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Yesterday was not the best of days for the high flying Nuggets. It was game one and they were ready to get things going in their best of seven series with the Lakers. Leaving 2 and half hours before tipoff, the Nuggets had high hopes but they’d soon be stranded on the side of the Santa Monica Freeway after their bus broke down and caught on fire. Thats not the type of pregame warmup Coach George Karl had in mind.

The bus left the team’s hotel about 2½ hours before tipoff as scheduled, but experienced problems about 15 minutes into the trip, club spokesman Eric Sebastian said. Players and staff had to wait on the Santa Monica Freeway.

“There was a pop, black smoke, there was another pop, more black smoke,” Sebastian said. “We rushed off the bus. We were standing on the side of the road.”

The Nuggets’ second bus, which left the team hotel about 30 minutes after the first one, stopped to pick up their teammates. The entire team made the rest of the trip to the arena, arriving about 90 minutes before game-time.

As if it’s not already hard enough to get to the Staples Center. Usually it’s traffic thats the problem and they probably had to deal with that too.

Once they arrived to the stadium they were greeted by boos from rabid Lakers fans and Pau Gasol didn’t do anything to make them feel anymore welcome either. He dropped 36 points, grabbed 16 rebounds and had 8 assists. They couldn’t contain him or Kobe Bryant either for that matter. They held Kobe in check for the first 40 minutes of the game until Kobe decided to be Kobe and took over scoring 18 points in the final 8 minutes of the game to secure the victory for them.

So first their bus catches fire and they lose the game so why is Carmelo Anthony more angry than normal. Well see for yourself…

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQiGv_LJ6-U]

Anybody thats actually taken a ball to the face like that knows that hurts like hell. Maybe the Nuggets will have a better day on Wednesday when these two squads meet up again.