ReportWire

Tag: brandon ingram

  • Brandon Ingram’s buzzer beater called off, Nuggets survive Raptors without Nikola Jokic

    TORONTO — The new year couldn’t arrive soon enough for the Nuggets.

    Already down four starters, including three-time NBA MVP Nikola Jokic, they were hanging on for dear life to a third-quarter lead Wednesday in Toronto. Then, as the final hours of 2025 ticked away, one more cursed injury beat the buzzer. As spontaneously as if he was struck by lightning, Jonas Valanciunas pulled up with a sudden limp between possessions and reached for his right leg — a non-contact calf strain.

    Jokic’s replacement was done before he could finish a stellar performance in his first start of the season, and the Nuggets were missing more than half of their usual rotation for the last 16 minutes of game time at Scotiabank Arena. What followed was a New Year’s Eve miracle under the circumstances: a 106-103 win over the Raptors despite shooting 28.2% as a team in the second half.

    Bruce Brown missed a pair of free throws with three seconds left when making just one would have clinched the game. Toronto didn’t have a timeout, but Scottie Barnes seized the rebound and fired ahead to Brandon Ingram — “absolutely unbelievable pass,” Nuggets coach David Adelman said afterward — who then buried an off-balance 3-pointer at the buzzer to force overtime. Multiple Nuggets players thought Ingram got the shot off as they watched the play in real time.

    It would have stretched them even thinner for an extra five minutes. Instead, the review process revealed the ball was still on Ingram’s fingers when the clock struck midnight.

    “I was really close to telling Spencer (Jones) to get back to match up with him,” Adelman said, “and then the other part of me thought, Bruce just missed one, am I really gonna wait 15 more seconds for Bruce to shoot it? … I knew it was really close. Right away, guys behind the bench said it wasn’t good, so that did calm me down a little bit.”

    “I really wasn’t thinking too much about whether he got it off in time or not. Just gotta think about the next minutes, prepare for that,” Jones told The Denver Post. “But we got the win either way. We deserved the win. We fought our (butts) off. We’ll go out and celebrate and have a good new year.”

    The Nuggets (23-10) missed 12 of their last 15 field goal attempts but escaped Canada with a messy win in their first game without Jokic, only at the cost of another center. DaRon Holmes II finished the game as Denver’s healthiest remaining option at the five.

    “I don’t know how serious it is. We’re just getting used to this,” an exasperated Adelman said. “It just seems like every night, somebody has something. The cool thing about it is there’s somebody else to get an opportunity from it. And that’s how you have to look at it. Hopefully Jonas heals up correctly. Hopefully it’s not serious, just like I’ve said the other 19 times this month.”

    Face-guarded, double-teamed and full-court pressed throughout the night, Murray patched together 21 points, seven rebounds and six assists in his home country. Watson was the team’s leading scorer with 24 points, hunting shots with the sort of reckless abandon his team needed.

    Valanciunas amassed 17 points (on six field goal attempts), nine rebounds, four assists and three blocks before he limped off as the latest casualty of the highly contagious injury bug going through Denver’s locker room. He left the arena in a boot, but early indications were that he didn’t suffer an Achilles injury.

    “He was great. … He’s been sick,” Adelman said. “I saw a much different energy from him tonight. … If he ends up playing the 32 minutes I thought I was going to play him, you’re probably looking at 25 (points) and 12 (rebounds). That’s what he can do, especially when teams have small-ball lineups like they do.”

    The Nuggets needed contributions from everyone in Adelman’s makeshift eight-man rotation just to carry a 63-54 lead into halftime, and that was before Valanciunas went down. Jalen Pickett started at shooting guard, while Tim Hardaway Jr. slid back to the bench to create the illusion of reinforcements. Four starters were in double figures at the break, and the fifth (Spencer Jones) was a team-best plus-10 despite scoring. He played more minutes than anyone for either side.

    Valanciunas set the tone by scoring Denver’s first four points and was impactful across the board in his first nine-minute stint, which ended when he picked up his second foul. As he took his seat, he had already supplied eight points, six boards, two assists, a steal and a block. He was replaced by DaRon Holmes II, who joined forces with Jones in the frontcourt for the next seven minutes.

    It was a rag-tag duo — one player on a two-way contract, another who’s on a standard rookie deal but has spent most of his season developing in the G League. Yet they made it work together, winning their first-half minutes together by three. Denver’s limited sources of shot creation when Murray isn’t on the court will be a major topic for the next month, so Holmes’ confidence driving and kicking multiple times — including once to assist a Pickett 3-pointer — was an important variable.

    Holmes also knocked down a corner three of his own and delivered a bruising screen to free up Bruce Brown for a floater, a play that kick-started a 5-0 mini-run without Murray or Valanciunas in the game. Those small surges of momentum will be crucial for a team trying to survive without so much talent. After Brown’s floater, Jones forced a live-ball turnover and found Hardaway in transition for a side-step three, forcing a Toronto timeout.

    The Raptors made runs throughout the night but couldn’t find consistent rhythm. Denver survived a 13-1 push to start the second half and a 9-0 run early in the fourth quarter, both of which gave Toronto brief leads.

    Bennett Durando

    Source link

  • ‘This is just game one of 82’: Atlanta Hawks lose home opener by 20

    The Atlanta Hawks opened the 2025-26 season like they closed the 2024-25 season, with a loss. The Hawks fell to the Toronto Raptors, 138-118, in front of a sellout crowd of 17,800 fans. 

    With five minutes remaining in the game and the Hawks behind by 25 points, that sellout crowd began to start heading towards the exit. The NBA season is a marathon and not a sprint, so Wednesday night’s loss shouldn’t be seen as a sign for the rest of the season. That said, it was as bad a start as one could imagine for a team projected to be better than last season.

    Trae Young (above) scored 22 points during the loss. Eleven of those points were from the free-throw line.
    Photo by Donnell Suggs/The Atlanta Voice

    The Hawks took a 2-0 lead and never led the game again. Toronto guard RJ Barrett (game-high 25 points) and forward Scottie Barnes (22 points, six rebounds, and nine assists), arguably the team’s best players, along with veteran forward Brandon Ingram (16 points, nine rebounds), took charge of the game from the beginning. Atlanta couldn’t do anything to stop them.

    The Raptors outrebounded the Hawks by 20 (54-34) and scored 86 of their points in the paint. Toronto is a big team, but a 20-rebound advantage felt more like the Hawks’ lack of effort than the Raptors’ ability. After the game, Hawks head coach Quin Snyder said his team would have to do better going forward.

    Atlanta Hawks head coach Quin Snyder (above) credited forward Jalen Johnson and Zaccharie Risacher for playing hard the entire game. The Hawks were out-rebounded by 20 during the loss. Photo by Donnell Suggs/The Atlanta Voice

    “It’s hard to win games like that,” Snyder said. “There are a lot of things we need to clean up, and that’s stating the obvious.” 

    Snyder, Hawks guard Trae Young (5-14 from the floor, 22 points), and forward Jalen Johnson (team-high eight assists, 20 points, and seven rebounds) all said the loss was just one of 82 games and shouldn’t be a sign of the times in Hawks land.

    “Our team is going to be right, trust me,” Young said.

    Johnson, back on the court after a season-ending injury last season, was more straightforward about the loss. “We just got to be better,” he said.

    Johnson couldn’t have played much better. He ran the floor, led the team with seven rebounds, along with first-year Hawk Kristaps Porzingis (20 points), and did everything he could. 

    The two bench players brought in to help the Hawks’ depth, Nickeil Alexander-Walker (2-15 for 10 points) and Luke Kennard (1-5 from three-point land), weren’t much help tonight, but will need to be better if Atlanta is going to make the postseason without the help of a play-in game for the first time in years.

    Bright spot: Zaccharie Risacher scored 16 points and looked comfortable being a part of the Hawks’ offense. During his rookie season last year, he tended to shy away from the ball. Risacher, the runner-up for Rookie of the Year, took 13 shots, six of which were from behind the three-point line. 

    “He’s finding a good balance. You saw him attack the rim in transition,” Snyder said of Risacher. “He’s shooting the ball with confidence, and we need him to keep doing that.” 

    What’s next: The Hawks will travel south to Orlando to play a much-improved Magic squad on Friday, before returning to State Farm Arena to host the reigning NBA champion Oklahoma City Thunder on Saturday night.

    Donnell Suggs

    Source link

  • Nuggets might watch Lakers vs. Pelicans together, but “we don’t have a preferred opponent”

    Nuggets might watch Lakers vs. Pelicans together, but “we don’t have a preferred opponent”

    MEMPHIS, Tenn. — The tarp is being removed from the pool for the first time this year at the Jokic household.

    “We have good weather,” Nikola Jokic said Sunday afternoon in Memphis, his mind already back in Denver enough to know the local forecast. “So I’m going to go in my swimming pool. … Probably get some treatment. Relax a little bit.”

    The Nuggets have five nights off before they play again, in Game 1 of the Western Conference playoffs Saturday at Ball Arena. They have two full days before they’ll know their first-round opponent — either the Los Angeles Lakers or New Orleans Pelicans.

    They intend to enjoy the brief moment of stillness while they can. Because they hope to enjoy what happens next even more.

    “I think we all kind of were tired of the regular season,” Michael Porter Jr. said.

    Common side-effect of winning a championship. The first 82 games suddenly don’t feel as important. The playoffs can’t arrive soon enough. Champions become adrenaline junkies, living for the pressure and excitement. After a rollicking win over the Timberwolves last Wednesday, Nuggets players sat in the locker room and fantasized about the crowd noise of a playoff environment, the extra oomph of player introductions. Ball Arena had just given them an early taste of it.

    Maybe that’s why they fell apart two nights later in San Antonio. Second-half blowout. Lottery team. Lethargic crowd. Minds in the future. The Nuggets lost focus, lost a 23-point lead and lost their stranglehold on the No. 1 seed in the West.

    The regular-season finale in Memphis was an opportunity seized to salvage something out of their slip to third place in the standings. Minnesota’s loss to Phoenix handed the No. 2 seed back to Denver (57-25), an extra series with that coveted home-court advantage and a different path through the playoffs. Lemons to lemonade.

    “In the second round, we’ll get another round of home-court, and then the only way we wouldn’t get the Western Conference Finals home-court is if OKC makes it all the way,” Porter said. “Which they very well could. So definitely some benefits to being the second seed.”

    “We’ll see in a couple months how it played out for us,” Reggie Jackson said. “Still a tough loss in San Antonio, just because we completely controlled our own destiny. But we still control our destiny. It’s just about playing our best ball at the right time.”

    First, a few days to breathe. The afternoon game time Sunday allowed the Nuggets to fly home from Memphis immediately after the game and have most of the evening to relax. Monday is also a “black-out day,” with nobody going to the team facility or working.

    “Let everybody stay home, get some rest, be with your families, whatever it is you need to do,” coach Michael Malone said. “And then obviously on Tuesday, maybe have a light player development type of a day. And may get together as a team to watch that game on Tuesday night.”

    That’s the burning question now. Who would the Nuggets rather play in the first round? The seventh-seeded Pelicans, a roster that might end up without an All-NBA selection and a core with minimal playoff experience? Or the eighth-seeded Lakers, a franchise that strikes fear into everybody but a current iteration that has lost eight consecutive games to Denver? It’s a fresh matchup or a grudge match.

    “I think it’s pretty even throughout,” Porter said. “New Orleans presents a lot of challenges. Especially with (Brandon Ingram) being back. But the Lakers are a very good team as well. We may have swept them last year (in the Western Conference), but it was a battle every game. I think they ran every game, and then it came down to the last two or three minutes where we kind of pulled away. So it may have looked like we dominated, but that was a very good matchup last year, so we’re taking everyone serious.”

    Porter, despite Denver’s scoreboard-watching Sunday, wanted to be clear: “We don’t have a preferred opponent.”

    Meanwhile, Malone wasn’t focused on the “who” so much as the “when.”

    “You find out a lot sooner than you did as a 1-seed,” he said. “So that helps.”

    Indeed, the Nuggets will have more time to scout one specific opponent than they did last year as the top seed, which doesn’t find out its adversary until Friday at the conclusion of the Play-In Tournament. The real work starts Wednesday for Denver. Even that rumored gathering for the Lakers-Pelicans game Tuesday night would be more of a social event than a work function.

    “We’ll probably get together and watch it and just try to relax at the same time,” Jackson said. “Try to do a little bit of scouting, but just trying to do a little bit of hanging out. Build some comradery and just relax a little bit.”

    The situation in New Orleans will be intriguing. The Lakers were already there Sunday for Game 82. Their 124-108 rout vaulted them to the No. 8 position and knocked the Pelicans from No. 6 to No. 7 … all for the two teams to play again in the same arena 48 hours later. The Lakers don’t even have to fly home to Los Angeles and back.

    Bennett Durando

    Source link