general manager and ownership side<\/a> of this that\u2019s perhaps the most impactful of everything.<\/p>\nAfter winning the championship in 2023, Nuggets fans were sold the snake oil of dynasty talk, running back the same team and expecting everything to work out in exactly the same way. It looked great for a while as the Nuggets won 57 games during the 2023-24 season and won their first round playoff series against the Los Angeles Lakers in five games; however, a calf injury to Jamal Murray and flaws in the Nuggets rotation shined through in a seven-game series loss to the Minnesota Timberwolves.<\/p>\n
Rather than add to the roster, the Nuggets subtracted, allowing Kentavious Caldwell-Pope to depart without a fight for a variety of reasons. The most common answer was the belief in Christian Braun. A sneaky answer was the Nuggets\u2019 internal belief that Caldwell-Pope was soon to be on the decline (he did).<\/p>\n
The actual answer was that the Nuggets weren\u2019t going to exceed the second tax apron under any circumstances, an edict laid out by KSE and executed brilliantly by Calvin Booth. It\u2019s one reason why the Nuggets didn\u2019t get anything back for Caldwell-Pope when they had the opportunity in a sign-and-trade with the Dallas Mavericks for Tim Hardaway Jr. when the subject was broached.<\/p>\n
To compensate for the loss of a veteran, the Nuggets ultimately added Russell Westbrook to the roster. Denver was one of the only teams, maybe\u00a0the only team, willing to go after Westbrook and make a commitment to him. He paid that gamble off throughout the season with impressive production, highlight moments, and an impactful first round series against the Los Angeles Clippers. Unfortunately, his series against the Thunder (a much, much better team) was far less impactful.<\/p>\n
Among the Nuggets\u2019 other roster moves outside of signing Westbrook: trading up for and drafting DaRon Holmes II (more about that move later), signing Dario Saric to the taxpayer mid-level exception, re-signing DeAndre Jordan and Vlatko Cancar\u2026and that\u2019s it. That\u2019s what they did. They let Justin Holiday walk and decided to go forward with more or less the same group they had in 2023-24, which was more or less the same group they had in 2022-23. Just a bit worse both times.<\/p>\n
At Media Day in late September, Calvin Booth addressed local media and shared that he believed Denver had \u201cnine real guys\u201d heading into the playoffs, indicating Nikola Jokic, Jamal Murray, Aaron Gordon, Michael Porter Jr., Christian Braun, Russell Westbrook, Peyton Watson, Julian Strawther, and Dario Saric as those players. The six other players, Zeke Nnaji, DeAndre Jordan, Vlatko Cancar, Jalen Pickett, Hunter Tyson, and DaRon Holmes II were not expected to fill a significant role.<\/p>\n
Calvin Booth also stated plainly that the Nuggets would look to address shooting if that became a concern during the season, because even he saw that floor spacing could be a problem for Denver during the season if they didn\u2019t have enough shooters.<\/p>\n
So, what happened? Well, Denver attempted over 100 fewer three-pointers than the next closest team, saw their offensive rating drop against teams that could consistently pack the paint, and never once addressed shooting prior to the trade deadline or on the buyout market. In reality, the Nuggets were more concerned with adding a backup center like Jonas Valanciunas or Larry Nance Jr. instead of improving the shooting capacity of their actual playoff rotation.<\/p>\n
Why were they concerned with backup center? Well, Dario Saric played a grand total of 16 games and 210 minutes during the regular season. He wasn\u2019t a fit for what the Nuggets needed, a horrible miscalculation with Denver\u2019s largest free agency asset. Also, the aforementioned Holmes tore his achilles during the first summer league game back in mid July, DeAndre Jordan was in his 17th season and couldn\u2019t play every night, and Zeke Nnaji inexplicably could not pick up the center position in Denver\u2019s offensive scheme (which honestly isn\u2019t that surprising given that the starter is Nikola Jokic, but still).<\/p>\n
Still, the Nuggets knew they weren\u2019t good enough. They tried to get better on the margins. Booth floated the possibility of first round pick swaps as the sweetener for a trade to take on Nnaji, Saric, or both in a deal. It was a pittance of an offer. If only the Nuggets had a second round pick or two that they could part with.<\/p>\n
The Nuggets own zero second round picks. Why? Because Booth spent three picks to eradicate Reggie Jackson\u2019s contract from the salary books, all $5 million of it, prior to Westbrook\u2019s arrival. They also spent another three second round picks to trade up for Holmes, who of course played zero minutes this season (again, not his fault). The Nuggets utilized six second round picks for zero minutes during the 2024-25 season, an inexplicable failure of asset management for a Nuggets team as asset poor as it already was due to Booth\u2019s previous inexplicable moves to trade into the draft using future draft capital.<\/p>\n
So, the Nuggets didn\u2019t make any midseason moves at all. Part of the reason why no bigger moves were made stemmed from ownership though. There were opportunities to shake up the core of the team (mostly Michael Porter Jr.) in preseason and midseason trades, but Josh Kroenke decided against exploring those moves with any seriousness. He believed, rightly or wrongly, that the Nuggets core was still championship caliber and deserved to stay together for at least this season. Based on the way these playoffs went, he wasn\u2019t that far off.<\/p>\n
However, the difference in Denver\u2019s core in 2023 vs 2025 is their ability to make up for spots 9 to 15 giving so little. Back in 2023, the Nuggets needed eight guys to get the job done. In 2025, they needed more, particularly because those eight guys were simply more volatile than in seasons past. Jokic, Murray, and Gordon were similar versions of themselves, but Porter injured his shoulder, Braun was new and shot poorly, Westbrook was volatile, and both Watson and Strawther were likewise. Denver needed more depth this season to make up for the erratic nature of this group. Instead, they had less depth overall.<\/p>\n
As a result, the Nuggets failed. Are we having this conversation if the Nuggets succeed? Perhaps, but probably not so vociferously. Every team makes bad moves, even those that are successful. Teams are never perfect in their management of assets, salaries, and roster moves. It\u2019s simply a matter of how damaging certain moves are and how much an elite superstar or two can mitigate the losses.<\/p>\n
But for a team that has Nikola Jokic, a team with the self-proclaimed steward of the Nikola Jokic era, you cannot make\u00a0that many mistakes and expect to win anyway. The Nuggets appeared okay with the errors, right up until they weren\u2019t and fired the head coach and general manager on the same day.<\/p>\n
Now, the next person to take up the \u201csteward\u201d mantle will be doing so at a massive disadvantage. The Nuggets have zero picks in the 2025 NBA Draft. They have one \u201ctradeable\u201d first round pick in 2031 along with pick swaps. They could wait until after the draft and use the 2032 pick instead, but they can\u2019t trade both due to the Stepien rule.<\/p>\n
The Nuggets are also into the first tax apron, meaning they must send out more salary in trades than they can receive. Given that Zeke Nnaji is Denver\u2019s fifth largest contract, it should be expected that if the Nuggets are making an actually meaningful trade, it will involve one or more starters due to the salary cap rules.<\/p>\n
Finally, the \u201cvalue\u201d on various players isn\u2019t exactly high. Nnaji\u2019s contract value is negative, and it wouldn\u2019t surprise me if Porter (9.1 points per game on 34% from three-point range) was seen as a significantly negative value contract too. If the Nuggets wanted to get crazy and trade Jamal Murray, they wouldn\u2019t be getting back a valuable All-Star for return either, more likely a collection of solid role players. Is that what the Nuggets really want in the even they broke up this version of the team? I don\u2019t know.<\/p>\n
This year was a failure in many ways. The Nuggets acquitted themselves well after the firings or Malone and Booth, but they still ended up in the exact same place they were. Not every team can win a championship, but the Nuggets are one of the few teams in the NBA that should experience actual disappointment about not winning one. Any time you have Nikola Jokic on your roster, the best player in the world, it\u2019s a disappointment to not win a championship.<\/p>\n
The path that takes the Nuggets closer to winning a championship in the near future? That\u2019s the one they must consider walking, even if it gets uncomfortable rather quickly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There are lots of directions to cast blame for the Denver Nuggets losing in the second round of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":58597,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3781],"tags":[5339,7,301,187,3943,6,302],"class_list":{"0":"post-58596","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-denver-nuggets","8":"tag-2024-25-nba-season","9":"tag-basketball","10":"tag-denver","11":"tag-denver-nuggets","12":"tag-denvernuggets","13":"tag-nba","14":"tag-nuggets"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/114577283727471973","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58596","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58596"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58596\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58597"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58596"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58596"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58596"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}