Denver, CO
Nuggets-Timberwolves: 5 takeaways from Denver’s Game 3 answer
Jamal Murray rediscovered his groove, as did the Nuggets in Game 3.
• Download the NBA App
MINNEAPOLIS — You could see this kind of night coming from here to, well, Denver.
With their season and 2023 championship defense essentially on the line, the Nuggets responded in this surprisingly one-sided Western Conference semifinal Game 3 with force and conviction. Whether or not the series will take a drastic turn will be determined Sunday (8 ET, TNT).
But there’s at least a sense of suspense after the Nuggets won Game 3 breezily and showed plenty of flex and, well, desperate unwillingness to fall three games down. It was a blowout from the jump, with the Nuggets keeping a double-digit lead for much of the game and winning by 27 points at the buzzer.
There was plenty of Jamal Murray and shot-making from the Nuggets and lots of shoddy stretches at both rims by the Wolves. As a result, Minnesota lost for the first time in seven games in these playoffs as their lead in this series was cut in half by a dominant and determined Denver response.
It was the largest Game 3 margin of victory by a team that dropped the first two games at home in postseason history, and especially impressive coming off a 26-point Game 2 loss.
Here are five takeaways from the Nuggets’ 117-90 win, and a series that’s now 2-1 Minnesota:
1. Murray in a hurry to respond
The Target Center fans booed Murray right from the introductions, mainly because he was actually in the introductions.
More than a few were unhappy that Murray was allowed to play at all; he dodged a suspension (but not a fine) from the league office for throwing items on the floor in Game 2.
Without Murray, the Nuggets don’t win this game. That’s because this was the best result from Murray throughout these playoffs. Until Friday, he was mostly reckless and inefficient — even in the Laker series when he hit big game-deciding jumpers.
Murray was obviously on a mission to change all that in Game 3. Lucky for him, the three off-days after Game 2 helped his sore calf.
Murray, Nuggets bounce back with Game 3 rout
Three days off did wonders for Jamal Murray, who scores 24 points on 11-for-21 shooting in Denver’s 117-90 victory.
Consequently, Murray was frisky from the first quarter, zipping between double-teams, stepping back for jumpers, getting 18 of his 24 points by halftime, and taking control of the game.
Murray now has only one off-day before Game 4, so the calf muscle could once again be an issue.
“This is probably the best it’s felt going into a game,” he said, “But it tightened up a bit at the end.”
2. Minnesota makes a return to earth
Really, these playoffs represented the best the Wolves could offer. Their defense was historic, Anthony Edwards volcanic, and their depth simply wore down the Suns in the first round and, through the first two games of this semifinal, the Nuggets.
But this was a not-so-welcome-back to normalcy for a team that, while certainly solid and a contender, came with flaws. And those issues haunted the Wolves in Game 3, mainly on the offensive end.
Minnesota couldn’t shoot straight from deep, failed to match the Nuggets’ sense of urgency and never generated any traction to battle back from its first real deficit in the playoffs. Furthermore, the sellout crowd was never a factor, and fans began beating traffic home halfway through the fourth quarter.
“I haven’t seen a team win 16 straight in the playoffs,” said Wolves center Karl-Anthony Towns. But, he added, “We just have to be a better version of ourselves. We weren’t tonight.”
Other than Towns, the Wolves shot 5-for-28 on 3s, scored just 41 points in the first half and allowed the Nuggets to roam free offensively — a near-reversal from Minnesota’s decisive Game 2 win.
“Our decision making wasn’t there, general movement wasn’t there,” said Wolves coach Chris Finch. “Not a lot of good things on either end of the floor.”
3. Nuggets crack Wolves’ code with deep shooting
A game ago the Nuggets were completely flummoxed by the Wolves’ pressing and trapping. It stripped away everything Denver does well — especially shooting.
That changed abruptly on Friday. The Nuggets’ aim was true all night; they made nearly half of their 3-point shots and connected on 54% overall for the game, especially impressive given the quality of defense usually played by the Wolves.
The beauty of the Nuggets is their calm and deliberate pace, fostered by a sense of familiarity and ability to find the open man. This is a product of an organically-grown team — an offense that works like a Swiss timepiece — run by Nikola Jokic, perhaps the finest passing big man in history.
None of this was evident last Monday when the Nuggets unraveled, shot 35% overall and 30% from deep while looking nothing like the team that raised the trophy a year ago.
But that was then. One game can change the flow of a series suddenly, and in that sense, the Nuggets aren’t taking too much from Game 3.
“We’re far from doing anything to celebrate,” said Nuggets coach Michael Malone.
4. McDaniels’ fouls were a factor
It was a subtle development involving a player who seems to work in the shadows, and it helped the game get away from the Wolves.
When swingman Jaden McDaniels developed early foul trouble, the Wolves were stripped of arguably their most important defender. That’s how much McDaniels’ value has grown, not only in this series, but all season, actually.
McDaniels is tasked with being a speed bump for Murray, and through two games he did that job well — Murray never drew blood from the Wolves. Then came Friday. Murray brought the energy, and so did McDaniels, though maybe too much.
His fouls limited McDaniels to only seven first-half minutes, and by then, the Nuggets and Murray were in control, up 15 points and cruising.
5. Nuggets regain swagger
This 48-minute performance by the Nuggets looked familiar. As in, it looked like last year’s team that had few hiccups on the way to a championship.
That team hadn’t appeared in the 2024 playoffs, until now. Even though the Nuggets swept the Lakers in the first round, they trailed at halftime of each game, then scrambled to win all four.
The first two games in this series were forgettable, especially Game 2, when their body language was foul in a 26-point loss.
The Nuggets were consistent in this respect: they remained tough on the road. They’re now 8-4, stretching back to last postseason.
So they reached back for a 2023 throwback and it agreed with them Friday. The ball moved, Jokic went for 24-14-9, Murray bounced off screens and defenders and the Nuggets kept the Wolves on a treadmill.
“That was Denver Nuggets basketball,” Malone said.
Malone cited his team’s rally from a pair of 3-1 deficits in the bubble as proof of its mental toughness, and also spliced together chatter of Denver doom over the last three days by TV talk shows as motivation.
“Our guys answered the bell,” Malone said. “They still believe.”
* * *
Shaun Powell has covered the NBA for more than 25 years. You can e-mail him here, find his archive here and follow him on X.
The views on this page do not necessarily reflect the views of the NBA, its clubs or Warner Bros. Discovery.
Craig Morton, a Broncos Ring of Fame quarterback who played professionally for nearly two decades, died Saturday at his home in Mill Valley, Calif., at the age of 83.
Morton’s family confirmed his death through the organization, which announced the news on Monday.
Morton led Denver to its first Super Bowl appearance in 1977, quarterbacking the team best known for its ferocious Orange Crush defense. That season, at the age of 34, Morton earned the league’s comeback player of the year award and sparked a six-season run with the Broncos.
“He was our leader that year that we went 12-2, the first year he came to Denver,” fellow Broncos Ring of Famer and former safety Steve Foley told The Post. “It was a magical season. He was just tough as nails.”
Morton was hurt throughout the playoffs and Foley said the quarterback was in the hospital before the AFC Championship Game, when the Broncos beat the Oakland Raiders, 20-17, and advanced to their first Super Bowl appearance.
“I don’t know how he even suited up,” Foley said. “He was black and blue and yellow all over his hip. … Man, he came out and had a great game. He was just tough.
“And what a gem of a guy. Oh, yeah. He had the best heart.”
Morton was the first quarterback to lead two different teams to the Super Bowl, taking the Cowboys there in 1970 before later leading the Broncos.
Morton was born in February 1943 in Michigan, but graduated from high school in California and played quarterback in college at Cal. He also played baseball in college. He was selected No. 5 overall by Dallas in the 1965 NFL Draft, five years before the AFL and NFL merged.
Early in his career, Morton started for Dallas over Roger Staubach before Staubach eventually took over the job.
Morton, though, engineered a long and successful career in pro football.
He played in 207 career games over 18 seasons, including 72 games (64 starts) for the Broncos from 1977-82. Morton was 41-23 as a starter and threw for 11,895 yards for Denver.
“He had a confidence about himself. Kind of a swagger,” Foley said. “Our offense picked up when he arrived. We just knew he could win. He brought that to the team. And man, he had an arm. Oh, yeah. He had a gun.”
Morton was inducted into the Broncos Ring of Fame in 1988 as part of a three-man class along with Haven Moses and Jim Turner. Four years later, he was enshrined in the College Football Hall of Fame.
Morton’s tenure in Denver helped put the Broncos on the map.
“Absolutely, it did,” Foley said. “It made everybody wake up and say, ‘Who is this team on the interior of the United States?’ Unless you played on the East Coast or West Coast, you weren’t getting much coverage.”
Foley said he last saw Morton in the Champions Club at Empower Field during a game sometime in the past two seasons and said he remembered thinking, ‘Man, he looks great.’” Players from the Orange Crush era were surprised and saddened, then, to learn of the quarterback’s passing.
“It’s a little bit shocking,” Foley said. “He was a beautiful guy.”
Want more Broncos news? Sign up for the Broncos Insider to get all our NFL analysis.
Rocky Mountain sandhill cranes battle warmer conditions due to drought
Wildlife biologist Jenny Nehring and farmer Rob Jones talk about Sandhill cranes and their impact on the San Luis Valley.
DENVER — Zoos are of necessity big gulpers of water, a fact that has some zookeepers in the drying American West working to rapidly upgrade efficiency and reduce unnecessary irrigation or leaks.
Denver Zoo, formally known as the Denver Zoo Conservation Alliance, has rapidly reduced its demands on threatened and declining water sources, including the Colorado River.
Among the upgrades is a sea lion water filtration system that allows most of the water to be cleaned and reused each time the pool is drained. That’s saving more than 8 million gallons a year, zoo sustainability director Blair Neelands said. “You can get in there, scrub it with a toothbrush and refill it with the same water,” she said.
Similar upgrades to an African penguin showcase reduced its water use by 95% by largely eliminating what’s sent down the drain. (Like a backyard swimming pool, though, these tanks sometimes still need to be drained and refreshed with new water to reduce mineral buildup.)
“The biggest thing for us is swapping from dump-and-fill pools to life-support systems,” Neeland said.
Another biggie is replacement of a 50-year-old water main with funding of about $3 million from the city. There’s no way of knowing how much that pipe had leaked over the years, but Neeland suspected it was more than a million gallons a year. The savings should become apparent as the zoo tracks its water use over the next few years.
Creating hippo-sized water savings
When The Arizona Republic visited in 2025, the zoo was on the cusp of eclipsing a goal to reduce its water use by half of what it had been in 2018. The zoo had used 80 million gallons in 2024, or about 219,000 a day, a 45% reduction in just a handful of years. Much of the savings had come in the form of smarter irrigation practices and use of drought-tolerant native plants where possible. The landscaping also pivoted to recycled “purple pipe” water from the city, which owns the zoo’s land, restricting potable water to areas where animals really need it.
“When people hear ‘recycled water,’ they get worried about cleanliness and hygiene,” zoo spokesman Jake Kubié said. “But it’s safe for the animals, and it’s not their drinking water.”
Getting past the water conservation goal would mean draining the pool where Mahali the hippo spent most hours lurking with just his eyes, ears and snout visible to visitors. Because he spent so much time in the pool, the water needed daily changes. It amounted to 21 million gallons a year, not to mention water heater bills that drove the cost to $200,000 a year, according to zoo officials. They estimated that Mahali used as much water as 350,000 four-person households.
“This facility is outdated,” Kubié said. “Some day this will become a huge saver of water.”
That day came before year’s end, and it indeed brought a tremendous savings. The zoo shipped Mahali to a new home (and a potential mate) at a wildlife preserve in Texas and drained the pool one last time. Ending the daily change-outs shaved more than a quarter of the zoo’s entire water usage from the previous year. It put the zoo significantly beyond its goal.
Denver Zoo’s water savings are part of a broader waste- and pollution-prevention effort aimed at being a good neighbor in uncertain times, Neeland said.
“Water savings and drought is top of mind for anyone who lives in the Western United States,” she said.
In Phoenix, a different mix of animals
That’s true of the Phoenix Zoo, as well, where zookeepers must maintain landscaping and animal exhibits in a city that baked under 100-degree-plus high temperatures for a third of the days last year. The zoo creates a “respite in the desert,” spokeswoman Linda Hardwick said, but has no hippos, penguins, grizzly bears or many of the other species that would require big water investments for outdoor swimming or cooling.
“We really specialize in animals that will thrive in the temperatures here,” Hardwick said.
The Phoenix Zoo uses most of its water on landscaping. After a consultant’s 2023 irrigation assessment, the staff centralized irrigation scheduling under a single trained technician and employed technologies including weather-based controllers and smart meters. Salt River Project awarded $70,000 in grant funds for the upgrades and several thousand more for training.
The zoo uses about 189,000 gallons a day, she said. That represents a 17% reduction from 2023, or 20% when adjusted for the year’s particular weather and evapotranspiration demand.
Brandon Loomis covers environmental and climate issues for The Arizona Republic and azcentral.com. Reach him at brandon.loomis@arizonarepublic.com.
Environmental coverage on azcentral.com and in The Arizona Republic is supported by a grant from the Nina Mason Pulliam Charitable Trust.
Follow The Republic environmental reporting team at environment.azcentral.com and @azcenvironment on Facebook and Instagram.
Watch CBS News
-
Wyoming5 minutes ago2 dead, 1 injured after vehicle goes airborne, strikes pole in Fremont County
-
Crypto11 minutes agoTrio charged in Bay Area cryptocurrency robbery spree
-
Finance17 minutes agoNorway faces dilemma on openness in wealth fund ethical divestments, finance minister says
-
Fitness23 minutes agoExercise Icons Of The ’70s Who Were So Ahead Of Their Time – Health Digest
-
Movie Reviews35 minutes agoFilm Review: ‘The Wizard of the Kremlin’ Finds Paul Dano and Jude Law in a Compelling Throwback Political Drama – Awards Radar
-
World47 minutes ago
A South Korean startup captures workers’ techniques to develop AI brains for robots
-
News53 minutes agoInstructure Strikes Deal for Hackers for Return of Canvas Data
-
Politics59 minutes agoJudge Again Delays Guantánamo’s First Death-Penalty Terror Trial
