The Denver Nuggets lost Game 4 to the Minnesota Timberwolves 112-96 on Saturday in Minnesota, and David Adelman spent his postgame minutes pushing back against the idea that his team quit. "You don’t think we were competitive tonight?" Adelman asked, then added, "I thought we were very competitive tonight."
The numbers that followed make the game feel like a correction waiting to happen: the Nuggets have failed to score 100 points in two straight playoff games, and they are shooting 28.5% from 3-point range through four playoff games. Nikola Jokic is averaging 25 points on 39.1% shooting in the series, while Jamal Murray is shooting 37.1% from the field and 26.5% from 3-point range. Adelman pinned the loss on the second half: "When you shoot 24% in the second half, it’s hard to win."
Adelman pointed to both effort and outside factors. "I thought our guys played their (butts) off throughout that first half," he said, and he also credited Minnesota: "You give (the Timberwolves) credit. Two guys off their bench had 60 points combined." The coach tried to separate narrative from result: "I think it’s hilarious that the narrative is offense doesn’t matter," and later, "The narrative doesn’t matter to me." He closed his comments brusquely: "And I don’t care what you write. I really don’t."
Context sharpens why this matters now. The Nuggets were on a 13-game win streak before the series and have since slipped into a three-game skid, a reversal that has exposed the championship-contender language that followed the regular season. During Game 2 of the first-round playoff series, Denver led by 19 points and appeared headed to a 2-0 series lead — a moment that now reads like a missed chance as the series tightens and the offense has grown inconsistent.
There are contradictions in the box score that keep the story from being tidy. The Nuggets’ defense was not the disaster some will say: they held Minnesota to 108 points excluding two garbage-time buckets. Yet Denver’s offense self-sabotaged in the second half, when it managed only nine made shots and turned the ball over nine times. That parity — nine turnovers and nine made shots in one half — undercuts claims that effort alone will carry them through.
Nikola Jokic, asked about the offensive issues, offered a compact diagnosis: "Probably it’s a little bit of everything." He broke it down further: "Not setting screens. Not getting guys open." He also acknowledged the opponent: "They’ve played some good defense," and added, "They have an effect on that, too." Those blunt lines point to execution problems rather than a single missing ingredient.
Adelman framed the locker room mood as frustrated but realistic: "That’s why the guys in the locker room are very frustrated but very understanding of how close we are to flipping the series." His words aim to steady a narrative that will now split between those who highlight Denver’s defensive stops and those who underline the inability to score. Both are true; both matter.
This season’s data matters here: Jokic’s 25 points on 39.1% shooting and Murray’s mid-30s field-goal rate are not the level the Nuggets need when their 3-point stroke is at 28.5% and the team has been held under 100 points twice. If shooting and execution don’t improve, Adelman’s insistence that narrative is irrelevant will feel less like defiance and more like wishful thinking. For now, he returned to the team’s character before the lights went out: "You don’t think we were competitive tonight?" Then, after a pause that felt like a challenge, he said, "And I don’t care what you write. I really don’t."
