Bruce Brown. Jeff Green. Kentavious Caldwell-Pope.
How many Jenga pieces can Nuggets management pull out before the entire Nikola Jokic era collapses?
Okay, “collapse” is an overstatement, this team is still a title contender, but their margin for error is smaller. Much smaller. The Nuggets still have the best player on the planet in Jokic, he’s a walking 50+ wins as long as he stays healthy. Also, this team still has quality veteran players around him, including guys like Jamal Murray and Aaron Gordon (newcomer Russell Westbrook could also fit in this group). We’re talking about a Nuggets team that was up 20 in the second half of Game 7 against the Timberwolves in last season’s playoffs only to blow that lead. If they had won that game, Denver might have knocked off Dallas and returned to the NBA Finals.
“After a season where everybody says we failed, it’s my job to make sure that we don’t believe all that s***,” Nuggets coach Michael Malone said at media day. “We’re a good team. The last six years, no one in the West has come close to doing what we’ve done. Remind yourself of that, but also challenge yourself to not be satisfied.”
Part of that challenge is a big bet by GM Calvin Booth and the front office on their drafting and player development to fill in for those pieces that have been pulled out.
NUGGETS BET ON YOUTH
Let’s talk about the young stars the Nuggets are betting on to step up this season.
• How old is Christian Braun? Braun is a 23-year-old guard entering his third NBA season after three years at Kansas.
Braun is expected to step into the starting lineup in place of KCP (although Malone said Julian Strawther will get a chance to compete for it), and those are huge shoes to fill. Braun is going to be asked to space the floor from 3, where he shot 38.4% last season on two attempts a game (Caldwell-Pope shot 40.6% on 4.1 attempts). He’s also going to draw the toughest perimeter defensive assignments nightly, and while Braun has shown promise as a solid defender, KCP was a proven plus defender who was in All-Defensive Team consideration.
Braun must make a leap on both ends of the court this season to fill those shoes.
•When was Peyton Watson drafted? Watson, who played one season at UCLA, was the final pick of the first round, 30th overall, in the 2022 NBA Draft (the same draft Denver got Braun, but the Thunder took Watson then traded on draft night to the Nuggets as part of a JaMychael Green deal).
Last season, Watson came off the bench for 18 minutes a night, averaging 6.7 points and 3.2 rebounds a game, and being an athletic plus defender. His role will expand this season and the Nuggets need him to develop a more reliable jump shot — he shot 29.6% from 3 last season — and be more of an offensive force. Like Braun, the Nuggets need him to step up into a larger role.
• Julian Strawther might be the best of them. The second-year wing out of Gonzaga showed some promise for the Nuggets as a rookie until a knee injury sidelined him. That knee looked fine at Summer League, where Strawther looked like a player ready to make a leap.
He has the potential to make a leap and ultimately be the best of this young group. He’s known as a shooter but hit just 29.7% from 3 last season, he has to be more consistent, and he has to step up on the defensive end.
Denver was going to lean hard into another young player, DaRon Holmes II — a rookie center out of Dayton — for backup minutes at the five, but he tore his right Achilles tendon in the Nuggets’ NBA Summer League opener. He is out for the season.
For all the talk of the youth needing to step up, the reality of Denver’s chances is much simpler.
DENVER WILL GO AS FAR AS MURRAY TAKES IT
Don’t take Nikola Jokic for granted: The man averaged 26.4 points, 12.4 rebounds and 9 assists a game last season shooting 35.9% from 3, and that is with every defense focused on him. He is a perennial MVP candidate for a reason. He also has proven durable, playing 79 games a season ago and never fewer than 69 in his career.
Jokic is reliable. Gordon is reliable. The youth movement will be good enough, at least until deep in the playoffs.
Jamal Murray has to be better than he was in the last playoffs if Denver is returning to the Finals.
He also struggled with his shot through last postseason and has a history of injury issues. While his playoff counting stats of 20.6 points and 5.8 assists a game last season look good on paper (and he drained a couple of game-winners against the Lakers), he was anything but elite and efficient. Murray shot 31.5% from 3 in the playoffs with a 47.4 true shooting percentage that was 10 points below the league average. To use a catch-all stat, his playoff PER was 12.2, which is below the league average and is the number of a solid bench player.
Things got uglier during the Paris Olympics, where he averaged six points a game and shot 14.3% from 3 for Canada and saw his role shrink with the team.
Denver president Josh Kroenke stood up for Murray and said he wasn’t 100% healthy in the playoffs or Paris. Kroenke and the Nuggets then put their money where their mouth was and agreed to a four-year, $208 million max contract extension.
Murray is getting paid like one of the best in the game and Denver is betting he can return to that championship form. Murray and Jokic have that rare pick-and-roll chemistry that goes beyond just running the plays, the Nuggets can win it all when those two are clicking. That way the Nuggets locked Murray up through Jokic’s prime, they are paying him like one of the elite point guards in the game, now he has to live up to that consistently.
“In a best-case scenario, I think Nikola has like a prime 10-year contention window, and if you count the first year of that when Jamal got hurt, I think we’re about halfway through it,” Nuggets GM Calvin Booth said at media day. “We probably have about five more single shots. All those shots count. If we hit one of them, it’s great. The earlier we hit it, the more we can have other conversations about other things. It’s going to be incredibly hard to win another one.”
NUGGETS FANTASY PREVIEW
From Raphielle Johnson of NBC Sports Rotoworld, focused on Dener’s youth movement.
While the East has improved at its top, the West is the deeper conference of the two. And this is why I don’t see the Nuggets, who lost another starter this offseason in Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, returning to the NBA Finals. First and foremost, who steps into the void left by KCP? Christian Braun has been pegged by many as the favorite to move into the starting lineup, as he’s an athletic perimeter player who defends his position well. However, could Julian Strawther be a better fit, even if he isn’t the defender that Braun is?
In limited action in Las Vegas, Strawther went off in Summer League play. Of course, that environment doesn’t hold a candle to the competition players see during the winter, but this was a necessary confidence booster for a player whose rookie season was derailed by injuries. Braun may be the player fantasy managers lock in on, especially if he is the fifth starter, but don’t overlook Strawther, even if he’s coming off the bench. The Nuggets will not have enough to reach the NBA Finals (unless Michael Porter Jr. raises his game significantly). Still, Strawther could be a value pick, especially in deeper fantasy leagues.
From Noah Rubin of NBC Sports.
During media day, head coach Mike Malone said that Christian Braun and Julian Strawther will compete for the fifth starting spot. Braun has been a winner at every level and can do a lot of the little things to help the team win. Malone said that both Braun and Peyton Watson spent a lot of time this summer working on shooting from deep, which has been a weakness for both players early in their careers. Strawther doesn’t have those issues. He’s an elite shooter that had two games with more than five 3-pointers early last season. He was a stud in each of the last two Summer Leagues, and now he appears to be ready to step into a larger role in year two.
Another player to keep an eye on is Trey Alexander. The rookie quickly agreed to a deal with the Nuggets after going undrafted this past summer and was able to have a lot of success during Summer League. In five appearances, he averaged 17.2 points, 5.8 rebounds, 2.8 assists, 1.2 steals and 2.2 threes per game. Summer League dominance doesn’t correlate directly to NBA production, but it certainly doesn’t hurt.
If these young players are able to step up to the moment, there is certainly a chance that Denver is able to get back to the Finals and add a second ring in three years.
