DENVER — Dan Issel has a story about the mystique of the playoff Los Angeles Lakers, the iconic franchise that has consistently crushed the championship dreams of the Denver Nuggets for the past five decades.
As Game 5 of the 1985 Western Conference finals neared a merciful end for the Nuggets, Issel sat on the bench at The Forum in Inglewood, Calif., staring down at the hardwood floor. The final game of his 15-year pro career was ending in a 153-109 blowout against the Lakers, and Issel was reflecting on all the moments that made up a career that would ultimately be enshrined in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.
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Then, as the game’s final seconds began ticking away, Issel heard what he thought was the voice of head coach Doug Moe calling for him. But it couldn’t be, he thought. No way Moe was actually asking him to check back into this laugher.
“Then, he calls my name again,” Issel recalled in a telephone interview Monday. “So I get up and walk to the front of the bench, and Doug says, ‘I want you to go in the game. I want your last shot to be a 3-pointer.'”
So Issel, who made only 32 3s in his career, checked back into the game and was immediately hounded by Lakers forward Kurt Rambis, who had no intention of letting Issel get off a clean shot. But on one of the game’s final possessions, Rambis got lost in transition, Issel caught the ball near the top of the arc and … “By the grace of God, it went in,” he said.
Issel was given the game ball to serve as a reminder of the final shot in the final game of his storied career. When he got back to Denver after the series ended, he went home and handed the ball to his 7-year-old son, Scott.
“He takes it from me and says, ‘So you mean Magic and Kareem touched this ball?'” recalled Issel, who was no match for the aura of the Showtime Lakers, even in his own household.
During a rich playoff history that includes 17 NBA championships, the Lakers have faced the Nuggets in seven postseason series. Denver has lost all of them. The first series was a first-round matchup in 1979, when the Nuggets hosted the Lakers in the third and deciding game of the best-of-three series. The Nuggets led by one point with 12 seconds left, only to watch Kareem Abdul-Jabbar drain a game-winning sky hook shot to win the game.
The Nuggets haven’t been that close to beating the Lakers in the playoffs since. In 33 games across those seven series, Denver has won just eight times.
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“The Lakers were always just so good,” Issel said, “a team full of Hall of Famers. They were favored just about every year I played. You knew, to get any place, you were going to have to play the Lakers.”
Issel, a seven-time NBA All-Star, played 10 seasons with the Nuggets, joining the team during its final ABA days in 1975. His playing career ended with that loss in the ’85 West Finals, and he later had two stints as the team’s head coach. So he is intimately familiar with the struggles the Nuggets have endured against the Lakers, tortured by one-name giants like Magic, Kareem, Kobe and LeBron. Issel has lived that history, felt the hurt when the Lakers ended Denver’s run. It always felt so inevitable.
But now, Issel also finds it easy to envision the streak coming to an end after 44 long years.
“In the number of years that we have played the Lakers in important series, I would say this is the closest the Nuggets have come to being able to put the same amount of talent on the floor as the Lakers have been able to do,” Issel said.
If there is one team that appears poised to overcome the mythology of the Lakers rivalry, it’s this version of the Nuggets. That’s in large part due to approach of their leader, Nikola Jokić, who couldn’t be less concerned with his franchise’s history against its upcoming opponent. Asked Monday what he can take from the one playoff series against the Lakers — the 2020 Western Conference finals, a 4-1 win for Los Angeles — Jokić was brief.
“To be honest,” Jokić said of the series played in the Orlando bubble, “I don’t remember anything.”
The Nuggets have been the most dominant team in this postseason. Their offensive rating of 118.7 is the best in the playoff field. So, too, is their 8.6 net rating. Jokić has been the most dynamic individual performer in the playoffs, averaging 30.7 points, 12.8 rebounds and 9.7 assists per game. He averaged a triple-double in the second-round series against the Phoenix Suns and has five triple-doubles in his 11 playoff games, shooting 48 percent from 3-point range in the process.
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How exactly do the Lakers plan on stopping him?
“Catch him coming out of his house and kidnap him,” Lakers coach Darvin Ham said Monday at Ball Arena as his team made preparations for Game 1 on Tuesday night.
The Nuggets have not lost at home in this postseason (6-0). They are the Las Vegas favorite, something they haven’t been in a series against the Lakers since they were marginally favored in that ’79 series. The Nuggets, the No. 1 seed in the Western Conference throughout the season, the team that has essentially breezed through these playoffs, basically has the profile of so many of the Lakers teams that broke Denver’s hearts over the past five decades.
“They know who they are,” Ham said of the Nuggets. “They’re efficient; they’re physical; they play fast; they play the right way; they defend.”
The Lakers, meanwhile, are the team that started 2-10. They were on the outside of the playoff picture for much of the season. They won a Play-In Tournament game against the Minnesota Timberwolves to take the No. 7 seed, but only after trailing by as many as 15 points in the second half. It’s a team that only gained steam after a trade-deadline restructure that swapped Russell Westbrook for impact role players such as D’Angelo Russell and Jarred Vanderbilt, a former Nuggets draft pick.
But a team with James is no one’s version of a plucky underdog.
“You can’t overstate his greatness,” Nuggets forward Aaron Gordon said of the 38-year-old James, who is 10-1 in conference finals appearances in his career. “He’s been great in this league for so long. He’s like a coach out there. All the accolades he’s achieved over the years and how good he is at manipulating the game of basketball, it’s something you need a hyper-level of focus to compete with.”
No team with Anthony Davis, the best defensive force in these playoffs, can be considered a typical No. 7 seed.
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“He’s really talented defensively and they look for him (offensively); he can score any kind of basket,” Jokić said. “Rolling, short roll, midrange, post-up, face-up. He’s a player that block shots, deflections; he’s got quick hands. He’s a really good player.”
But it’s the Nuggets who should have the best player in this series. The all-encompassing presence of Jokić, Issel said, is what makes these Nuggets a different animal — or “a monster,” as Ham called them — than any of the Denver squads that earned a playoff matchup with L.A. in the past. It’s a team good enough to move past LeBron, AD and the Lakers and reach the NBA Finals, so long as the Nuggets pay no mind to 44 years of heartbreaking history standing in their way.
“It would be unbelievable and this place would go nuts,” Issel said. “If you go back to when we entered the NBA, the Nuggets have been competitive. We’ve gotten to the conference finals on several occasions. But we’ve never gotten to play for a championship. I can’t think of how cool that would be to have the Denver Nuggets playing for an NBA championship.”
They just have to slay a few purple-and-gold demons first.
(Top photo of Anthony Davis and Nikola Jokić: Sean M. Haffey / Getty Images)
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