Kevin Durant led the Brooklyn Nets with 33 points, 11 rebounds, seven assists, two blocks and two steals as they came away with a 125-119 victory over the Denver Nuggets, snapping a four-game losing streak. Kyrie Irving added 31 points on 11-of-17 shooting. Blake Griffin chipped in with 20 points.
Joe Harris gave the Nets the lead for good with a little over six minutes left in the fourth quarter after making the right corner 3-pointer off the feed from Griffin, as Griffin passed out of a triple-team inside the paint after receiving the ball on the cut to the rim off the pick. That lead was Brooklyn’s first since they led 3-0 to start off the game.
“They played hard as hell,” Nets head coach Steve Nash said. “Really proud of the effort they put in. They proved something to themselves tonight.”
Preceding the big 3-pointer from Harris, Durant drilled the wide-open straightaway triple to tie up the score at 108 before Michael Porter Jr. briefly gave the Nuggets the lead back with a putback layup.
After the Harris three, the dynamic scoring duo of Durant and Irving combined to put up 15 of Brooklyn’s final points in the game.
“I think we stayed with it throughout the whole game and were able to get stops in the fourth,” Durant said.
Durant is spot on in that assessment, as Nikola Jokic uncharacteristically blew a layup at the rim as the smaller Harris bodied him up just enough to prevent Denver from taking a one-point lead with about a minute left in regulation.
With about 24 seconds left and the score still the same, Jokic had another crack at giving the Nuggets their lead back, but Durant stood his ground and got into him just enough inside the painted area to force “The Joker” into a miss on a more difficult, but still makeable turnaround hook shot.
With the shot clock being turned off after that possession, that forced the Nuggets into playing the fouling game, but they’d have no such luck, as Durant unsurprisingly knocked down all five of his free-throw attempts to close out the game.
The Nuggets led by as many as 21 points in the first half, as Porter Jr. set the tempo early with Denver’s first 11 points of the game with 21 of his 28 total points coming within the first 24 minutes of the game. That led to Ian Eagle and Richard Jefferson of the YES Network comparing Porter Jr. to his idol Durant.
“Michael Porter is turning into his own player,” Durant said. “I hear the comparisons, but he’s his own player.”
The Nuggets also got an unexpected 10 points from Markus Howard off the bench in the second quarter, as it seemed from that moment on that Denver had everything clicking.
Denver went into halftime holding a comfortable 15 point lead, but Irving and Griffin combined to go on an 18-6 run in the first four minutes of the second half to all of a sudden make it a one-possession game.
Facundo Campazzo and Porter Jr. then answered with back-to-back triples, as the Nuggets ultimately kept a two-possession or greater lead for the rest of the third before their fourth-quarter collapse.
Jokic finished with 29 points, seven rebounds and six assists. Campazzo had 19 points, five assists and three steals.
