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Starting the season 0-2 doesn’t mean things are hopeless for the Nuggets, but it does confirm some discouraging signs about their viability as an NBA championship contender.
Are the Denver Nuggets bad? No, but that’s not going to cut it.
The Western Conference is stacked to the nines with not-bad teams. The Spurs and the Trail Blazers are the only comfortably bad teams, and the Thunder are the only ones who are unequivocally good — even the Timberwolves have some stuff to figure out. The Nuggets are in a conference where “not bad” might get you in the lottery. So here’s where they stand: They still have three-time MVP Nikola Jokic, currently the best player in the world. They have the best homecourt advantage in sports. But in the offseason, they lost two rotation players in Reggie Jackson and Kentavious Caldwell-Pope; and replaced them with Russell Westbrook and rookie Julian Strawther. They just lost to the Kawhi Leonard-less Clippers even with 41 points from Jokic. They’re 0-2, and they don’t have any reinforcements on the horizon.
That’s… not great. Even with Jokic, the Nuggets are hamstrung by their once-mighty supporting cast failing to produce at a high level consistently. Jamal Murray — whose pairing with Jokic just two years ago had an argument as the best duo in the league — is now perhaps the streakiest offensive player in the NBA. Aaron Gordon can no longer shoot, and Michael Porter Jr. has hit a wall of development that has relegated him to a massive shoot-first, second, third and fourth forward who provides nothing beyond the occasional scoring outburst.
Jokic is the massive Serbian counterpoint to all of that. He has gotten better every year for a decade, and is this generation’s LeBron James at squeezing every ounce of quality basketball out of whomever happens to be sharing the court with him.
This year, they are betting that working with Russell Westbrook — now in year five of being a losing player on teams that hoped to contend since leading the Wizards to the playoffs in 2021. Westbrook has had a terrible (2-18 from the field terrible) start to the season, as his shot and physical tools continue to deteriorate, and there is no reason to believe that will suddenly reverse. Westbrook needs the ball in his hands to be impactful, but the Nuggets are at their best when everything runs through Jokic.
He’s closer to a candidate for a desperate flier than someone a contender should actually count on. But the fact they are counting on him at all shows how bad their hand is. They lack the three most important things every contender needs: size, shooting and defensive switchability.
It’s hard to overstate how important Caldwell-Pope was for this team. He could guard everyone Murray could not, and is still a quality shooter. Replacing him with Westbrook removed those two critical traits. Julian Strawther was a good shooter and rangy defender at Gonzaga, but he’s still a theoretical at this level.
Unlike many of the other not-bad teams, the Nuggets have Jokic and three other quality players. But they lack the bodies behind them to turn that core into a contender like it once was. They need more out of Christian Braun than he’s been able to give them, and nobody has any idea what Peyton Watson is going to be in this league.
There are also the whispers of head coach Michael Malone not seeing eye-to-eye with management, perhaps over minutes for young players like Strawther and Braun, whom the organization drafted to contribute early, but the grizzled Malone does not yet trust. But the Nuggets are just out of bodies, and unless they intend to trade rookies — never a great teambuilding strategy — for veterans Malone will actually play, they’re going to have to get whatever they can out of them.
The Clippers loss was shocking, though not entirely unpredictable. They can’t guard bigs, so Ivica Zubac went bananas. They can’t guard wings either, so Norman Powell went nuts. In Game 1, Chet Holmgren went so nuts we might have to call him Mr. Peanut.
Theoretically, this team can still play at a high level with their Jokic cheat code. But their roster has far more question marks than rotation-level players. Who is their backup center? Dario Saric? DeAndre Jordan? Zeke Nnaji small ball? And who on this team can credibly guard Shai Gilgeous-Alexander or Anthony Edwards? Who can rebound against players like Zubac? Derek Lively? Anthony freaking Davis?
The Nuggets simply need too much out of too little to be considered a real contender. Unless Jokic finds another limitless fount of basketball genius within his unparalleled superbrain, this team needs to make moves. Plural.
I won’t speculate too much as to what those could be, but Denver has already traded three first-round picks and plenty of seconds. Jamal Murray’s new $200 million deal hasn’t even kicked in yet, and they lack the massive expiring contract needed to poach a quality starter from a tanking team. Their flexibility isn’t zero, and good NBA GMs always figure something out provided ownership doesn’t tie their hands. But their options are very limited, and this team will have to get creative to fix this.
Is this Nuggets window closed? It’s only been two games, so I won’t go there yet. But this team has degraded more and more each year since winning the championship, and I don’t see a solution on the horizon. They still have Jokic, and maybe that will be enough.
But right now, it doesn’t look like it’s even close.
