Nikola Jokic will gladly leave any speculation about the Nuggets’ championship capability to the media.

The three-time MVP center has never been reluctant to share his honest outlook on Denver’s successes and failures. He even went as far as to suggest the Nuggets needed pay cuts to incentivize them to play better at one point last season. But when the topic turns to what they can achieve — a much more popular talking point locally and nationally — Jokic is stubbornly set to “we’ll see” mode.

That’s not a sign of him withholding his opinion, though. He explained why on Friday, after another game that amplified the league-wide confusion about what exactly this Nuggets team is.

“First of all, we still have eight, seven more games. Who knows what’s gonna happen in those seven games?” Jokic said after a 135-129 win over the tanking Utah Jazz. “What seed, who we’re gonna play, matchup, this and that. Then that team who we’re gonna play, maybe someone’s gonna get injured. Maybe something’s gonna happen. Maybe they’re gonna have a bad stretch. Maybe we’re gonna have an extremely good stretch. I think it’s really hard to say, ‘Oh yeah, we’re gonna have amazing playoffs,’ because you cannot know what’s gonna happen or how the team’s gonna feel basically in (one) month.”

It was a long-winded answer by Jokic’s standards, and he grew more animated as he spoke, as if to emphasize how little Denver’s 75th game of the regular season will actually matter during a playoff series against Minnesota or San Antonio or Oklahoma City. He was candid in his assessment of that 75th game, saying that “we didn’t play any defense,” but he refused to make any conclusions based on that statement.

Or based on the fact that Denver (47-28) had overcome that absence of defense to win its fifth consecutive game, extending the team’s longest streak in more than three months.

So is it Jokic’s philosophy, then, that regular-season performance isn’t predictive of the playoffs at all?

“I think this season, we lost some games that we shouldn’t lose and we won some games we should win. So I think it’s hard to predict, hard to say,” he said. “I think it’s hard say. Like when we won a championship, we lost the last three games in the season, or four. And we won the championship. And then we can maybe (win) five in a row and lose in the first round (this year). Maybe we can lose next seven games and then play in the Play-In game. You do not know. And I don’t like to look in the future like that. It’s just not how I am. That’s now how I work.”

March and April were indeed awkward in 2023, even if Jokic was slightly off on the specifics. The Nuggets entered the playoffs having lost three of their last four games and five of their last seven. Then they went 16-4 en route to their first NBA title in franchise history.

This season has been particularly confounding, as Jokic himself pointed out this week regarding his individual play. The Nuggets stayed above water for a month without him. They fell in the standings immediately after they got him back. They’ve shown signs of a juggernaut when healthy, yet they rejected almost every opportunity to flex their potential Friday. It started as their game with the full rotation available since Nov. 12. It turned out to be the second time in March that they narrowly avoided losing to Utah.

This time, they had to overcome 84 Jazz points in the paint and a 10-point deficit with 5:29 left. Utah, an organization hellbent on losing, benched leading scorer Kyle Filipowski (25 points) for the last 18 minutes of the game.

Plenty of fuel for one of the most unanswerable questions going around the NBA: Are the Nuggets a sleeping giant on the verge of waking up at the right time, or a defensive pushover undeserving of championship contender status?

“Obviously, we’re very talented offensively,” coach David Adelman said. “Can always make a run, get back in games. But we shouldn’t have to work our way into every game. You have to come with more purpose to start the game.”

“We know what we’re capable of. … I know how great Jok is,” Jamal Murray said this week. “I know how good of a shooter Tim (Hardaway Jr.) is. I know how selfless and patient (Aaron Gordon) is. I know how much of a team player and leader (Christian Braun) is. I can go down the line. But this is what we have in the locker room. There’s no reason for us not to believe. So, of course, we’re confident. Even if we have a bad game or a bad loss, we just find a way to pick it up and get back to what we do. And not let the outside noise affect us.”

Jokic’s confidence, though, will remain defiantly measured.

Can the Nuggets pull off another magical playoff run?

Maybe. Just don’t ask their best player.

“We didn’t have time to play all together,” he stressed. “Some guys are still getting back. Some guys are still (on) minutes restrictions. Some guys are struggling. Some guys are playing well. We need to just try to get as best (as) possible heading into that stretch.”

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