Denver was having a disappointing year when three games away from the end of the regular season, they decided to fire their coach Mike Malone and promote David Adelman into the head coach role. The timing was bizarre for being so late in the season, but the truth is that the Nuggets improved their play with the new leadership as they won their last three regular season games before going into a playoffs series against the Clippers, one of the hottest teams in the league at the time.
In a thrilling seven games series, Denver won the decisive G7 and then also pushed OKC to an unexpected Game 7 in the following round. However, Denver was pretty banged up and with a short rotation, they lacked the energy to compete with the Thunder in that final game and lost it by 32 points.
Nikola Jokic enjoyed another incredible season by becoming the first player in NBA history to finish in the top 3 in all points, rebounds and assists. It was expected that the Nuggets would be one of the best offensive teams in the league and indeed that happened (top 5 offense for the third season in a row).
However, it was on the defensive end where the Nuggets disappointed during the regular season. They were a subpar defensive unit by being just ranked #21 and that’s not good enough for a legit title contender. The Nuggets couldn’t protect the rim and after being a top defensive team at defending the 3pts line the previous year, they regressed and slipped to being just #22 on 3pts% allowed to their opponents.
Finally, as expected, the Nuggets completely collapsed everytime Jokic wasn’t on court.
With Jokic: +11.5 Net | Without Jokic: -9.8 Net.
For this new season, David Adelman was confirmed as the team’s head coach through 2027. In order to help him, Denver’s front office tried to improve the team’s depth during the offseason and I think they did a good job.
They traded Michael Porter Jr to Brooklyn for Cam Johnson, who will be earning half of Porter’s salary. That helped the team’s cap salary situation but on the court, there won’t be much difference as Cam Johnson has been one of the best perimeter shooters in the league. Jokic will finally have a legit backup who can hold the position for some minutes in Jonas Valanciunas. They also signed Bruce Brown and Tim Hardaway Jr in order to improve their flexibility on the perimeter. They also expect both Christian Braun and Peyton Watson to keep improving their play and suddenly, the Nuggets seem to finally have some nice depth in the roster.
OKC’s ceiling might be just too high for the current Nuggets, but this team really has the potential to be the main threat to dethrone OKC in the Western conference.