The Denver Nuggets are 6-3 since losing their three-time MVP, Nikola Jokic, to injury. At the time of his hyperextended knee—the result of a freak accident, and not the sign of deeper injury issues to come for Jokic—Denver was already thin, having lost Cam Johnson during their Christmas Day game, and having lost Aaron Gordon and Christian Braun previously. That meant that Jokic and Jamal Murray were their only starters available; and then, it was just Murray.
The tenth-year point guard is having the best campaign of his career, and could finally join his first All-Star game as a result. Typically a clutch-time specialist within the larger system of Jokic’s distributive largesse, he hasn’t usually had to spread his wings so much, but now he’s doing just that, playing a more amorphous game according to his team’s rapidly changing needs. Anyone who’s seen Murray, year after year, prove himself as one of the game’s very best playoff performers, knew it was in him, but now the proof’s fully in the regular season pudding; look no further than his 17-assist showcase in a road win, sans Jokic, against the then-hot Boston Celtics.
It’s not just Murray who’s kept things surprisingly more than afloat with Jokic out, though. Peyton Watson was named the most recent Western Conference Player of The Week, averaging 24 points and seven rebounds in his expanded playing time. Watson’s in the final year of his rookie contract, and after he and the Nuggets’ front office failed to reach terms early on an extension, he’s played the best ball of his life, greatly increasing the size of his near-future paychecks. Long one of the most explosive, versatile wing athletes in the sport, whether or not he refined his game enough to maximize on his gifts was an open question until recently.
His answering that question so resoundingly is a huge gift to a team that seemed, with all their injuries, like they might be finding themselves on the wrong end of a curse. Watson’s play has reshaped the future of the team, boosting their championship odds and likely blowing up what they thought their upcoming summer might look like; now, getting rid of enough veteran salary (recently taken on to bolster the team’s depth) to afford a Watson extension is surely a task being theorized thoroughly by someone in that organization. They wouldn’t want to lose a lengthy 23-year-old who can dribble, shoot, pass, and get nasty in the paint—and one who, because of the team that drafted him, is already battle-tested.
Perhaps Jalen Pickett has earned himself a closer look, too. He has not figured as a premier starting role player with upside for more, like Watson, but in this delightful Nuggets run of January he has shown that he’s more than his former coach, Michael Malone, probably thought he was. A shorter point guard, he knows how to make up for that deficit with his width and trickery, mesmerizing and misdirecting defenses from perspectives he is uniquely capable of getting to. Maybe more stylistically similar to Jokic than anyone else on the roster, his hardwood flow and intelligence could be just the funk that the Nuggets need off the bench in games with much higher stakes this Spring.
Spencer Jones has shown a lot, too, and even the long-exiled Zeke Nnaji has pulsed with impressive life in recent games. The Nuggets, it turns out, have a potent young core, which new coach David Adelman has managed to unlock just at the time that the veterans they piled up over the past summer—after renovating their management, too—has shown its signs of aging; Jonas Valanciunas, brought in to back up Jokic, is out now as well. From last season to this one, Denver has grown from its status as one the NBA’s most shallow contenders to potentially one of its deepest.
It all amounts to Adelman having a very advantageous kind of complexity to work through, when this team is theoretically whole again. Only five players fit on a basketball court together at one time, and one could argue that Denver now has more than a dozen who deserve good time on it when they’re trying their very hardest to win. Adelman is paid to figure out such generous problems, and how he does so will be one of the larger X-factors in a Western Conference playoff field loaded with intrigue.