My Truck Keeps Burning Through Starters

Jamal Murray didn’t want the rest. He’s getting it anyway after Denver blew a 20-point lead in Game 7 against Minnesota on Sunday night and bowed out of the NBA Playoffs well short of his expectations. He wanted to keep grinding through a stubborn calf injury, but instead he’ll get some down time.

The Ant-Man waved goodbye. To the script. To the narrative. To Denver. And to the Nuggets’ chances of winning back-to-back NBA titles. “I mean, it showed us who we are,” Minnesota star Anthony Edwards said after his Timberwolves stunned the defending NBA champs, 98-90, in Game 7 of their second-round series on Sunday. “Because the coaches believed in us, even though at halftime, even in the third (period), the coaches said, ‘Just keep making runs, keep making runs.’ Offense played OK.

The Nuggets paged Dr. Heimlich. In their biggest game of the season, the defending champs choked. It sounds unfair because of the difficulty of repeating, because of the competition, but is not when weighed against history. The Nuggets are the first team to squander a 20-point lead in a Game 7. Wasn’t it bad enough that the Avs’ broke our hearts on Friday night? There’s no way to overstate how crushing this loss is in context with this team, this time, this place.

From celebration to cataclysmic ouster. You could almost feel the afterparty warming up. The Nuggets came out of the halftime locker room up 15 and promptly pushed their lead to 20. You could see Luka Doncic and Dallas preparing to fly northwest for Game 1 of the Western Conference Finals. Then it all came crashing down.

Nikola Jokic’s expression was either vacant or vengeful, defeated or determined. Staring at the basketball court but maybe beyond it, too, he stood alone on the Target Center baseline and watched the fourth quarter of a historic clobbering without taking his seat on the bench. Was he antsy to jump on the team plane back to Denver to play Game 7 immediately?

A boisterous crowd of a thousand or so packed the Stanley Marketplace in Aurora on Sunday to hear a White House pitch from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — a presidential candidate who isn’t yet on Colorado’s November ballot but who said he represents an opportunity for people to “vote out of hope and inspiration” rather than fear. Kennedy started his speech by decrying his omission from two recently scheduled presidential debates, noting that independent voters are by far the largest bloc of the American electorate.