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The case for letting the Nuggets burn
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- The case for letting the Nuggets burn
(Photo by AAron Ontiveroz/The Denver Post) | Denver Post via Getty Images
The Denver Nuggets definitely needed to win in 1974 and definitely again in 2008 and probably again in 2020. The Denver Nuggets needed to lose in 1983, and again 2002, and again in 2014. Because for 40 years, the Denver Nuggets were good and for 40 years the Denver Nuggets were also bad. In any given year, if you wanted to find the Denver Nuggets, it was probably a good idea to start around the eighth seed of the Western Conference, where they were feisty and incomplete and without any good way to be anything else.
That was, of course, until the arrival of Nikola Jokic. Nikola Jokic is a very real 7-footer who weighs a very real 300 pounds, and who very really cannot jump very high or run very fast. There are many lies told about him, and almost all of them originate from or attempt to explain the fact that he should not be able to do everything that he does. The accepted rebuttal to these lies generally assumes three things to be true: he sees the game better than anyone; his touch is soft as it comes; he can throw his 300 pounds around like a ballerina. These contain three secondary propositions: he is profoundly unselfish for a player of his caliber; he can manufacture good looks for himself at will; and he is, for all intents and purposes, an immovable object. The veracity of these six is undeniable, and the problem, is that these six facts, taken together, engender a belief that any basketball player, of any size, with any skillset, can be made to work next to Jokic.
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But every year the Nuggets need a shooter, and every year Cam Johnson drifts out of the three-foot wide, half-second long windows Jokic opens for him. They need men who can reliably dribble, and Reggie Jackson did not know he was still supposed to move when Jokic has the ball. They need guards who can play with instinct, and Jalen Pickett did not know what was going on unless he ground the offense to a halt.
Because Jokic is an emperor and he does not like the members of his imperial court to move where they are not supposed to move when they are not supposed to do it. He understands what the defense is going to do and because he likes to trick them into believing they know what he is going to do. His eyes usually fall on the space of the floor where he does not want the ball to go, and he moves slowly when he wants to explode. He shoots the ball higher than it seems like he might need to and from angles that should not work, and he does not like to hold onto the ball for very long but he needs to touch the ball more than anyone else, or the defense will figure it out and he will not be able to fuck with them anymore.
Aaron Gordon and Jamal Murray understood this very early on. The beauty of the early configurations, which usually included Michael Porter Jr. and one of Bruce Brown, Christian Braun, or Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, is that these three men were seeing things the rest of the league did not. Aaron knew that Jokic turned his back in the mid-post to draw the attention of Gordon's man, who would not notice Aaron leaping up from the dunker's spot until Aaron's hand was eleven feet above the ground. Just as Jamal understood that the exceptionally quick dump-off to Jokic on the short roll was necessary to catch the weak-side help off-guard and force them to choose between a Jokic floater or an MPJ three. And then of course, there are the smart defenses who see it coming and overload on Aaron at the expense of Braun who can either parachute into the paint from nowhere or step into a three, and then of course the defenses who seem to load up on Aaron only to sprint home to shooters when Jokic seems to make a decision, at which point the ball falls into Aaron's arms for an easy lay-in, and then the defenses who see that Jamal just wants to dump it to Jokic at the free-throw line and hard hedge him at the top of the key only for him to wrap the ball around the side for a Jokic floater, and then those that stunt and try to intercept the pass, only for Jamal to recognize the stunt before it happens and step back to his left for an open three.
The kind of empire Jokic rules is a ruthless hierarchy. Success depends on the free rein of its upper stratum, to whom must go the most minutes and touches, and for whose services cartoonish sums of money are required. Admission to this stratum requires the possession of either a decade-old stake or a disruptive element of titanic proportion. The middle stratum proliferates around and beneath the upper stratum, consigned to very specific roles and afforded only very specific opportunities. The middle stratum, consisting mostly of proven veterans on more expensive deals, is designed to constantly turn itself over: the best performers will invariably get better deals and better roles on different teams. In theory the future depends on the lowest players, especially the younger ones on cost-effective deals, to prove enough to fill those roles within the middle.
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The empire, on some level, understands this. But it also understands the unthinkable financial commitment it has made to the imperial core, who at any time could blow out their Achilles or force their way out of the city. The empire cannot afford slippage, and so neither can its projects. Right away, Julian Strawther must be good enough defensively that he can survive a three-step drift away from a momentary Jokic-created window, and unleash the scoring punch for which he was drafted. Peyton Watson must find a way to throw his wiry frame around in the dunker's spot, or his minutes won't recover from a blown rotation on defense where his athleticism and instincts could be game-changing. And Trevon Brazile has to hit his every defensive rotation in his second career game, just for the Nuggets to tread water when Cam Johnson goes down.
Should the lower ranks perform above their current market value, the empire can theoretically weather a two-month injury within its upper stratum, and can still compete at the highest levels. This is the ideal situation, in which the empire is able to live off the surplus value generated by its cheap, nameless masses, who very well might.
But this is decidedly not what happened: Strawther is yet to look truly comfortable in the system, and now enters a contract year; Peyton Watson flourished in a mostly-coreless, isolation-heavy offense for twenty games before he hit restricted free agency and was moved to the Cavs; Zeke Nnaji is neither the bouncy Jokic backup, nor the instinctual interior demon the Nuggets have long needed off the bench; and Isaiah Hartenstein, Collin Gillespie, and Jay Huff were all somewhat odd stylistic fits who were released before they got a real shot, and are now at least solid rotation pieces elsewhere in the league.
The problem being that Jokic, Murray, and Gordon command well north of seventy percent of the available money, but they cannot take seventy percent of the available minutes. The best candidates to supplement the ailing middle stratum, your OGs Anunoby and your Treys Murphy, will probably not be available at the price the empire is willing to pay. The good-but-not-great options can be made available if they're willing to pay a little more than they think they should have to, and the cheap and passable options all come with their own baggage. This is why Christian Braun transforms from a fun prospect that dunks the shit out the ball and embarrasses Rudy Gobert to a bet that has to pay off; why a 35-year-old Russell Westbrook, playing on a vet minimum, has to be an EPM monster off the bench; and why you trade away your last remaining first round draft pick for Cam Johnson, and why he has to immediately be a good third option on a championship team.
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Every year, in desperation, becomes the year, during which time failure cannot be tolerated, and in pursuit of which all available assets can—and should—be expended. A coreless future is the bleakest imaginable, full of bad years that go nowhere and desperate gambles without any clear purpose. The empire knows this, and so, ironically, has no problem salting the soil from which its new generation might spring — trading away all its draft picks and jettisoning young talent in favor of proven vets. Maybe Russ works, maybe he doesn't, but you're going to sign DeMar either way and you're probably gonna trade away Peyton for a valuable asset once he gets priced out of your budget, which you can then flip for Jaylin Williams if Bryce Hopkins doesn't slide in perfectly next to Bagley on the bench. The players on your team cease to become players themselves, but rather shapes of players who, given the right kinds of touches, or next to the right kinds of players, could, in these precisely-manufactured circumstances, become what you need right now.
And the real difficulty is that these bets often appear to work. Every season during this run the team shatters some decades-old record, for most franchise wins in a regular season or most threes or best offense. Looking purely at the metrics, the core still puts out a five-man lineup on par with anyone's, an offense that could be the best of all-time, and a middling, but improving defense, still with the best player in the world.
But then you see Jokic lazing his way back across halfcourt as the Wolves take a 10-point lead in the first round of '26, and Jamal moving in Jaden-McDaniels-brand molasses, and Christian walking around the floor without a clue. You see the team sleepwalk their way to a 4-2 defeat in the quarterfinals. You see random contracts for washouts like Tyus Jones and Marvin Bagley, and rapid changes of direction from cheap, offense-first vets, to unproven developmental projects the system has since 2023 proven unable to complete.
The infrastructure that was once able to identify and develop its margins in the early days has dissolved, and the team has stopped moving with it. This is the 2026 Playoffs, this is stagflation —times during which the once inimitable edge of empire no longer suffices, but the costs associated with its maintenance keep rising.
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And this is the most ephemeral problem of the Denver Nuggets, and of other empires like theirs. The game they play, and the speed and fluency with which they play it, is a game of trust, first and foremost. It is about rhythms and it is about vibes, and it is, at its most basic level, about the language that develops in no fewer than 5,000 minutes between three people walking one direction. Jokic works when he is sure of who will be where, and Aaron works when he is where Jokic wants him to be, and Jamal works when he knows where the defense does not want Jokic to be. The regime remains, at its peak, capable of suspending all reality, and of making dollars out of quarters and of bending at its whim the long arc of history.
Should they continue the trajectory they are on, they will likely flip one of Aaron Gordon or Jamal Murray. The returns will, in all likelihood, underwhelm, and the greatest player in franchise history will waste away in the play-in. The fans who remained loyal during all the bad years will debase themselves in their attempts to believe whatever remains of the core might still have what it takes. The case for letting the Denver Nuggets burn, therefore, for keeping the core together, and for taking a longer view, and making the most of what it has, is not that the empire will pull a rabbit out of a hat and return to their place atop the NBA. But that, should the spiral continue, they may soon destroy the very thing that made them special in the first place — and fall short nonetheless.
