Michael Malone Wants Nuggets to Pretend Like They’re Down 3-1 in Finals

It’s not always easy to motivate a team that leads the NBA Finals by a 3-1 series count. Especially when that team gets to play Game 5 at home.

That is the current arrangement for the Nuggets, who can close out the first championship in franchise history with a win over the Heat on Monday night in Denver.

It’s only human nature to take your foot off the gas a little, to think that it’s in the bag. Nuggets coach Michael Malone, however, wants his team to avoid all that. In fact, he doesn’t want them approaching the game as if they’re up 3-1 … but the opposite of that.

“My biggest concern going into any close-out game is human nature and fighting against that,” Malone said, via Ohm Youngmisuk of ESPN. “Most teams, when you’re up 3-1, they come up for air. They relax and they just kind of take it for granted that, oh, we’re going to win this. We know anything is possible.

That’s why my message to our team was our approach has to be we are down 3-1. They are desperate. We have to be more desperate. They are hungry. We have to be hungrier.”

Only one team has come back from a 3-1 deficit in the Finals — the 2016 LeBron James-led Cavaliers. The Heat have some nice players, starting with wing Jimmy Butler. But it does feel like their magical run through the playoffs as a No. 8 seed is about to come to an end.

Malone just doesn’t want the Nuggets to feel that way.