FanHouse Kenyon Martin

FanHouse previews all 30 NBA teams in advance of the 2009-10 season.

Denver's previous coach wasn't bashful about title talk.

"To win a championship, you've got to talk championship,'' Michael Cooper said on several occasions as members of the media attempted to keep from snickering.

Let's just say Cooper, who compiled a 4-10 interim coaching stint before being silenced in January 2005, didn't do much more than talk championship.

Now, the guy who replaced Cooper is doing a lot of such spouting. But nobody is snickering.

"I believe this team can win a championship,'' said George Karl, who has led the Nuggets to five straight playoff berths since taking over.

DENVER -- Kenyon Martin can joke a little about replacement officials. Overall, though, he doesn't think it's too funny.

In an interview with FanHouse, Martin said he believes games will be "terrible'' with the replacements.

"I joked the other day with [Tim Grgurich] and Jamahl Mosley,'' the Denver Nuggets feisty forward said about talking to a pair of assistant coaches. "I'm going to get suspended in the first month of the season. I'm going to have 15 technicals in the first month just for the simple fact [replacement officials] don't know how I run my mouth. They don't know how I approach the game.''

They might find out in a hurry. Martin and his Nuggets play Thursday at Utah in the NBA preseason opener and first game using replacement referees.

During last season's playoff series between the Nuggets and the Mavericks, things got a little crazy between Kenyon Martin and Mark Cuban. After Game 3, Cuban said a fan yelled out that the Nuggets "were thugs," and he couldn't resist yelling over to Martin's mother, who was in the stands at the time, "That included your son."

Things got uglier after that, with Mavs' fans harassing some of the Nuggets' players' family members in the stands, and culminated with Martin yelling some obscenities in Cuban's direction, before the Mavs' owner attempted to end all of this by posting a late night apology on his blog.

It would probably have been best for everyone involved to leave this incident in the past, but Kenyon Martin, in an interview with Yahoo! Sports, couldn't resist getting in one more shot at Cuban.

The term "revisit" might be a little inaccurate for this one. Re-miserating -- if that's a word -- may be more appropriate. The 2000 NBA Draft is perhaps the worst of all time. Of the 13 players picked in the lottery, only one has made an All-Star Team, Kenyon Martin in 2004. Nine years after the draft, four of the 13 lottery picks are out of the NBA, four averaged double figures in points and none has won an NBA title.

It's not as if a number of gems were passed up -- this was just a poor crop players coming out, filled with collegians who made putrid mistakes in leaving school early such as Erick Barkley, Donnell Harvey, Jerome Moiso and Khalid El-Amin.

If that wasn't enough evidence that this was a forgettable draft, the best player in this group was drafted 43rd, Milwaukee's Michael Redd, perhaps the biggest oversight in recent draft history.

The Nuggets far exceeded expectations this season. The team ranked not as the squad most likely to scare the snot out of the Lakers, but as the old guard least likely to return to the postseason in the New World.

Chauncey Billups, Nene, Kenyon Martin, Carmelo Anthony, George Karl, Chris Andersen, J.R. Smith and Joe Dumars changed that. The opening week trade for Mr. Big Shot completely transformed the spirit of the team, as did Karl's summer decision to focus on defense, even at the expense of his stars' allegiance. Everything else went right, for the most part.

But the franchise sit has payroll cuts to consummate, and little in the way of burgeoning youth to fill the holes. By trading the promise of cap space (in the convenient form of Allen Iverson) for Billups, the Nuggets trade a minor rebuild for contention. It worked -- the Nuggets were legit contenders. But what now? How can they possibly get better?

There's a good chance that at some point during the NBA Finals -- or likely before they even start -- there will be talk of whether or not the Lakers are tough enough to win a championship.

And there should be that kind of talk. But it wasn't even an issue against the Denver Nuggets.

The Lakers are going to their second consecutive NBA Finals because their big players were more skilled and more talented than the Nuggets' big players were tough and physical.

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It's pretty much put up or shut up time for Denver Nuggets coach George Karl and his team. Karl has been saying much of this Western Conference finals series that he believes his team is better than the Lakers.

Point guard Chauncey Billups maintains the Nuggets have outplayed the Lakers for most of the series except for the closing-out of games part.

The Nuggets, however, are running out of time. They need two straight wins over the Lakers or little of what they say or believe will matter. Five questions heading into Game 6:

The clock is ticking on the Denver Nuggets. They seem like they're good enough to beat the L.A. Lakers in a seven-game series, but if they're going to get it done, it would probably behoove them to get a win tonight.

Will the Lakers prove to be resilient once again on their home floor? Or will the Nuggets make the right plays, close out a game and push the Lakers to the brink? Oh, and here are five more questions about tonight ...

There's no other way to say it, really: the way that Dahntay Jones has chosen to play against Kobe Bryant in the last two games of the Conference Finals has been dirty. The first play in that video clip is the intentional trip from Game 4; the second is a two-handed push in the back from Game 3. The former wasn't even ruled a personal foul at the time, but the latter was upgraded to a flagrant-one a day later.

Bryant took the high road when asked about it post-game, while Kenyon Martin proudly (but not surprisingly) welcomed Jones to the "dirty player" club.

Three games into the Western Conference finals and we know a couple of things for certain:

One, that the Nuggets are giving the Lakers all they can handle; and, two, Lakers fans don't like it when you say their team feels like an underdog.

Here are five questions heading into tonight's Western Conference Game 4: