No NBA player is a bigger fan of harness racing than Denver Nuggets center Nikola Jokic.
He owns horses, goes to tracks whenever he can and even accepted one of his MVP awards while riding around at his farm back home in Serbia.
He also knows the stretch run often decides races — and the same holds true in basketball.
The NBA All-Star break is over, games resume Thursday and reigning champion Denver and a slew of other contenders hope to hit their stride at the best possible time. Denver comes out of the break in fourth place in the Western Conference standings, three games back of the first-place Minnesota Timberwolves, as the stretch run begins.
“We don’t try to listen to what people say,” Jokic said. “We know what we are capable of. And it’s working for us. So I don’t know what people are saying, that we are not good. I don’t say that we are the best, but we are not bad.”
The Nuggets were the best last season, with the former ABA franchise winning it all in its first trip to the NBA Finals. This season’s best team won’t be crowned until June, of course, and the next couple of months are all about jostling for playoff position — or in some cases, fighting for playoff spots.
It’s not the second half — what people commonly call the period after the All-Star break — but rather the final third of the regular season. The league is exactly two-thirds of the way through the schedule, with 820 games down and 410 to go. It’s the time of year when playbooks tend to get tweaked a little and things get a little more serious.
Paul George of the Los Angeles Clippers knows the playoff push is underway. But as a 14-year veteran of the league, he also knows the most important game is always the next one.
“Can’t look too far ahead,” George said. “Take it one game at a time. Because that’s what you tend to do, second half of the season, start to look ahead and look forward to playoffs and just trying to get to the playoffs. But we’ve just got to take it one game at a time.”
AP photo by Rick Bowmer / Oklahoma City Thunder guard Shai Gilgeous-Alexander shoots as Utah Jazz guard Kris Dunn defends on Feb. 6 in Salt Lake City. Gilgeous-Alexander, a former prep standout at Chattanooga’s Hamilton Heights, has helped the Thunder surprise as one of the top teams in the NBA’s Western Conference this season.The Boston Celtics have the NBA’s best record at 43-12 and sit high atop the Eastern Conference standings. Minnesota (39-16) and the Oklahoma City Thunder (37-17) — a pair of surprises — are first and second, respectively, in the West, where some teams with championship pedigrees such as the Golden State Warriors (27-26) and the Los Angeles Lakers (30-26) hope their momentum from before the break carries over.
The Warriors were 8-2 in their last 10 games before this past weekend’s NBA All-Star Game, while the Lakers were 7-3.
“The most important thing for me is definitely my health, where I’m at right now, where our team is leaning,” said Lakers forward LeBron James, who at 39 is in his 21st NBA season. “We’re trending in the right direction. Obviously, with our Laker team, it’s been about health all year. Trying to do what’s best for me for the betterment of the team.”
The four-time league MVP been dealing with an ankle injury that limited him in the NBA All-Star Game but didn’t prevent him from playing. Other teams have far bigger concerns — primarily the Philadelphia 76ers, who spent a bit of time in November atop the Eastern Conference standings but have dropped nine of their past 12 games with reigning MVP Joel Embiid out with a knee injury.
Now they’re sliding, and so are the Milwaukee Bucks, who have gone 3-7 since Doc Rivers took over as coach but are third in the East. Rivers said this past weekend that he knew that taking over a team just before a long road trip would be a mistake, and it seems like he was right. He also believes there’s time to figure things out.
“If you look statistically over the last 20 years, the same teams win it: the teams that are in the top five or 10 in offense, and the teams that are in the top five or 10 in defense,” Rivers said. “That’s not going away. So you can score all you want. But you better be able to defend, too, if you want to win.”
Boston has a six-game lead over the second-place Cleveland Cavaliers (36-17) in the East. That would suggest it’s safe to go ahead and put the Celtics down for a 10th consecutive playoff berth, extending the longest current streak of postseason appearances in the league.
The Charlotte Hornets, Detroit Pistons, Memphis Grizzlies, Portland Trail Blazers, San Antonio Spurs and Washington Wizards all are alive mathematically, but not realistically. Take them out of the mix, and there are 24 teams left in the race for 20 spots when including the play-in tournament.
The Thunder had 100-1 odds to win the NBA title when the season started. They’re at 25-1 now, according to FanDuel Sportsbook.
“I think we’re starting to kind of see others take notice of us,” said Thunder guard and MVP candidate Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, a former prep standout at Chattanooga’s Hamilton Heights Christian Academy. “We knew that was going to happen once we started winning games. It comes with the territory.”
Every team has from 26 to 29 games left to play. In terms of their remaining opponents’ combined winning percentage, the Celtics, Miami Heat and Orlando Magic are among the teams with the easiest schedules the rest of the way. The Phoenix Suns have potentially the toughest schedule, including two games left to play against Boston and a 10-game stretch to end the season all against likely playoff teams.
“We respect every team regardless and try to focus on us as much as possible each night,” said Suns forward Kevin Durant, who won a pair of titles with Golden State and was NBA Finals MVP both times. “It just about building our habits, getting better at what we’ve already established and pushing forward. I think playing against some of the teams that’s going to be there at the end of the season, it’s going to be a great test before we head to the playoffs.”