Hornets take Game Three

The Denver Nuggets made a valiant effort at the end of Game Three of their best-of-seven series with the New Orleans Hornets yesterday, but it wasn’t enough to keep their series lead from being cut in half.

Chauncey Billups, Denver’s biggest threat over the first two games, was held to 16 points on 3-of-10 shooting, though he added six assists and seven defensive rebounds. Carmelo Anthony, the team’s star for several seasons, scored 25, had eight rebounds and passed out five assists.

But neither player really seemed cold or especially shaken by the Hornets’ defense. The only real change was that the Hornets seemed to key a little less on Anthony, while being determined to give Billups fewer uncontested shots. Anthony, though he wasn’t red-hot, didn’t shrink from the role of go-to guy, and almost pulled it out at the end. I think if he had been the focus of the offense a little more in the fourth quarter we could have gotten our run started sooner.

All in all, it’s tough to be too discouraged by a tight road loss in a game the Nuggets had no business being in. The keys for Game Four (Monday night, 6:30 Mountain):

1. Make free throws. Yeah, it’s obvious, but the team made only 24 of 35 Saturday.

2. Keep going to Chauncey or Carmelo, and if the defense is like Game Two, look for Carmelo more. In past seasons, if Carmelo gave up the ball during a possession, he still frequently got it back. Not so on Saturday. It’s a good thing that the team spreads the ball around and doesn’t rely on Carmelo alone, because we’ve seen what happens when that’s the entire gameplan. But…teams that go deep in the playoffs have a go-to guy, especially at the end of games, and Carmelo is the Nugget best-suited to it. And he definitely needs the ball every single time Peja Stojakovic is on him, because when Anthony puts the ball on the floor, Peja is exposed as an hilariously incompetent defender. If they triple Carmelo at any time, Billups is the obvious alternative, but I felt there were a few too many times in the game when J.R. Smith or Kenyon Martin were relied on.

3. Give K-Mart the ball less. I was being polite after Game Two, and I’m not sure why. The fact is I’ve never been crazy about K-Mart and especially not his contract. But man alive, he is a madman on offense, and not in the good way. Usually he just takes a lot of 20-footers, which is weird enough, but in Game Three he was making enough odd decisions that I was just openly rooting for him not to get the ball. The box score credits him with five-of-eight from the floor, which is better than I’d thought, but he also had half a dozen turnovers.

4. Knock Chris Paul to the floor. Game Three got pretty chippy, which I think for the most part worked in the Nuggets’ favor. Carmelo got fired up by it in the third, and there are a few Hornets, led by Tyson Chandler, who don’t seem to respond well to that kind of game. That said, what kind of physical game seems to deliberately avoid the other team’s star player, especially when he’s a whiner and takes cheap shots on the Birdman? Paul, the Vlade Divac of point guards, deserves an opportunity to show us all what a real foul actually looks like.