Nikola Jokic is the best basketball player in the world. There is no other way to describe someone who has won three of the NBA’s last four MVP trophies, and who has earned a recent championship alongside zero All-Star teammates. He will take the Denver Nuggets as far as any single man can, every season. In 22-23, that meant a title, but in 23-24, that meant a seven-game series loss to the Minnesota Timberwolves in the second round of the playoffs. Next season, Jokic’s impact will be tested even further: this July, one of the championship squad’s starting players, Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, left for the Orlando Magic.
The Nuggets did not really replace him with any external addition. Instead, third-year guard Christian Braun will get promoted from the bench to take Caldwell-Pope’s place. Braun is buff and hyper-athletic, but doesn’t dribble and shoot as reliably as a more traditional guard like Pope, though he improved at those skills in his second season. He projects as a better defender than Pope in the near- and long-term—it was Braun who the Nuggets turned to when they needed someone to challenge Anthony Edwards in the playoffs. And while he is an explosive and creative off-ball cutter, ready to capitalize on Jokic’s passing intuition, there’s no question that he’ll have to make three-pointers at much greater volume to keep Denver’s offensive real estate from shrinking.
A youngster who is perhaps even more important to the Nuggets’ immediate future, despite coming off the bench, is Peyton Watson. Also heading into his third season, he’s a long and springy forward with great instincts near the rim. Like Braun, he also hyper-charges the Nuggets’ defense and transition offense; but, like Braun, he’s also a raw duckling in half-court sets, which is why he barely played against the Wolves in the second round. The addition of his older friend and fellow UCLA alum Russell Westbrook will mean lots more opportunities to thrive in run-and-dunk mode for Watson, but Denver’s ceiling has a lot to do with what he can prove when games slow down.
That’s also where the acquisition of Westbrook may prove dubious. For several years—even including seasons shortly after his 2017 MVP campaign—Westbrook has been neutral, at best, in the postseason. In three of the past four seasons, advanced analytics suggests he is a serious playoff negative. Basic ocular functionality and common sense would tell you this, too: a repeat victim of his own hubris, he is perpetually baited into bad long jumpers and silly interpersonal beefing. And the excess effort and adrenaline that make him a historically productive rebounding guard in the regular season doesn’t help as much when the stakes are maximized for everyone.
But Westbrook should at least be an able manager of the second unit, and allow Jokic to rest more than he usually has. The addition of Dario Saric, the best backup center Denver’s had in three seasons, should help on that front as well. The Nuggets figure to be a regular season wins machine, again, but no one ever doubted that. And once you win a championship, you’ve got higher bars than that to clear, every season onward. Can 23-24, by the Nuggets’ new standards, even be considered a success? Probably not. Every season you give sub-championship parts to a generational big man—with the prospect of earning his way into realms as hallowed as Top Ten Player All-Time status—you’re squandering too much of your pure basketball potential.
So Nuggets fans, and basketball fans more broadly, are feeling miffed that Denver looks positioned to keep committing that sin. No one is convinced that the addition of Westbrook and Saric, plus the loss of Caldwell-Pope—whose absence compounds the team’s already diminished versatility, after the previous summer’s departure of Bruce Brown—has been a good enough off-season. Jokic is now, indisputably, the most under-staffed MVP candidate alive.
One recalls the hooper’s wilderness that Hakeem Olajuwon once traversed, from about 1986 to 1992, or what LeBron James dealt with through the first several seasons of his career. Or, to extend the trend to other leagues, what the Detroit Lions put Barry Sanders through in the 1990s. It sickens sports’ true and worthy purists, seeing unprecedented talent laid to waste. We want to see them armed enough with co-stars to push the possibilities of the game into new horizons.
Until Jokic finds himself with such an infantry, though, his Nuggets will be like the 2024 Serbian national team: a hardly extraordinary collection, expanded to their strategic limits by the genius of their leader. That’s how it was in Serbia’s narrow loss to Team USA in the Olympic semi-finals. With his punishing and conductorial screens, his magnetization of multiple all-world defenders, and his visionary laser passing, he controlled the game without even scoring a ton. Playing all but two minutes, he was the center of a gravity that he managed, for 35 minutes, to direct against the most talented basketball team on earth.
What happened in the game’s final minutes was familiar enough to any Nuggets fan. The sheer attrition of their overall talent deficit, played out over too many possessions, finally caught up to Serbia. When Kevin Durant is on your team and you only need a few pivotal baskets from him, you tend to win every game that you play. And when you’re Jokic, up against the world with Bogdan Bogdanovic and Aleksa Avramovic—or Jamal Murray and Aaron Gordon, come next Spring—you’re fighting for a deeper kind of glory, preserved for those forced to run into building-breaking winds, but who somehow make that kind of losing look both noble and dominant.
