HIGHLIGHTS

•  The Nuggets lost to the Lakers on Saturday night, ending an 11-game winning streak and sending the series back to Denver with Nikola Jokić and company holding a 3-1 lead.
•  Jokić compared the slow starts in recent games to horse racing, confident in the team’s ability to finish.
•  After the Lakers jumped out to an early lead again in Game 4, they managed to hold on and extend their season by at least one more game.

The Denver Nuggets suffered their first postseason defeat on Saturday night, falling to the Los Angeles Lakers 119–108 at the Crypto.com Arena to push the series back to Denver.

With the win, the Lakers snapped an 11-game losing streak they’d had against the Nuggets, which included getting swept out of the Western Conference finals in last year’s playoffs.

After the game, Nuggets superstar Nikola Jokić was asked about his team’s slow starts throughout the series. While Denver has largely dominated the series according to the final scores, the Nuggets have found themselves getting outplayed early by the Lakers, trailing by double-digits in each of their eventual victories so far, including erasing a 20-point deficit in the second half of Game 2.

Jokić explained that while the slow starts were frustrating, he knew his team had the resilience to overcome them through 48 minutes of basketball.

“Of course we want to win, but I’ve learned in horse racing: it’s not how you start, it’s how you finish,” Jokić told reporters. “We didn’t finish today really well. Hopefully we can do a better job. Yes, we want to be up and control the game, but it seems like that didn’t happen.”

Throughout his career, Jokić’s love of horse racing has been an entertaining throughline. As dominant a player as he is on the court, Jokić’s offseasons are spent doing what he truly loves: hanging out with horses.

After the Nuggets’ championship win last year, Jokić expressed frustration upon learning that he would have to stick around for a few more days to celebrate his team’s title with a parade.

“No, I need to go home,” he said, after being informed of the parade. Thankfully, Jokić stuck around, and ultimately said the extra few days was worth the party, even if it meant a few days longer away from his horses back home in Serbia.

Despite the Slow Starts, Jokić and the Nuggets Have Looked As Dominant As Ever

Reigning NBA champions look well on their way to defending the crown.

It’s a credit to the Nuggets that the flaw in their game as it currently stands appears to be, “sometimes it takes them awhile before they start blowing out the competition.”

In the first three games of the series, Denver outscored the Lakers by 42 points combined in the second half, topping Los Angeles by double digits over the third and fourth quarters in each outing. In Game 4, the Lakers were able to hold on, again jumping out to a double-digit lead in the first half, but playing the Nuggets to nearly a draw in the second half to secure the win.

Now, the series heads back to Denver for Game 5, with the Nuggets holding a chance to win the series and the Lakers looking to keep alive their hopes of becoming the first team in NBA history to erase a 3–0 postseason deficit.