Recap: Nuggets escape near collapse, take 5 seed

First Quarter

While it took the team a second to get scoring, well more accurately 75ish seconds, once they got going — they didn’t stop, at least initially. Joker exploited the hell out of the skill gap between him and Indiana Pacers’ starting center Goga Bitadze. He scored 6 points in about 2 minutes and didn’t miss a shot. Goga, on the other hand, had more airballs than makes. Indiana called a timeout after going down 10-2 in just 3 minutes.

The next few minutes were largely back and forth. Some Jokic and Gordon two man game; which is always fun to see, but nothing really remarkable happened until after the Nuggets lead was cut down to 14-10 and they went on a 7-0 run to push it up to…