SAN FRANCISCO — Aaron Gordon gets hyphy when he’s near his hometown.
His string of exceptional scoring performances at Golden State might seem to defy explanation, but it turns out there is one. Home is where the heart is, or in Gordon’s case, where the ear is.
“Man, the DJ was playing slaps, you know what I mean?” the Nuggets forward said after Denver’s season-opening overtime loss on Thursday. “So I’m vibing the whole game. He’s playing the straight Bay that I grew up with. Just like hyphy music, you know what I mean?”
He’s talking about Oakland-style hip-hop, the frenetic subgenre that emerged in the ’90s and spread across the Bay Area as he was growing up in San Jose in the early aughts. Give Gordon the soundtrack of his youth, and he’ll give you a memorable game.
Fifteen fourth-quarter points to pilot an epic comeback and set up the shot of Nikola Jokic’s life. A 38-point throwback to carry a short-handed team without Jokic, Jamal Murray or darn near anyone else.
A bittersweet 50-piece.
“I was just up there getting hyphy,” he said.
Fifty was not enough on Thursday night, and that will haunt the Nuggets, even if it was only the first game of the season. It will haunt them in annoyingly sentimental and emotional ways more than it will in the standings, at least for now.
Warriors 137, Nuggets 131 in an overtime opener for the ages.
“I feel awful for Aaron,” coach David Adelman said unprompted. “Aaron had a night that I’ll never forget. I know that he won’t.”
Gordon shone brightest, but Steph Curry got the last laugh in a city that he wields so effortlessly in the palm of his hand, even at 37 years old. His effect on the Bay Area is as timeless as hyphy’s spell on Gordon. When he stepped to the foul line late in regulation for three free throws, he first paused, took notice of a momentary lull and calmly implored Chase Center to get noisier. They couldn’t jump to their feet fast enough.
“He doesn’t need a lot,” Nikola Jokic said. “He just needs to see one ball go in.”
That was the second-most striking crowd reaction of the night, outdone only by the authentic joy when Gordon missed his first 3-pointer. It happened late in the third quarter, on Gordon’s ninth try. He seemed invincible up to that point, and afterward, too. The final stat line: 50 points and eight rebounds on 17-of-21 shooting, including 10 of 11 outside the arc.
“Whoever scores 10 threes in a game,” Jokic said, “it’s easy to play with that person.”
Even after he cashed in a few, the Warriors relentlessly made head-scratching defensive decisions — going under a ball screen, not picking Gordon up in transition as he brought the ball up, selling out to take away the paint from him off-ball instead of the 3-point line, as Draymond Green did with 25 seconds left in regulation.
Gordon’s 10th triple should have been the game-winner.
But…
“He hit a super-tough shot to send it to OT,” Gordon said. “That’s Steph being Steph.”
From 34 feet deep, Curry pulled up and stole Gordon’s moment. The Nuggets were helpless to stop it. They showed him bodies and ran him off the 3-point line effectively early in the game, but steadily, he turned Christian Braun’s sneakers into ice-skates, predicted the beats and rhythms of Jokic’s double-teams, and found the angles that transferred control back to him. He scored 35 of his 42 points after halftime.
The Nuggets didn’t defend well enough. They relinquished a 14-point lead.
“A few times, we didn’t send him in the direction of the defense,” Adelman said. “If he gets the other way, there’s no one on the other side of that pick. … The shot he made to tie, it’s a shot that only he can make. But obviously you have to be up (the floor) more.”
Denver still had a chance to win on the last possession of regulation. The Warriors had offense-based personnel on the floor from the previous sequence. But Adelman was OK using a timeout and allowing them to substitute if it meant getting organized on the pick-and-roll setup and making sure his players didn’t rush to shoot before the buzzer. They produced a quality shot out of that timeout, but Jokic missed from floater range.
This was a night when plenty of components weren’t good enough around Gordon. Braun struggled at both ends. Cam Johnson was cold from 3-point range and had a minus-17 in his Nuggets debut. The defense was often tangled or disorganized getting back in transition. But Jokic’s individual inefficiency stood out. In one of the lesser triple-doubles of his career, he missed 13 of his last 16 field goal attempts. He was 0 for 4 in the last two minutes of overtime. He was 2 for 13 from three. It was a sobering inversion of Gordon’s hyphy night.
Asked if he could’ve done more to establish an interior presence in lieu of those 3s, though, Jokic played a bit of defense.
“I think I need to mix it up, (but) I’m happy with the 3-point (looks),” he said. “I think I was open. Most of them seemed like they were going in, but they didn’t. So I mean, I’m happy with the shots.”
Just not the results — a beloved teammate’s career night wasted, a homecoming squandered.
“It sucks,” Gordon admitted. “They’re asking if I wanted the game ball. And no, I don’t want the game ball to take an L home with me. No, thank you. So it sucks. But it’s one game. It’s our first game. That’s a good team. It’s a really good team. It’s hard to win on the road. You’ve gotta execute offensively and defensively down the stretch. So we’re gonna reconvene, watch the film, go back home and try to play better in our home opener.”