Nuggets vs. Lakers score: Denver survives dominant LeBron James, sweeps L.A. to reach first NBA Finals

The Nuggets completed a four-game sweep in Los Angeles

The Denver Nuggets are your 2023 Western Conference champions. They defeated the Los Angeles Lakers 113-111 in Game 4 on Monday, completing their series sweep and advancing to the Finals for the first time in franchise history. It was a remarkable night for a Denver team that trailed by 15 points at halftime, but rallied back in the final two quarters to take care of the Lakers once and for all.

The Nuggets needed all 113 of those points to advance on Monday. LeBron James played by far the best game of his postseason tonight with 40 points, 10 rebounds and nine assists. He set a new career-high with 31 points in the first half, but managed just nine in the second. His teammates couldn't lift him up when he needed them. A poor second half defensively paired with a 1-for-9 shooting half from deep doomed the Lakers down the stretch.

Now the Nuggets will await the winner of the Eastern Conference Finals. If the Miami Heat complete their own sweep on Tuesday, we'll have our Finals matchup tomorrow. If the Celtics can do the impossible and win four straight? The Celtics will face the Nuggets. But for now, the first ticket to the 2023 Finals has been punched. The Denver Nuggets will play for the championship. 

Here are the main takeaways from Game 4:

LeBron was incredible... and not enough

For the first 24 minutes of Game 4, it looked like we were getting a vintage LeBron James game. The final box score will tell you that we did: 40 points, 10 rebounds, nine assists and all 48 minutes played, save the final 4.3 seconds of the first half. But the numbers themselves won't tell you the whole story.

James scored 31 points in the first half. It was a bit fluky in that he made all four of his 3-point attempts after shooting 3-of-19 in the first three games of the series, but James was ultimately at his most aggressive in the first half. The Lakers ran their offense through him. He hunted mismatches. He imposed his will on an overwhelmed Nuggets defense, and the history books will now show that he scored more points in a half in this game than he ever had in a playoff game, beating out his legendary 30-point half against Boston in 2012.

The second half was a different story. He didn't attempt a shot until six minutes and 33 seconds had passed in the third quarter. He didn't score until more than nine minutes had passed. Austin Reaves functioned as the point guard for most of the third quarter. Most distressingly, James was blocked on his game-tying floater attempt.

Just think of that sentence even a few years ago. LeBron James, perhaps the greatest athlete the NBA had ever seen, getting blocked with his season on the line? It was unthinkable, but this is not the same LeBron James. He was exhausted in the second half. His lift was gone.

We don't know how much of that was his age, how much of it was his incredible first half and how much of it was his injured foot. But if this postseason taught us anything, it's that while James can still be James for short stretches, he just isn't the every night superhero he used to be. Even the James that the Lakers had in the 2020 bubble would have won them this game. This one didn't, and now the Lakers need to figure out how to rebuild around this lesser version of James.

The Lakers were desperate and it showed

The Lakers played this game like a team whose season was about to end, emphasizing the things that have worked and throwing stuff against the wall to see what would stick. They finally put their five best players on the floor together to open the game, starting Dennis Schroder and Rui Hachimura alongside Austin Reaves, Anthony Davis and James. That had been their most consistent lineup in this series, but it took them three games to finally start it.

More surprisingly, they inserted Tristan Thompson into the rotation as their backup center. Thompson didn't play a single regular-season minute. He was out of the rotation for the entire postseason prior to Game 4. But the Lakers gave him 10 minutes, and they played the Nuggets to a draw with him on the floor. Denver consistently hunted him in pick-and-roll, but Thompson didn't just hold up defensively, he thrived. The Lakers liked his performance so much that they even played him alongside Davis for a brief stretch in the second half.

Maybe the Lakers could have made this series more competitive if they'd come to these adjustments earlier, but hindsight is 20-20. The Nuggets were the better team, but the Lakers had a rookie coach figuring out the postseason on the fly. That he even landed on these unorthodox moves that worked is pretty impressive.

The Nuggets proved they can win in more than one way

For years, the question surrounding Denver was whether or not their defense would hold up in the postseason. Nikola Jokic has been the NBA's best offensive player for years, but he's a relatively immobile big men, and relatively immobile big men tend to struggle in pick-and-roll. Golden State and Phoenix exploited that in the past two postseasons. Michael Porter Jr's. defense has been maligned for his entire career, and Jamal Murray hasn't exactly been a stopper either. The old adage that defense wins championships has led plenty of neutral observers to dismiss Denver's success as a regular-season mirage.

The first half of Game 4 lived up to that myth. The Nuggets allowed 73 points. They fouled constantly and had no answer for James. The second half was another story. They held the Lakers to 38 total points, including 16 in the third quarter, which they won by 20 total points. The Lakers shot 1-of-9 from 3-point range in the second half, and none of them were open. The Nuggets cut their free-throw attempts from 17 in the first half to nine in the second.

The Lakers aren't the perfect representation of where Denver has struggled defensively in the playoffs. Small guards have been a far bigger problem for them than wings and bigs. But championship runs aren't always perfectly poetic. The Nuggets didn't get to play Stephen Curry this year, and Devin Booker came closer to slaying them than any other opponent thus far. It would be a bit unfair to suggest the Nuggets have solved all of their defensive problems. But the idea that they were ever incapable of getting stops in the playoffs was always overblown, and it feels fitting that their first trip to the Finals was sealed on the defensive end of the floor. They don't need to play elite defense for 48 minutes every night. Their offense is and always will be their bread and butter. But this team isn't a one-trick pony, and it showed down the stretch of this one.

[May 22, 2023 at 11:14 pm ET · Sam Quinn]

Nuggets win!

LeBron James is blocked on his game-tying layup attempt, and the Nuggets win 113-111. Denver will now advance to their first NBA Finals in franchise history.