DENVER — Michael Malone needn't have worried about his superstar center and a potential letdown when the Denver Nuggets faced the short-handed Utah Jazz.
Nikola Jokic played through a bruised right arm that kept him out of shootaround and Jamal Murray scored 37 points, helping the Nuggets bulldoze the Jazz 142-121 Saturday night.
Jokic had 26 points, six rebounds and eight assists, and Michael Porter Jr. added 19 points for Denver.
The Nuggets led by as many as 39 points in the first half, which helped them withstand a third-quarter letdown.
The Jazz scored as many points in the third as they did in the first half.
Down 78-44 at the half, the Jazz outscored Denver 44-24 in the third quarter but couldn't cut their deficit below 14 points, even against Denver's reserves who played most of the fourth quarter.
Keyonte George led Utah with 29 points and fueled the Jazz's third-quarter surge that made it more respectable and had the sellout crowd buzzing over a potential historic collapse.
The Nuggets made 14 of 20 long-range shots before halftime. After getting outscored by 20 points in the third quarter, the Nuggets recalibrated at the break and played better on both ends in the fourth quarter to improve to 8-1 since the All-Star break.
With the win, Denver inched within a-half game of West leader Oklahoma City, which was idle Saturday night.
The Nuggets were coming off a 115-109 win over the Boston Celtics on Thursday night that gave them a season sweep of the Eastern Conference leaders, so Malone worried that his team would have an emotional letdown.
“Getting up for the best team in the NBA is easy," Malone said an hour before tip-off. “And Boston's a sexy game.”
Not so this one.
“Tonight is different. You're playing against a team that's 5½ games out of the play-in with no Lauri Markkanen (bruised right thigh), they have no All-Stars," Malone said. "They're playing a lot of guys that our players probably don't even know about — They don't know who Brice Sensabaugh is.”
So, Malone said he'd continue to hammer away at the point that the reason the defending NBA champs are rolling is because “we have not cared who we're playing; we've cared about playing up to our standards.”
UP NEXT
Jazz: Host Boston on Tuesday night.
Nuggets: Host Toronto on Monday night.
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