INDIANAPOLIS — Jamal Murray’s ankle is fine.

He couldn’t play through the pain 48 hours earlier. Not effectively, anyway. He tried at first, but his struggles were contagious. “I think he felt like he was hurting us more than he was helping us,” coach David Adelman reflected on Wednesday night. But the absence of Murray proved just as painful during a fourth-quarter scoring drought and eventual loss to Dallas.

With the benefit of those 48 hours, Murray looked springier than ever.

Enough to unretire his signature celebration.

Listed as questionable on Denver’s injury report with a right ankle sprain, Murray suited up and ignited for his fifth career 50-point game (including two in the playoffs) in a 135-120 win over the Pacers.

“I didn’t realize he had as many points as he did, to be honest,” Adelman said. “We were going to him a lot. But yeah, you can tell when he gets in a certain rhythm, the way the ball comes off his hand, the way he releases his legs, it just has that feeling.”

When Murray became the eighth player in the NBA and the third Nugget this season to score 50 with an off-the-dribble 3-pointer, he fired the Blue Arrow, his go-to move dating back to college.

The arrow hadn’t left the quiver in at least a year, maybe more. He’s teased it from time to time. But he usually pulls it back and restrains himself, as if to keep the audience wanting more.

The occasion was right on a wintery night in the Midwest. No more cliffhangers.

“A little kid wanted it,” he said. “So I gave it to him.”

He finished with 52, the second-highest scoring total of his career. His 10 threes were a career-high. He made 19 of 25 total shots, including 10 in a row at one point — “one of the most efficient 50-point games of all time,” Adelman went out on a limb and guessed.

In lieu of hyping himself up too much, Murray joined a FaceTime call with a group of old friends from back home while he took postgame questions from reporters. They did the heavy lifting for him.

“Fifty-two, fam, what are you doing? What is going on?”

“You’re the best, brother. Best to ever do it.”

“And barely any free throws?”

Four, to be exact.

“That’s been my whole career,” Murray said.

“He was really good,” Nikola Jokic marveled. “He had amazing energy. He was aggressive, getting into the shot and shooting the ball. He was really impressive.”

Despite their home swoon, the Nuggets (15-6) have strangely won a franchise record eight consecutive road games. They’ve won their annual trip to Indiana seven straight years.

It helps when the Pacers are missing their MVP. Tyrese Haliburton is out for the season after suffering a devastating Achilles injury in Game 7 of the NBA Finals last June. Without his play-making and his grit, the 2025-26 Pacers (4-18) haven’t resembled anything close to their former selves, and Gainbridge Fieldhouse didn’t look or sound anything like an arena that hosted Finals games this year.

The Nuggets sucked what little energy there was in the first place out of the building with a monstrous second-quarter run, erupting into halftime with a 72-48 lead. They eventually reached 100 points before the fourth quarter for the eighth time this season, more than any other team in the NBA.

But the Nuggets also have made a habit of playing with their food after building comfortable leads. Indiana started the fourth quarter on a 19-9 run, trimming down a 23-point deficit before Adelman brought Jokic back into the game. This night left a mark more than most. He spent most of the game with three fresh scratches across his right arm, as if by a grizzly bear.

Murray’s heater could not be stopped, though. The second-quarter run was too definitive — 32-9 in the last eight minutes of the first half, 22-3 in the last five, punctuated by a 10-for-11 shooting surge as a team.

Murray had already established a hypnotic rhythm by slithering into comfortable pockets in the midrange. When he started uncorking 3s toward the end of the run, Denver hammered the nail into Indiana’s coffin. He made three of them in the last 1:54 of the half, finishing with a step-back 29-footer and some spirited trash talk before the buzzer.

“I felt pretty good, honestly,” he said of his ankle. “You do a lot of treatment going into the game, and today, I felt good. Felt good. Maybe a little sore at the end of the first quarter, but it wasn’t nothing I couldn’t manage.”