OKLAHOMA CITY — Tension thickened in the old Boston Garden locker room on June 12, 1984. Game 7 of the NBA Finals was about to ensue, Celtics-Lakers, the first Celtics-Lakers Finals in 15 years.
Danny Ainge figured the mood needed some comic relief. So, he borrowed a stethoscope from a team doctor and made the rounds, listening to the heartbeat of teammates.
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“Let’s see how nervous you are,” Ainge said to Kevin McHale.
“You got a heartbeat?” Ainge asked Cornbread Maxwell.
Ainge was young in that series; 25. Years later, he wondered if he overstepped his bounds.
“It was a tension-breaker,” Ainge told Sports Illustrated. “But I’m not sure everybody thought it was funny.”
Tension goes with the Game 7 territory. In the locker room. On the court. In the stands. And Paycom Center will be no exception Sunday, when the Thunder and Nuggets settle their two-week series with the 152nd Game 7 in NBA history.
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“It’s do or die,” said Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. “It’s what you live for. It’s what you’ve worked your whole life for. Either your dream continues or your dream ends, so you lay it all out there on the floor and live with the results.”
The Thunder’s historic season, 68 wins and just 14 losses, begat overwhelming confidence in this team largely untested in playoff waters. A Game 1 giveaway reminded everyone that this would be a series, and a series it has been. Denver’s commanding victory in Game 6 Thursday night set up a winner-take-all showdown.
A showdown in which the Nuggets are well-tested. The Thunder, not so much.
Gilgeous-Alexander and Luguentz Dort are veterans of a 2020 Game 7 in the Orlando bubble, a last-second loss to Houston. No other Thunders have experienced that tension that Danny Ainge felt all those years ago.
But Nugget stars Nikola Jokic and Jamal Murray know the feeling well. This will be their SEVENTH Game 7 together. Two in 2019. Two in 2020. One in 2024. And a 120-101 wipeout of the Clippers two weeks ago. Jokic and Murray are 4-2 in Game 7s.
Still, this will be different for the Nuggets. Those six Game 7s? None were true road games. All were played either in Denver or in the Orlando bubble.
Road teams have won seven of the last 10 Game 7s. Including Minnesota’s 98-90 victory at Denver last May in the Western Conference semifinals. But home teams still have a commanding edge in Game 7s; 110-37 all time.
“It’s a lot of fun,” Murray said of a Game 7 on the road, not that he would know. “There’s no crowd for you. You gotta stay together. You gotta bring your own energy. Gotta go in with the right mindset. I think it’s going to force us to be more together. Little more trust.
“I think it’s a great opportunity. Going to be a good challenge. It’ll be fun. Crowd will be rocking. Energy will be high.”
We’ve spent two weeks analyzing the strategy and the results, the downs and the ups, of this wild series. Can’t dissect it much more. Let’s talk instead about Game 7s.
Thunder Nuggets Basketball (copy)
Oklahoma City Thunder guard Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Luguentz Dort are veterans of a 2020 Game 7 in the Orlando bubble, a last-second loss to Houston. David Zalubowski, Associated Press
Magic of seven
Seven, the scholars say, is the Bible’s perfect number. Seven days of creation, counting the Sabbath. Even God, like Nikola Jokic, needed his rest. Seven churches in Revelations. Seven seals, seven trumpets, seven spirits of God, seven trumpets of Jericho, seven dips in the Jordan River for Captain Naaman.
Maybe that’s what prompted leaders of different sports and different generations to all settle on seven as the perfect number for a series. Baseball adopted a seven-game World Series in 1905, went away from it for three years in 1919, then returned to seven in 1922, and danged if it hasn’t remained there. Hockey’s Stanley Cup Finals adopted a best-of-seven format in 1939. The NBA did the same in 1947.
The NBA thought so highly of seven-game series, it kept adding rounds and games to each round. As recently as 2002, first-round NBA games were best-of-five. But now all four rounds are best-of-seven.
The elongated series makes for riveting drama. By now, the Nuggets feel like forever foes in Oklahoma. Coloradoans know the Thunder well.
“Every game is its own chapter, its own thing, its own entity,” said Denver interim coach David Adelman. “Now you put yourself in a situation where you go ‘hey, let’s go see what happens on Sunday. We’re excited for the opportunity.”
The Nuggets indeed are quite experienced in Game 7s. But not as experienced as some have been in NBA history.
The Celtics are 27-10 all time in Game 7s, and their vaunted dynasty — 11 championships in the 13-year span of 1957-69 — included 10 Game 7s. Bill Russell played in all 10. He won all 10. The first eight were at home; the final two on the road.
The two arenas that have hosted the most Game 7s are the Celtics’ current home, TD Garden with 11, and the Celtics’ former home, Boston Garden, with nine.
This will be Paycom’s third Game 7. The Thunder twice won home Game 7s against Memphis, 105-90 in 2011 and 120-109 in 2014. The Thunder also lost Game 7s at Golden State, 96-88 in 2016, and that 2020 bubble game against Houston, 104-102.
Game 7 history is laced with oddities. Like this. The last three teams to play Game 7s in each of the first two rounds of a playoff? The 2019 Nuggets, the 2020 Nuggets and these Nuggets.
Thunder Nuggets Basketball
Sunday will be Nugget stars Nikola Jokic and Jamal Murray SEVENTH Game 7 together. Jokic and Murray are 4-2 in Game 7s. David Zalubowski
Pressure on SGA
2020 was a long time ago. Since that loss to the Rockets, a game in which Gilgeous-Alexander was his usual solid self, with 19 points on 6-of-11 shooting, and Dort made six 3-pointers and scored 30 points, the NBA has staged 16 Game 7s.
Dort still amazes us when his 3-point rainbows fall through the net, and SGA remains solid, though these days that means 29 points on 12-of-22 shooting.
“It’s going to be very fun,” Gilgeous-Alexander said after Game 6. “It’s going to be the highest intensity basketball that you ever play, but at the same time, it’s still just basketball. You get to go out there, have fun, play free, let the chips fall where they may.”
Having fun, playing free, is easier said than done. This isn’t a January Tuesday night in Salt Lake City. This isn’t Game 3 of a first-round series in which you lead 2-0. This is the end of the road for one of these teams, either the proud former champion Nuggets, who clearly could win the title again, or the upstart Thunder, two-time top seeds in the Western Conference, with designs on the first title in OKC history.
This is a series in which both teams have rallied from discouraging defeats, either through domination or late-game collapses.
“Both teams have done a great job of standing back up,” Mark Daigneault said. “And we need to do that on Sunday. Other than that, we need to be who we’ve been all season and embrace the opportunity that’s in front of us.
“We get to play that game at home, because of the work we’ve done all season, in front of our fans. When the ball goes up, we’ll be ready to go.”
The Thunder seems to have a lot of runway to win big in the future, with a lot of youth and saddlebags full of draft picks, but you never know. The Kevin Durant/Russell Westbrook halcyon days seemed to sport a long runway, too, and yet there’s been no victory parade in Oklahoma.
Gilgeous-Alexander seems to know the weight that this team carries. The weight that he carries.
“The formula is very simple for me,” SGA said. “I work hard, I trust my work. No matter the stage, no matter the jersey, no matter the arena, It comes down to that for me. That formula has worked pretty well for me in my career so far, so it won’t be anything different.”
Again, easy to say, hard to live out. Game 7s are different. Game 7s are as tense as a John Grisham courtroom. Game 7s are guaranteed to break one side’s heart. Game 7s live forever.
“I remember every one of my Game 7s,” the great Larry Bird once said. He went 6-2 in Game 7s. “Hell, if you don’t remember them, what do you remember?”
berry.tramel@tulsaworld.com
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