NBA scores 2017: Nuggets aren’t giving up their playoff spot without a fight

Stop giving away the No. 8 seed to other teams — Denver’s got this.

Mar 17, 2017, 12:00 PM UTC

NBA: Los Angeles Clippers at Denver Nuggets

Isaiah J. Downing-USA TODAY Sports

It was the Pelicans first. After DeMarcus Cousins was traded over the All-Star break, we anointed them as the new favorites to sneak into the No. 8 seed in the Western Conference — because, of course, it wouldn’t be Denver.

Jusuf Nurkic, arriving in Portland from Denver, began playing absolutely inspired basketball which we hadn’t seen all season out of him. With a center who finally seemed worth a damn, and a roster that had snagged the No. 5 seed a season ago, this was the new favorite team. Not the Nuggets.

Minnesota has been playing basketball that could only be categorized as exceedingly toasty. Man, that was such an obnoxious way for me to say the Timberwolves have been hot. They’ve seen odds mostly go against them this year, frequently losing games by close scores and winning them by large margins.

Maybe, we speculated, they could finally put it together in the final month of the season and surge back into a playoff team. Someone had to attempt to upset the Warriors in the first round, and maybe this was going to be the team, because surely it wasn’t going to be Denver.

But have we considered it might just be that? Because the Nuggets don’t seem too pleased with giving up the No. 8 seed anymore.

It’s an extreme generalization to say that you, dear reader, thought any of those things about the teams listed above. But it’s fair to say that all three squads — and the Mavericks, too, who have been revitalized since Seth Curry’s entrance into the starting lineup in January — have earned buzz, and that a playoff push into the final spot in the West has been discussed as a possibility.

Sure, it’s possible. But it’s also possible that Denver just won’t give it up, and its win on Thursday — a 129-114 victory against a fellow West playoff team, the Clippers — showed just that.

Fancy rhetoric aside, here’s how the playoff picture really looks.

Denver sits at 33-35, which is 2.5 games ahead of Portland, 3.5 up on Dallas, and 4.5 in advance of Minnesota. The Pelicans have firmly spun out, not mathematically eliminated but the closest thing to it. Sure, Portland still has a chance. (Dallas has a tough final month of regular season games, and Minnesota would need to make up a lot of ground.) But right now, this is Denver’s spot to lose. The Nuggets don’t seem too interested in doing that.

They are a ragtag bunch, and they’re not a traditional playoff team in the sense they’ll probably finish a game or two under .500. That may factor into why some of us never trusted them to hang onto the spot. But right now, with all the evidence we have at hand, you’d be foolish not to trust them with that final spot.

The Warriors are back on track, or something like that

Briefly, Golden State was tied with San Antonio for the No. 1 seed — which the Spurs own the tiebreaker for now. They were fighting through Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson slumps, and they were struggling to beat even bad teams like Philadelphia.

Apparently, all they needed was a game against Orlando to finally turn that around. Thompson scored 21 points in the first quarter while the Warriors blew the doors off them in a 30-point defeat that wasn’t even as close as the final score would indicate. Like, they probably could have won by 60 if they really wanted to.

The Warriors even survived a brief Curry injury scare, which manifested in the form of beat writers saying he had gone down without contact, only for us to collectively exhale when we realized he stepped on someone’s foot. Curry quickly returned from the locker room and no harm was done.

Cleveland gives one up as soon as it gets one back

The Cavaliers saw Kevin Love return on Thursday after missing 13 straight games with an arthroscopic knee injury, and for a moment, they were a sore Kyle Korver foot away from being a totally healthy team again.

Unfortunately, the universe wouldn’t allow that to happen — Iman Shumpert left the game early, and then Kyrie Irving exited with a (hopefully) minor knee injury. We’ll see if either of those linger for the Cavaliers at all this season.