The team that has been able to follow the Spurs' pre-playoff precision preparation formula admits it was relieved to learn of Ginobili's misfortune. It's not fair to say the Nuggets threw a party when his season-ending injury was announced, but they didn't offer much sympathy.

"You don't wish injury on anybody," forward Kenyon Martin told Chris Thomasson, former Nuggets beat man-turned-blogger because his newspaper folded. "It's a tough thing. I broke my fibula twice, so I know. I hope he feels better. But I don't feel sorry for the Spurs."

The Nuggets lead the Western Conference in field-goal percentage defense, the statistic Popovich calls the most telling measure of defensive excellence. They finally have a leader, Chauncey Billups, capable of controlling their knucklehead factor. Plus, their coach found a way to get his players to defend as teams must to win in the playoffs, even after management gave away his best defender, Marcus Camby, last July.

I sat with a forlorn George Karl in the nearly-empty Thomas & Mack Center during a Las Vegas summer league game after the Camby deal, listening as he tried to convince himself he would still find a way to guide his team into the postseason.

He was not very convincing, but he was very angry.

That was months before the league's most convoluted Basketball operations department pulled off the best trade of the season, shipping Allen Iverson to Detroit for Billups, saving Karl's sanity in the process.

"There was a lot of anger and finger-pointing and bitching from July 15 to about mid-August," Karl said. "Then (assistant coach Tim) Grgurich came in my office and just kind of fired me up.

"I remember thinking: We've still got a good team and we just need to get in touch with our players, get them in the gym in the summertime more. Then, we went back to the philosophical change of trying to coach them at the defensive end more than at the offensive end."

One by one, the players Karl called bought in, and it was hardly a coincidence that the one player he couldn't reach was the one later traded for Billups.

Karl stressed fundamentals at both ends and told his players to rely less on transition, more on fundamentals.

"What we've become is a more fundamental team," he said. "We play boring Basketball now. We just win, like San Antonio."

The Nuggets have won more than the Spurs of late, and are one win away from locking up the second seed and a spot in the bracket opposite Kobe Bryant.

The Spurs can still run the table and finish third, setting up a potential second-round series with Denver, and if Ginobili's absence then helped the Nuggets earn a spot in the Western finals, there will be no sympathy offered by Martin or his teammates.

mikemonroe@express-news.net