Jamal Murray is almost back to his NBA Bubble levels in the playoffs

Matt Krohn-USA TODAY Sports

The Nuggets are close to getting ‘Bubble Jamal Murray’ back.

If you follow the league at large, or at least keep tabs on the Denver Nuggets, you’ve surely heard some iteration of the phrase “the Nuggets need Jamal Murray to be ‘Bubble Jamal Murray’ if they are going to come out of the Western Conference this season.”

This statement begs a couple of questions. What exactly is Bubble Jamal Murray? Why is he so important to the Nuggets’ success? And most important of all, based on what we’ve observed so far, is the Nuggets’ star guard capable of reaching that illustrious standard this postseason?

What is “Bubble Jamal Murray?”

When the NBA returned from its four-month COVID-19 hiatus, Murray reintroduced himself as a human flamethrower, going on a historic scoring spree that pushed his Nuggets to their first conference finals appearance since 2009.

According to the Sunday night TNT broadcast of the Nuggets’ Game 4 first-round matchup against the Minnesota Timberwolves, no player in league history has seen a higher improvement in their regular season scoring average in the playoffs than Murray. For his career, Murray averages 16.9 PPG in the regular season. Meanwhile, in the playoffs, that average balloons up to 24.4 PPG.

Murray is one of the rare players whose scoring actually improves amidst all the increased physicality and intensity of the playoffs, and his iconic run during the 2020 playoffs is the perfect encapsulation of that.

Why does he matter so much to Denver?

The reigning two-time MVP, Nikola Jokic, is probably the best offensive player on the planet. However, to make a deep run in the playoffs, you need multiple guys who can create their own offense.

One of the reasons why Murray has been such a great postseason performer is his ability to operate as an independent scorer. Yes, he can function within the Nuggets’ movement-heavy offensive scheme. But he can also freelance when necessary and bail out stagnate possessions with his tough shot-making acumen.

The Timberwolves started the series off playing their bigs, Rudy Gobert and Karl-Anthony Towns, in a drop. For those unaware, drop coverage allows the defending big man to sink back into the paint to contain both the drive from the pick-and-roll ball handler and the rim run from the roller.

The main issue with the coverage is that unless your team is armed with great screen navigators (Minnesota’s cupboard is a bit bare in this regard since the injury to Jaden McDaniels), you often concede lightly contested pull-up jumpers.

Much like Austin “Him” Reaves did in Game 1 against the Memphis Grizzlies, Murray decided to attack this weakness by spamming pick-and-rolls to close out the Nuggets’ Game 2 victory over Minnesota.

Back to our comment about deep playoff teams needing multiple playoff creators. Those playoff-caliber creators also need to be multi-faceted, meaning they need to be able to create for themselves and their teammates.

Everyone loves to talk about how often Jokic is dime-ing up Murray, but their relationship is a two-way street. Murray’s scoring gravity also alleviates some pressure from Jokic.

In response to Murray dismantling their drop coverage, Minnesota has been playing more screens at the level as the series has gone on. This means that the person defending the screen comes higher up so that the ball handler can’t flow so seamlessly into a dribble pull-up.

The tradeoff of this alignment is that if Murray probes his dribble enough, he basically takes two defenders with him – his initial defender and the player guarding the screener. So, if his screener is Jokic, Murray has effectively just created room for the best offensive player on the planet to express himself.

Murray is an offensive supernova at the point guard position, in the same vein as guys like Trae Young, Darius Garland, and Jalen Brunson. But the difference between him and them is that he’s a bigger body (measuring in at 6’3 while the tallest among that triumvirate is 6’1), which makes it easier for him to hold his own on defense.

Maybe Minnesota is to blame for not being relentless enough, but so far in this series, you hardly ever see them manipulating the board to attack Murray in some sort of action. The same can’t be said about Young, Garland, and Brunson. But Murray is doing more than just not getting killed out there. He’s positively contributing to the team scheme.

Because of Jokic’s vertical and horizontal limitations, the Nuggets rely heavily on their team defense. Therefore, the team can’t afford to have a weak link out on the court.

Denver often deploys that same at the level coverage we outlined earlier. And so, to mitigate the damage done by automatically conceding a 4-on-3 advantage, their communication and rotations need to be nearly perfect.

Thanks to his experience as a floor general, Murray has no problem quarterbacking the team and communicating assignments to his teammates. But more than that, he also does a great job of flying around and fulfilling his duties within Denver’s organized scramble.

This next clip perfectly demonstrates his ability to execute rotations in a timely manner. Towns and Gobert flow into a middle pick-and-roll. Jokic plays the screen at the level while Aaron Gordon tries to fight over the top of it. Since Murray is guarding the weakside corner, it is his responsibility to provide backline assistance if Towns hits the rolling Gobert (they call this backline helper the “low man”). Towns does hit the rolling Gobert, and Murray is right there to intercept the pass.

Is ‘Bubble Jamal Murray’ back?

While the sample for Murray’s 2022-23 Playoffs is still small, we have enough data to begin to compare how his performance thus far stacks up to his legendary Bubble run.

Basketball Reference

Murray 2020 Playoffs vs. 2023 Playoffs Stats

From these measures, it appears that Murray’s scoring and playmaking volume are at the same levels they were at back when he was tearing it up in The Bubble. The key area that’s lagging is his scoring efficiency, which is over five percentage points lower than it was in 2020.

There are a couple of things to note here. First, during these playoffs, Murray is shooting 39.4% from three – right around his season average of 39.8%. In 2020, he shot 45.3% from downtown – over ten percentage points higher than his output during the 2019-20 regular season (34.6%).

It has been said before, but Murray’s Bubble three-point shooting is likely a product of hot-shooting and consistently playing in crowd-less arenas. So, Murray could be playing at Bubble levels even if he isn’t converting from beyond the arc at the same clip.

The thing that is concerning is that he’s not finishing from two at the same rate as he was in 2020. His two-point percentage this postseason (50%) is down 3.7% from The Bubble (53.7%). This is worrisome because it indicates that his interior finishing might still be inhibited by his surgically repaired left knee.

It’s also worth pointing out that these numbers say nothing about his defensive contributions, which, as we outlined earlier, have been superb (maybe even better than he was during The Bubble).

Overall, his ability to explode to the rim and finish there efficiently will be worth monitoring as the Nuggets’ postseason run continues. But for the most part, Murray is playing like the player that helped propel Denver to their best run in recent memory. And if he can continue this type of production, let’s just say that The Bubble won’t be the only thing we remember Jamal Murray for.