Today on the NBA, we will see the Denver Nuggets travel to take on the Houston Rockets in an exciting contest. The game is scheduled for an 8:00 pm start time and it will be televised live on Altitude2 (Denver) and CSN-Houston (Houston). Currently the odds for the game have the Rockets favored by 3 points, while the totals line is set at 204,5 points. Opening lines had the Rockets favored by 2 points, while the totals line was set at 203,5 points.
Game Analysis: Denver finally managed to win a game yesterday, something that should have regained their confidence. They looked very focused during the whole game. The team knew what they had to do offensively, pound down low, and they managed to do it with 25-38 FG at the rim, while scoring 56 points at the paint. Kenneth Faried shot 7-10 FG, Kosta Koufos 7-13 FG and even JaVale McGee shot 7-11 FG! This frontcourt domination was also visible on the boards battle, where Denver managed to grab 21 offensive rebounds, while grabbing 61.2% of the rebounds!
This has been indeed Denver's main characteristic for this season: they are completely dominating the boards battle! Over the last four games, they grabbed 16, 15, 18 and 21 offensive rebounds, while grabbing 52.86%, 51.59%, 61.21 and 61.62% of the total rebounds! They had been a shooting poorly from the perimeter and that was the main responsible for this loss, with 4-18, 7-26 and 5-21 3pts on their first three games of the season. But they managed to make 10 3pts shots yesterday, so this should give them a confidence boost on this area as well. Coach George Karl had already decided to use a short rotation in Miami and I mentioned exactly what on yesterday's writeup on their game against Detroit:
"It seems like coach George Karl has finally set the right rotations and only eight players were on the court against Miami."
The Nuggets used just 9 players yesterday and with that, they didn't use a lot of fluidity throughout the game, like it had happened on their first games of the season. All the bench players from Denver ended the game with a positive +/- number in the game. They will play now a back to back game in Houston, but the Rockets are a good matchup for the Nuggets. Just like Denver, Houston has been dominating the boards this season, but that is happening almost exclusively because of just one man: Omer Asik!
Even though Houston is having some nice offensive numbers, this has been mostly due to James Harden's excellent individual performances. Note that on their last two games, the Rockets had almost the same number of assists and turnovers! In Atlanta, they had 22 assists and 21 turnovers, while against Portland, they had 19 assists and 18 turnovers. It's obvious that James Harden will be a tough matchup once again, but Denver is used to face him from his Oklahoma City days and they have Andre Iguodala to chase him and Iguodala will surely cause a lot of problems to Harden tonight.
Therefore, I expect Denver to show their renewed confidence tonight and have a decent offensive game, while Andre Iguodala limits James Harden's performance tonight, the only player with enough quality in Houston to make this game close for the Rockets. Denver is clearly a much better team than Houston and even on a back to back spot, the Nuggets shouldn't be the underdog in here. So, I'll be taking the Nuggets tonight.
Free Pick: Take Denver +3 in here (Single Dime Play)
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