NBA - Nuggets Win over the Lakers

The current third place of the Western Conference, the Denver Nuggets, ended their loosing streak of nine games in a row by beating the LA Lakers 79-90 on Friday night, in a game where the Denver Nuggets demonstrated that they are a very good team in their Conference, just as the LA Lakers and the San Antonio Spurs. The Lakers shot poorly in this game, becoming the second worse shooting night for the team since they moved to LA, 50 years ago.

For the Lakers coach Phill Jackson, the game was completely a non-sense and trash game and he apologized to the fans to whom he referred saying that he wished he could repay them for the money they spent to see such a horrible game. He also explained that none of the teams played well but in this case the Nuggets played better than them.

Jackson also expressed that he felt very disillusioned since he knew that the guys in the team were planning to come and play in a good way, give a good performance but it just didn’t happened. He also alleged that he is not very happy with his younger players mentality, since he thinks they are not working in the system as they have to, making the team a little unbalanced.

The Nuggets took advantage of the poor performance that the Lakers were giving and with great performances of reserves J. R. Smith and Chris Andersen, who accomplished a career high with seven blocks, dragged down 12 rebounds and scored in 11 points. Moroever, the defense on the team was very solid and outstanding. On the other hand, for the Nuggets star Carmelo Anthony it was not the best night; he scored just 12 points and added 12 rebounds, however even with Carmelo’s not so good performance the team won the game.

After the game, Denver Coach George Karl expressed his content and satisfaction of his team defense and the positive result, which brings more confidence to the players and a motivation to keep going harder in the season.

"It's been a long time," expressed Coach Karl. "They've beaten us, they've hurt us, they've dominated us. Tonight, we [played] as active and as intelligent of a defensive game as I think we've played all year long or maybe ever since I've been here. We challenged a lot of shots, it was a tremendously active defensive game," stated the Denver coach.

For Kobe Bryant it was not a good night either, he needed 31 shots to make only 29 points and had a very tough mark from Smith, especially in the fourth quarter when the Nuggets defense allowed only 16 points to the Lakers and Bryant shot 2-for-9.

Kobe said later that the defense of the Denver team was outstanding; they put a lot of pressure on them, besides, he said that his team’ legs were very tired and it didn’t worked very well since their shooting was horrible and the combination of situations did not worked out for the Lakers.

The last time that the Denver Nuggets won against the Los Angeles Lakers was on April 9th, 2007, with a score of 111-115 at the Pepsi Center. The Lakers had won five consecutive regular-season games plus a four-game sweep in the playoffs last year when the Nuggets became the first 50-win team to get close out in the postseason. The Lakers are currently in the first place of the West conference.