius Caldwell-Pope was set up too far inside the arc and buried a lightly contested pull-up 3-pointer for a 90-88 advantage.
Then, after the quarter break, Booker continued a 14-0 Suns barrage with a pair of falling, leaning high-degree-of-difficulty shots off the glass.
In the aftermath of Booker’s 47-point bombardment and the Suns’ 121-114 Game 3 victory, Denver players largely tipped their cap to the superstar scorer.
“He was in a mode tonight,” Michael Porter Jr. said after Phoenix pulled within 2-1 in the series.
“That was pretty incredible,” acknowledged Aaron Gordon.
After what coach Michael Malone called a “very honest, direct” film session Saturday, there also came a clear lesson: If you don’t do the preventative work, a spark quickly turns into a blaze. If you don’t make a player like Booker work for every shot, he’s going to get so hot he’ll make the tough ones along with the easy ones. He might even make 20 of 25 from the floor in a must-have game.
“He had 18 points in the first quarter and as I told our players, I don’t think he had any white paint on him,” Malone lamented. “We were in white jerseys and I don’t think we touched him. Whether it was a transition three, a coast-to-coast drive, a mid-range pull-up, it was way too easy for him.”
Booker started with the coast-to-coast layup, then hit a mid-range jumper over Jamal Murray before easily backing down Caldwell-Pope for a layup. Booker cherry picked a transition three from the right wing after he thought he was fouled on his first miss of the night — another look right at the front of the rim — and by that time it was only a matter of how long he’d carry the hot streak.
“We’ve just got to make it harder for him,” Gordon said. “He was in too much of a rhythm.”
“It’s really hard to put a fire out and he had it going,” Malone said.
Whatever the metaphor — swapping paint or taking Smokey the Bear’s advice on preventing fires — the Nuggets have to do their work early on Booker to try to keep from getting burned late.
“He’s going to score. The sheer volume of shots he’s going to take, he’s going to score,” Malone said. “But we can’t allow him to go 80% from the field when he goes 20 of 25. Being into him, being more physical, more aggressive, showing him more of a crowd, hopefully that doesn’t allow him to start off with 18 points and shooting into a big basket the rest of the night.”
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