Michael Malone Calls Out Nuggets' Effort in Game 2 | 2023 NBA Finals

Can you kind of, I don't know, figure out why do you think your starters that weren't Joker struggled scoring, I guess? Well, I don't think that's the biggest question. No, let's talk about effort. I mean, this is the NBA Finals and we're talking about effort. That's a huge concern of mine. You know, and you guys probably thought I was just making up some storyline after game one when I said we didn't play well. We didn't play well. And tonight, you know, the starting lineup to start the game is 10-2 Miami. Start the third quarter, they scored 11 points in two minutes and 10 seconds. And we just got, you know, we had guys out there that were just, whether feeling sorry for themselves for not making shots or thinking they can just turn it on or off. This is not the preseason. It's not the regular season. It's not around. This is the NBA Finals. And that to me is really, really perplexing, disappointing. And I asked the team, I asked our players, you guys tell me why we lost. And they knew the answer. Miami came in here and outworked us. And we were by far our least disciplined game of the 16 or 17 playoff games, whatever it is now. So many breakdowns. And they exploited every one of those breakdowns and scored. So if we're going to try to go down there and regain control of this series and get home court advantage back, we're going to have to outwork Miami, which we didn't do tonight. And our discipline is going to have to be off the charts. You said Jamal got a good look at it. Did you at all consider calling a timeout there? Or do you like it when it's in transition and you can kind of scramble the defense and maybe catch them a little bit? Yeah, I think it's dependent upon the situation, you know, and their half court defense was giving us a lot of trouble in that fourth quarter, you know, and you take a time out, you let them get set, you let them review whatever play they think that we're going to run. And there's a great chance that we don't get a quality shot like Jamal got, which was online. And from my perspective, it looked like it had a great chance of going in. And we've seen Jamal make shots like that before. So some nights, yeah, I think, you know, we can take the time out. Other nights, give our guys a freedom to get out and run. But with how well they were guarding in that quarter and how hard it was for us to generate great looks, I felt in that transition, we're going to have the best chance to get the look that we wanted.