AFTER AN EARLY November 2017 home game -- with the revamped Denver Nuggets hovering at .500 -- I sat down for food and drinks with several members of the team's brain trust.
Calvin Booth, then the team's assistant general manager and the newest member of Denver's front office, posed a question: If you could have one for the next decade, who would you pick among Nikola Jokic, Karl-Anthony Towns and Kristaps Porzingis?
Jokic by that point had finished third in Rookie of the Year (behind Towns and Porzingis) and started more than 100 games -- dozens of which came alongside fellow center Jusuf Nurkic before Jokic once and for all won the starting spot solo on Dec. 15, 2016, a day now known within the team and around the city as "Jokmas."
Less than two months after Jokmas, the Nuggets traded Nurkic and a first-round pick to the Portland Trail Blazers for Mason Plumlee. In a critical late March game that season with the No. 8 seed potentially at stake, Nurkic lit up the Nuggets with 33 points and 16 rebounds -- and crowed afterward. "They know definitely what they're missing," Nurkic told reporters. "I wish those guys a happy summer."
The Nuggets missed the playoffs, and for some in the organization, it was the first moment they began to wonder if Tim Connelly, then the team's head of basketball operations, would move on from his fiery head coach Michael Malone. Connelly stuck by Malone, trusting Malone's feel for how hard he could coach the team and its young star -- and in Malone's commitment to building a defense that would one day be good enough to win the title.
That offseason, the Nuggets snared Paul Millsap away from the Atlanta Hawks in free agency, selling Millsap on his importance as a centerpiece in that defensive reconstruction.
Ten games into that 2017-18 season, as Booth posed his question, the defense was better but the offense was clunky as the Nuggets incorporated Millsap. Malone that week had threatened to kick Jokic out of a practice after Jokic was slow getting back in transition defense. "I jumped him very vocally," Malone told ESPN then.
Jamal Murray, the team's second-year starting point guard, was in a slump -- skittish, uncertain, passing up open jumpers, scattershot in learning point guard reads after splitting the position the year before with Jameer Nelson. (The Nuggets wanted Murray at No. 7 in the 2016 draft, but had to sweat out the Chicago Bulls and New Orleans Pelicans picking in the slots ahead of them; Denver viewed both as Murray threats, sources said. The Minnesota Timberwolves took Kris Dunn. New Orleans selected Buddy Hield.)
When I went to interview Murray, I found him shooting alone after practice, searching for his game. "Last year, I had Jameer out there with me, and I was coming off pindowns," he said then. "I'm trying to figure it all out."
(The Nuggets waived Nelson before that 2017-18 season, in part to clear playing time for Murray and Emmanuel Mudiay. They had chances to trade Nelson to at least one noncontender, but Connelly didn't think it was right to send Nelson somewhere he didn't want to be, sources told ESPN then. That move echoes today; Denver this season had the chance to move backup point guard Ish Smith, but coaches and players protested when front office officials presented them with the option: Smith was too important to their culture, their practices, their harmony. Everyone agreed to keep Smith, and he has served an important behind-the-scenes role -- including mimicking the Miami Heat's playbook as part of Denver's scout team at practices.)
Those were the vibes when Booth polled the table. There was much hemming and hawing. Porzingis' rim protection was intriguing. Towns looked to be an all-time shooter. Everyone was still digesting Jokic's unusual passing: How real was this? How would it translate against elite competition?
Booth stopped the discussion: It was Jokic, he told the group, and it was not going to be close.
THE NUGGETS HAD picked Jokic 41st in 2014 after promising his camp they would do so -- their method of convincing Jokic to keep his name in the draft instead of staying longer in Europe. They liked several other players, including Jordan Clarkson, who went No. 46, but they were thrilled Jokic was still there when No. 41 came up. It was a group decision, but Connelly loved Jokic and had made scouting Europe a bigger priority immediately upon his arrival in Denver.
Even in that up-and-down 2016-17 season, it was clear Jokic's passing had a special catalytic effect. Internally, the Nuggets' win over the Indiana Pacers in London on Jan. 12 is considered something of a watershed. The Pacers entered the game on a five-game winning streak. Denver had lost five straight to drop to 14-23. Jokic piled up 22 points, 10 rebounds and 8 assists on 7-of-11 shooting in an emphatic 140-112 Denver win. Murray looked good coming off the bench behind Mudiay.
Six-plus years later, that duo has led the Nuggets to the first title in franchise history after an utterly dominant 16-4 playoff run. Murray and Jokic combined to average almost 60 points per game. The Nuggets walloped opponents by 8.0 points per 100 possessions. Since 1996-97, only nine teams have won the title with a fatter per-possession scoring margin: the Golden State Warriors in 2015, and 2017 and 2018 (the Kevin Durant title years); the 2016 Cleveland Cavaliers; the 1999 and 2014 San Antonio Spurs; the Los Angeles Lakers in both 2001 and 2009; and the Chicago Bulls in 1998. The Nuggets are positioned to be at or near the top of the league for a half-decade.
No team has had an answer for Jokic. He has beaten every scheme. He might be both the league's best passer and best low-post scorer. He is an elite midrange shooter, both off the catch and off the dribble. He has hit 41% on 3s in the playoffs. Run him off the arc, and Jokic is an expert on pump-and-go drives. Send a third defender flying at him, and Jokic makes the right pass every time. He is not simply good at these discrete skills. He is great at all of them. Basketball has never seen someone who is great at all those things and also almost 7-feet tall.
In every series, the Nuggets noticed opponents making major adjustments against Jokic -- and the Murray-Jokic two-man game -- by the second half of Game 1. They are playing their cards early became a refrain.
Jokic's problem-solving is the main reason the Nuggets never really quivered in this run. At 2-2 against the Phoenix Suns in the second round, they were calm and confident, according to several within the team. When Jokic picked up his fifth foul early in the 4th quarter in Game 4 of the Finals in Miami, there was no unusual rah-rah speech in the huddle -- no shouting about The Moment, The Stakes, anything. (One huddle moment coaches and staffers remember from that game came earlier, just after the slumping Michael Porter Jr. had missed an open transition 3. "Mikey," Jokic told Porter, according to several sources, "if you get another 3 like that, we need you to shoot it!" It was another example of Jokic embracing an understated leadership role.)
With Jokic in foul trouble, everyone understood others would have to hold the fort for a while. The Nuggets had been doing it almost the entire postseason; Malone's move to go small and shift Aaron Gordon to center when Jokic rested had stabilized Denver's backup units.
As Jokic watched, the Heat cut the lead to five. The crowd roared. And for the second time in two games, it was Murray who silenced them with a turbocharged 3-pointer out of a handoff at the top of the arc -- extending the lead to eight, buying time. It may go down as the most consequential shot of Denver's playoff run. Some within the Nuggets wondered if -- should they go on to win -- Murray might have built a case for Finals MVP with that stretch. They believed Jokic might even prefer Murray win it.
Jokic has talked about wanting to win this title for Denver's longtime staff members and the three grizzled veterans who had never won one: Smith, Jeff Green and DeAndre Jordan. All three emerged as spiritual leaders. In the Finals, they were often charged (along with some staffers) with acting as Miami's offense during game-day walk-throughs. Denver's coaches would give them a series of Miami set plays and let them pick one to run against Denver's starters -- without the starters knowing what was coming.
In the walk-through before Game 4, the starters diagnosed the first Miami play right away and defended it properly. Unprompted, the players all began clapping and cheering, sources said. It wasn't goofy, laugh-infused cheering, either. It was serious. They knew they were ready. The ritual repeated after every successful defensive possession, those in attendance recall. Coaches, players and staff members came away with the same reaction: They are locked in. The scene was similar at their walk-through ahead of Game 5.
But people within the team say privately Jokic wanted the title just as badly for Murray. He watched up close as Murray worked and worked to get healthy in time for last season's playoffs, only for everyone involved to end up agreeing it would be best to put off his return until this season.
Murray hit a similar run-stopping 3 in the second quarter of Game 3 in Miami. In Game 2 of the conference finals against the Lakers, with Denver clinging to a 101-99 lead after Austin Reaves banked in a 3 with 1:07 left, Murray drew a shooting foul on a pick-and-roll with Jokic and hit both free throws.
The Nuggets might have reached the Finals sooner had Murray not torn his ACL in April 2021. Malone has told the story about how Murray worried in the wake of that injury the Nuggets might trade him. That was never happening. If they were ever going to entertain trading Murray -- and they never really did -- it would have been in 2017 or 2018. Malone has said recently that Connelly approached him around that time indicating they could possibly trade Murray for a certain marquee veteran or veterans.
Among those players was Kyrie Irving after he requested a trade from the Cavaliers in the summer of 2017, sources have said. The Nuggets were adamantly against it. They never stopped believing Murray could develop into a star -- the perfect point guard next to Jokic. "We've had a lot of excellent players offered to us for our young talent," Connelly told me in the fall of 2017. "There's a fine line between overvaluing your own players and being too aggressive chasing short-term results."
He saw no dissonance between signing Millsap, then 32, and continuing to build around two potential cornerstones in their early 20s. "It doesn't have to be all one way, or all the other," Connelly said then.
MURRAY'S INJURY INTERRUPTED what looked to be a classic multiyear journey from the lottery to the Finals. In 2017-18, the Nuggets grinded out six straight must-win games to set up a season finale winner-take-all for the No. 8 seed against the Timberwolves. The Nuggets lost in overtime, but higher-ups and coaches saw those six games as proof of the roster's toughness and big-game readiness.
On the return flight to Denver, Jokic strode row to row and thanked every player, coach and staffer for their work that season. He promised each of them they would take the next step soon. "It is the kind of thing," Connelly told ESPN in 2020, "that makes your disappointment fade pretty quickly."
They made the playoffs the next season and advanced to the second round despite a glaring hole at small forward. They had drafted Porter Jr. with that spot in mind, but back issues -- the issues that explained Porter's drop to Denver at No. 14 in 2018 -- torpedoed his rookie season.
Denver fortified the frontline in July 2019 by flipping a first-round pick to the Oklahoma City Thunder for Jerami Grant -- pairing Grant with Millsap at the forward spots and allowing the team to bring Porter along slowly. Grant was central in Denver's run to the 2020 conference finals in the bubble, in which it rallied from consecutive 3-1 deficits to upend the Utah Jazz and then the LA Clippers. A certain resiliency was becoming their trademark.
Kentavious Caldwell-Pope started for the Lakers team that defeated the Nuggets in the next round, but he has said he came away from the series impressed with Denver and confident it had big things ahead. The admiration was mutual. The Nuggets had long targeted Caldwell-Pope dating to the Connelly regime. They finally acquired him in a trade with the Washington Wizards last July. When Caldwell-Pope met one front office executive for the first time, he boldly but calmly declared the team would win the title this season, sources say.
They appeared to have a chance in 2021 before Murray's injury. Gordon, acquired as Grant's replacement after Grant left for Detroit in free agency, proved an ideal fit next to Jokic on both ends. (They are now close friends.)
Over Murray's two-postseason absence, the Nuggets tweaked the roster around their two stars. In perhaps their biggest team-building slip-up, Denver in the 2017 draft traded down from No. 13 -- the pick that became Donovan Mitchell -- in exchange for Trey Lyles and a late first-rounder it used on Tyler Lydon. In search of versatility, the Nuggets leaned toward big men who might be able to slide to the wing in spurts. They considered selecting O.G. Anunoby, sources said, but he seemed like a reach at No. 13 and was selected by the Raptors one spot ahead of Lydon.
The Nuggets took lessons from that draft. One was that if they were searching for wing versatility and defense, they might do better chasing big guards who could defend up one position instead of bigs who might be able to shift down. Watching the Suns' spread pick-and-roll lay waste to their defense in the second round in 2021 convinced the Nuggets they needed guards skilled at chasing ball handlers around screens. If they could stick closer to ball handlers on the pick-and-roll, Jokic would not be left on an island. Tighter point-of-attack defense might open up schematic versatility -- including at least dabbling in conservative drop-back defenses.
Caldwell-Pope fit that bill. Ditto for Bruce Brown. In the 2022 draft, Booth -- now the top decision-maker and holding the No. 22 pick -- thought about trading up with Washington for No. 10 with an eye on Jalen Williams. (No such deal emerged.) Braun, meanwhile, was projected in the late first round and perhaps even the second. In Braun, Booth saw a 6-7 guard who defended and made activity plays. "We just needed guys that do stuff -- 50-50 balls, offensive rebounds, transition defense," he said.
At the pre-draft combine, Booth watched to see if someone might expose Braun on defense. "He just never got beat," Booth said. As the draft approached, Booth asked his staff: If the Nuggets could land a backend lottery pick and thought Braun was the best guy available, why shouldn't they take him there? "That may have startled the room," Booth said. "But I don't really care where guys are mocked."'
In the end, the Nuggets could not move up and selected Braun at No. 21. Holding No. 30, Booth targeted Peyton Watson -- a 6-8 wing who averaged 3 points in one season at UCLA. But Watson had size and elite defensive instincts. In his private workout for Denver, Watson lost the ball on a dribble move, fell down, got up and sprinted back for a chase-down block. Booth turned to Malone: "That's why he didn't play at UCLA, and that's why he's a first-rounder -- all in one play," Booth told his coach.
He feared the Warriors might take Watson at No. 28; Booth envisioned Watson and Jonathan Kuminga hounding Murray on defense for years. He wondered if the Nuggets should perhaps trade up for Watson. He felt disagreement from corners of the Nuggets leadership. "There was," Booth said, "some trepidation." Watson fell to Denver at No. 30. He didn't play much this year, but coaches, players and staff are optimistic he could seize a big role next season -- especially if Brown leaves in free agency.
WITH A NEW collective bargaining agreement looming, the Nuggets and other contenders will have to hit these kinds of fringe moves at a higher rate than before to keep their windows open as veteran cores become too expensive. Look ahead to potential new contracts for Murray and Gordon in the summer of 2025, and you can envision some scenarios (depending on several variables, including Caldwell-Pope's future.) in which Denver has to choose between Gordon and Porter Jr. -- or massive tax bills.
The Nuggets have also doubled down on shooting, investing in Noah Shooting System shot-tracking technology; hiring the shooting coach Mike Penberthy; and tracking every player's shooting in practices. (They even have a competition -- the Nuggets 100 -- over who can make the most 3s in 100 attempts.) Penberthy marked Booth's first hire onto Malone's staff, and he was not fully integrated into the team this season, sources said; Penberthy often worked with select players in evening sessions.
Denver is doing everything to maximize this window. Even during the Finals, they struck a trade with the Thunder -- snagging a 2024 first-round pick and two near-term second-round picks in exchange for a distant future first-round pick. The message was clear: Win right now.
The NBA may be entering a new age of parity, but Denver isn't going anywhere -- and may enter next season as favorites to be the first repeat champions since 2018.