Nuggets on an 11‑game tear
The Denver Nuggets are riding an 11-game winning streak and sit at No. 3 in the West as they head into a weekend chance to lock down the 3-seed against San Antonio. (x.com) That run is the league’s longest active streak and has become a central storyline in Denver’s multi-sport surge this week. (x.com)
Denver has turned the last two weeks of the regular season into a sprint, winning 10 straight by April 8 and reaching 52-28 while everyone around them in the Western Conference kept scoreboard-watching. One more win in San Antonio on Sunday, April 12, would close the season at 53-28 and keep the Nuggets in control of the No. 3 line. (nba.com 1) (nba.com 2) The standings are tight enough that one game changes the whole first-round map. As of Friday’s completed games, Denver sat third at 52-28, with the Los Angeles Lakers and Houston Rockets both at 50-29 right behind them. (espn.com) That is why this streak feels bigger than a hot week in March. Denver is not chasing the top two anymore; Oklahoma City was 64-16 and San Antonio was 61-19, so the Nuggets’ run has been about staying out of the Play-In Tournament traffic and keeping home court in the first round. (espn.com) The streak has not been built on easy nights. Denver needed overtime to beat San Antonio 136-134 on April 4, then needed another overtime game to beat Portland 137-132 on April 6 before handling Memphis 136-119 on April 8. (espn.com 1) (espn.com 2) (nba.com) Nikola Jokic has been the engine again, and the numbers are absurd even by his standards. In the Memphis win, he logged his 34th triple-double of the season, and the Associated Press recap on NBA.com said he had already clinched averaging a triple-double for the second straight year. (nba.com) Jamal Murray is the other reason this looks like a team nobody wants to draw. He scored 26 against Memphis, and Denver’s late-season formula has looked familiar: Jokic bends the defense, Murray cashes in the space, and the score gets into the 130s. (nba.com) The timing matters because Denver’s last regular-season game is not against a team resting for summer. It is at Frost Bank Center against a Spurs team that was 61-19 after beating Portland on April 9 and had already clinched the Southwest Division. (espn.com) (nba.com) So the Sunday game is doing two jobs at once. For San Antonio, it is a tune-up against a playoff team; for Denver, it is the difference between entering the bracket from the 3-seed with momentum or dropping into the 4-5 mess with the Lakers and Rockets right there. (espn.com) (nba.com) There is also a little symmetry in the matchup. Denver’s surge took off by beating San Antonio in overtime on April 4, and if the Nuggets finish the job in San Antonio on April 12, the same opponent will have framed both the moment the streak became real and the moment the seeding became official. (espn.com) (nba.com)
