The last two-minute report from Monday night is out, and it once again shows that the Denver Nuggets were on the bad end of a no-call late in a game. With less than 40 seconds to go in the game against the Minnesota Timberwolves Sunday night, Karl-Anthony Towns should have been called for a defensive three-second violation. That would have given the Nuggets a free throw with the ball back. Instead, Danilo Gallinari passed the ball to Nikola Jokic under the rim, who then went on to uncharacteristically miss a shot and then give the Timberwolves the possession after a fight for the rebound. The call seems a fairly easy one to have made, as Towns was pretty far away from any Nuggets player in the paint and was hanging out for about six seconds before the missed shot by Denver.
This is obviously not the first time the last two-minute report has confirmed that a call, or no-call, went against the Nuggets late in a game they ended up losing. This one doesn’t hurt quite as bad as the other two, against the Atlanta Hawks when the report stated Jokic should not have been fouled out or against the Memphis Grizzlies when it was acknowledged that the last possession of the game should have been Denver’s and the Grizzlies should never have had a chance to tip in the game-winner. Still, as this one tweeter points out, it appears that the Nuggets have been on the losing end of wrong calls this season quite a lot. And when they are, they always seem to lose the game.
The Nuggets may not have ended up winning that game two nights ago even if the right call had been made, as they were down by two points. However, they would have definitely had a better chance had they been given a free throw and then an opportunity to take the lead after re-setting the offense. Regardless, it’s obviously frustrating as a Nuggets fans to keep seeing these reports, but hopefully the Nuggets will get better at executing games down the stretch and won’t even be in the situation to be affected so much by a wrong call in the last two minutes.
