Nuggets head coach Michael Malone has continually emphasized that his team has to start getting off on the right foot against the Lakers, producing faster starts to prevent the double-digit deficit comebacks that the first three games have seen.
On Saturday, that lesson was taken more literally.
Before the Lakers’ Game 4 win Saturday in the first-round NBA playoff series to stave off elimination, several players had to warm up in flip-flops and take the court with no shoes on at all due to a mix-up with players’ insoles on the early bus to the arena, a team spokesperson told ESPN.
“I think the bus that the shoes got loaded onto was the last bus. There was some confusion,” said Michael Porter Jr., who was one of the players that didn’t have his insoles and shoes at the gym in time for his pregame warmups. “So all I had was slides. They said we could either skip our warmup or go out there in slides. I kind of knew then that people would probably make a big deal out of it, but it was just because somebody forgot to put the shoes on the right bus.
“It’s frustrating. Pregame routine is very important, but everyone makes mistakes. Everybody’s human, so I’m not too mad.”
Whether the mishap messed up their flow or not, the Nuggets, this time around, failed to have an answer in what could have been a close-out game but they didn’t lean into the shoe excuse.
Denver couldn’t crawl back into the game after the Lakers built a comfortable double-digit lead in the first half and eventually lost 119-108.
The closest they came to the Lakers’ lead was within seven points in the fourth quarter.
“Is it ideal? No,” Malone said. “But hopefully we can figure that out and make sure it never happens again.
“If you want to dig into stuff and say, well, we lost because for some strange reason our players didn’t have their shoes when they got here for their normal warmups, that we had guys out there shooting around with flip-flops, is it ideal? No. But I’m not an excuse guy. And I’m not going to point to the reason we got our butts kicked in the paint because shoes weren’t here. I think that’s a reach, personally.”
The Lakers got away with 72 points in the paint, which marked as the most in a playoff game in the last 25 years within the organization, per ESPN.
It was the second consecutive game that they got away with 70 or more points inside — a stark contrast to their average 46 points in the paint in the first two games of the first-round playoff series.
“We talked about getting off to a better start,” Porter added. “It takes a lot of energy to come back from these double-digit leads down 20, down 15, whatever it is. Tonight they did a good job of sustaining it. Whenever we got within 10 or eight, it seemed like they made a 3-pointer or made a big shot. So credit to them.”
The series returns to Denver on Monday night for Game 5 with the Nuggets ahead 3-1.
