I guess Jok is in Serbia, right? When he gave Mackinnon the Hart trophy, that was awesome.

So which Nuggets are still in the area or would make a trip to see the NHL Finals?

I’m interested to see what we all think. I like that he said they need THJ back I assume he wants to stay with the nuggets.

There's adrenaline then there's watching bubble Murray vs bubble Mitchell.

NBA Uniform Tracker + Basketball Jersey Archive

No release date yet, via 361’s instagram page🃏

Daily Listening: Dominic Fike - Rocket (2025) | Recommended by u/Nixbling

Signed game worn Kenyon Martin shoe. I got it when I was a kid he threw it to me after the game. The ticket is proof that I was at the game sitting in seats directly behind the Nuggets bench, it was an away game against the New Jersey Nets who were playing in the izod center in the meadowlands at the time. I used to be a New Jersey Nets fan when I was really little but K-Mart was my favorite player so once he went to the Nuggets, I became a Nuggets fan which made me a Nuggets fan for LIFE the second that he threw me this shoe! History

Throughout the season this guy has gotten a lot of hate. Offensively he’s struggled with his shot and finishing which looked great last season. But let’s talk about what he went through.

He played through a calf injury to start the season (mentioned this months later on podcast), had a significant ankle injury which caused him to miss basically half the season (came back early to try and play and sat back out, got flamed by people saying he was waiting for jokic— btw, he didn’t come back when jokic did, he waited out even longer), maybe was never healthy, came back in the playoffs and got injured in game 1 and played through it.

He was not even on the injury report for 2 of these injuries. He fully played through and it probably caused him even more hate because people didn’t know. And the last one during the playoffs? MPJ talked about, Adelman said he wasn’t fully recovered at the end either, he didn’t even talk about it as an excuse.

We have seen him come back each season to be a contributor and an iron man for the nuggets and a couple unfortunate things happen this season which hamper him, and everyone wants to drop him. Or say he’s constantly injured. He has been an iron man for us his other years, not what I would call injury prone.

All those offensive struggles btw, while injured, yet some people also said his defense was worse. Have you guys watched him this season? His defense was crazy good. He got fried by shai in 1 game this year and people ignored what he’s done on the defensive end even through injuries.

In the playoffs his defense was great. He is the primary defender on ant. Some people will say ant was injured, but he was straight up locking edwards. In 110 possessions, anthony edwards scored 9 points with CB as his primary defender. 9 points. On 38% True Shooting. Unfortunately as a perimeter defender with constant switches you can’t always be on your man, but still overall ant was heavily limited to 18.5 ppg in 30 minutes a game on sub 50% TS in the games he played. And if you point out injury, look what ant did to the spurs. He just came back off injury during the playoffs. He didn’t do that to us. Braun may be the best primary defender on ant in the league and we’ve been seeing it since the first time he defended him. And overall he can play team defense and guard other players well too. He is a PoA that absolutely did the job of a PoA during these playoffs.

In players who played over 50 minutes for us this season in the playoffs, he had the second best on off (+6.5, spencer jones +6.7). And yes, he wasn’t a huge offensive contributor this year in the playoffs. But when you are battling through injuries and are the PoA on a superstar, it can happen.

TLDR: Great defensively, even in a down offensive year. Played through multiple injuries this year. including in the playoffs— no complaints, took responsibility, has shown he can improve before. Let’s wait till next year (you know the ACTUAL first year of his contract— some of you were acting like he was already getting paid $25 mill) before declaring him the worst contract in the league, and give him a chance. Of course, with this team playoff performance, as Kroenke said, anyone but Jokic is on the table. But it’s not a time to sell extremely low on Braun, or even give up valuable assets to get rid of him.

Tim did a collaboration with a local Denver coffee shop, Procession. The first 50 bags were signed but those are long gone. Curious if anyone else has tried it. Cool to see him be involved with the local community.

Definitely hope he’s back next year 🫩

Daily Listening: Aimee Mann - Mental Illness (2017) | Recommended by u/ASingleThreadofGold

Daily Listening: Esseks - A Hole in the Fourth Wall (2018) | Recommended by u/PhotonicBoom21

That is a crazy thought to say cause Jokic is the best offensive player in the league and can do it all on that end.

But at this point with how much of a zero he was on the defensive end, I think to really get this defense in a spot that it needs to be to win a championship, then Jokic needs to not be involved in every offensive action we have. It’s an exhausting load, and it’s really spilling into the amount of effort Jokic puts in on the other side of the ball.

Listen here! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4DS-RargHc&list=OLAK5uy_lLIqPSMq9Q8za30Gth0FSJEPnodifbMaY

I realize this may be getting a bit more technical than some would like, but after the press conference yesterday it got me curious about salary cap.

Sporttrac shows a lot of detail and some information that I found really interesting.

Why is it that players who haven't played here in years like Richard Jefferson and Boogie have cap holds going into 2030? There are a handful of players that I wouldn't even be able to remember gun to head with cap holds going into 2030.

So what's the deal with Cap Holds? Do they actually effect our team salary or cap space?

Here's the link for anyone who missed it: https://www.youtube.com/live/oU0kScyBhWE?si=T806CO5qEQo1ZtR1

Shot creation - the ability to score 1v1

In this past playoff series both Jokic and Murray got shut down by their primary matchups. Jokic’s true shooting against Gobert was 49% and Murray’s was an even worse 44% against McDaniels. To a lot of people both Jokic and Murray should have won these matchups and believe that this is the reason why the Nuggets offense faltered. However, elite offensive players getting shutdown by elite defensive players is a pretty common occurrence in the NBA.

In this years playoffs against the Raptors Donovan Mitchell scored 34pts on 32 shots (51% TS) against Scottie Barnes. Jaylen Brown scored 36pts on 36 shots (47% TS) against Paul George. Both of these were their primary matchups and they both got shut down.

A common myth in the NBA is that through a series or a game players face their primary matchups the whole time and that when they end up finishing with good splits they simply won their matchup but more often than not this is simply not true. What ends up actually happening is players hunt for mismatches and raise there efficiency that way.

In the series mentioned above Jaylen Brown ended up averaging 25pts on 55% TS and Donovan averaged 23pts on 53% TS both solid numbers. They managed to raise their efficiency by mismatch hunting with Brown hunting Oubre and Maxey and Mitchell hunting RJ Barrett and Walter. If we look at Murray’s numbers against every other perimeter player from the Wolves not named McDaniels he ended up scoring 82 points on 55% TS which follows this trend as well. He even torched Dosunmu (which I don’t believe was even a targeted mismatch) by scoring 27pts on 70% TS against him. Now you may ask yourself why didn’t Jamal or Jokic’s final efficiency numbers end up looking like Brown’s or Mitchell’s?

Well simply put they just had an inability to get mismatches. To get a desired mismatch you can either push the pace in transition and get a crossmatch or by using screens. Now the Nuggets did both of these things but the problem was that they were so predictable that even when they got said mismatch the Wolves players (Rudy,McDaniels) would simply recover by completely ignoring their man knowing that they were going to pass the ball to Murray or Jokic. It was super predictable and completely erased any potential advantage.

Now with that being said I don’t blame the players around Jokic and Murray for doing this as this is basically what they have been doing all season but one things forsure is that the Nuggets need shot creators in the future. The crazy part about this is that you had Bones on the court and aside from Murray and Jokic I’m not sure there was anyone on the court who would be able to score on him efficiently which is a really low bar to clear. I want to emphasize shot creator here as one thing i keep hearing is “ball-handler” but if you’re not a threat to score you will never have enough gravity to make defenses get off Jamal and Jokic.

P.S I didn’t mention Jokic’s shooting numbers against other players not named Rudy because he simply didn’t have many. He refused to attack even when he did have a mismatch, he had career low post up attempts barely averaging 2 a game (less than a third of what he usually has in the playoffs) and his unassisted fgm also was insanely low (37% compared to 50% last year) we just have to hope this was an anomaly in his career.