The Denver Nuggets are the champions of the NBA, and now many will ask what other teams, including the Boston Celtics, can learn from the team whose victory paints every move the team makes, along with all of its players and coaches, in a positive light.
Firstly, Nikola Jokic is one of the greatest players of all time, but he struggled to get there NBA Finals Without the right support staff. His teammates perfectly emphasized his passing skills and mentality and made their championship run look easy – a foregone conclusion.
The timeline, eight seasons culminating in Jokic’s first title at 28, mirrors other legends who waited until around age 30 to break through. It provides hope for Jason Tatum, Jaylen Brown and the Celtics through their difficult playoff exits around their teen years and last season – when they turned 25 and 26. The time to win is now, but the best opportunities may lie ahead.
“I remember Tim[Connelly]calling me,[and saying]‘Hey, we can replace Jamal[Murray]with this guy. (This was) probably three or four years ago—(and he was) a standout player. I said no.’ Like what? “Let’s not rush this,” Denver head coach Michael Malone said last month. “We have a patient ownership group. Let’s take our time and build this the right way. Bigger name isn’t always better. ”
“(Nuggets president) Josh (Kroenke) said to me after losing to Minnesota (in the aforementioned regular season finale in 2018), and Josh was like, ‘Man, I’m so excited for our two young players — Jamal and Nicola just came out in the 82nd game'” . This was the game before play began, and Josh’s reaction was, “Wow, we’ll be really good in a few years.” Just the ownership’s ability to be patient and not overreact (was key). Patience is not something you talk about in the NBA, or professional sports. And I think I, and we, are a perfect example of the results of being patient and saying, ‘You know what? Let’s keep letting this grow and season and mature and then we can see what we really have.”
The Nuggets drafted Murray the same summer the Celtics selected Brown, while Jokic got a four-year head start at Tatum. Their roster formations occurred over relatively the same period – Murray appeared on Portland’s Emmanuel Mudiay and Jusuf Nurkic after playing alongside Jokic for three sweepstakes seasons. Denver found Michael Malone, a new head coach, in 2015 and challenged Minnesota to a playoff game, losing in 2018. Dropping one spot allowed them to pick Michael Porter Jr., enduring the health issues that overshadowed his early great spurts.
The Ascension continued by defeating the Spurs in the first round, then overcame a 3-1 deficit against the Clippers in the Bubble. Traded for Aaron Gordon, they continued to shuffle their roster by giving up Gary Harris Jr. and a future first-round pick. The Nuggets’ starting five emerged, statistically, as dominant in basketball upon Gordon’s arrival, then Murray tore his ACL in the playoffs and sprained Porter Jr.’s back, forcing surgery that cost him 2021-22. The Suns swept Denver in the second round and were defeated by the Warriors the first year after that despite Jokic emerging as back-to-back MVPs.
The emergence of doubt that requires patience. And Malone stressed that Murray needs to continue to make strides throughout the 2023 regular season, praising Murray’s uneven performance in a poor early season loss in Boston for his aggressiveness. They kept Porter Jr. out for an extended period in the fall when an ailment in his left foot did not subside, possibly related to his back surgery, and managed it successfully so he could play 62 games and the playoffs. When they got to that point, armed with improved depth by adding Bruce Brown and Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, they swept the West and the NBA Finals, and are now 2024 candidates for a repeat.
“I remember having a conversation where we said, ‘Listen, we have a special, unique player, and this window is only open for so long,’” Malone recalled. “So while that window is open, we have to do everything we can to surround Nikola Jokic with the pieces that will allow We have to be a championship-caliber team. And even then, there’s no guarantee you’ll get to that point. Things must break your way. Luck always comes into play. So, we talked about how we can increase our volume. We have to get better defensive players. More variety. We talked about watching last year’s NBA Finals (between Boston and Golden State), and how everyone on the floor can shoot the ball and guard multiple positions.”
Boston will follow Denver’s lead and keep the core duo together this summer, According to Jake Fisher of Yahoo Sports, The first step towards bringing the team back like the Nuggets did.
Individual improvement from a relatively smaller roster needs to drive their future success. One of the questions I asked all last season, and never developed a great answer for, was whether the time Boston’s key players spent together provided greater connection, or could lead to stalemate. It was usually based on winning or losing.
“We’ve been doing this for a long time,” said Marcus Smart. CLNS Media/CelticsBlog After the seventh game. “That’s the beauty of it. We’ve got another chance. We’re lucky…we’ve come up short. We’ve got another chance next year and we’ll start, obviously not the way we wanted to, but we’ll start to see what we need to do next year.”
The Nuggets haven’t been completely satisfied though, and beloved players like Will Barton, Monte Morris, and Paul Millsap have come and gone, replaced with better ones. The Celtics will face similar decisions. Denver committed to a luxury tax last year, will likely do so again in 2024, and will pay a lot more if it decides to keep Bruce Brown. The Celtics face a similar decision with Grant Williams, another young player who may have room to grow from a disappointing 2023 performance.
There are major differences, especially in terms of style, that will not allow the Celtics to follow the Nuggets blueprint. First off, Jokic is one of a kind. Perhaps a player like Alperen Şengün will light up in Jokic’s shadow as he develops, but Jokic’s ability to touch every aspect of the game cannot be replicated. That’s why the Browns and Tatum need to grow to allow others to do it for them, especially the team’s guards who led much of Boston’s historic start on offense. We’re always left saying, if the Celtics cut more, if they involved Robert Williams III more, if the stars involved each other in the proceedings. These things must start happening. Less talk.
As I’ve written for years, Brown and Tatum not only don’t communicate well enough individually, but they don’t engage their teammates in the creative ways that Jokic does every night. Jokic and Murray make significantly more assists to each other than the Boston duo, and to teammates like Bruce Brown, all-field shooters and even rookie Christian Braun who pops up for immediate opportunities and even though he finds the ball, his stars make it too. The ball popped. Doc Rivers podcast recently appeared It made me think about why the Celtics don’t do the obvious things to get their attention.
“You know why people don’t cut? Because they don’t think they’re going to get the ball,” Rivers said. “You know why teams don’t work? Because they don’t think they’ll get the ball. The reason Denver is doing all of this is because they know they’re going to get the ball.”
“The way I think you have to play is to win,” he continued. “There’s a lot of giving up the ball, moving the ball around and getting back into the ball… giving up the ball and getting back into the ball is hard. It’s physical. It’s exhausting… getting out of dribbling deliveries, going uphill.”
Brown and Tatum showed enough, when they did these things, to warrant belief in them. To be patient as Denver did, even if parts of the list start to change around them to prime numbers. They’ve really persevered through the eras of Kyrie Irving, Gordon Hayward, and Kemba Walker to get the Celtics competitive again.
The philosophies that drive them to the next level, the championship, must improve. This is where Joe Mazzulla needs to evolve, challenging rather than allowing and applauding Brown and Tatum to take the fastest shot available, not digging deeper and getting out of plays once they develop their four and triple. How much of that plays out the way the Browns and Tatum want, or can even play Boston’s offense?
This is where concerns began that time might not even confirm the Celtics’ fatal flaws. The Nuggets finished the playoffs 5-1 when they hit less than 10, and 4-0 when they shot less than 30% from three, while Boston’s offense faded against Miami once all three were gone.
“There’s a case for fighting for the best shot,” Mazzola said during the Eastern Finals. “At the same time, as the shot clock goes down, the defenses improve, so we’ve been at our best this year creating PvP, creating advantages, creating early shooting opportunities that help us keep pace and gives us the early attacking identity that I think we’re at our best in.”