16 months removed from their NBA championship run, it’s still too soon to say the Denver Nuggets are in panic mode. But as Nuggets swingman Michael Porter Jr. admitted during a chat with Ramona Shelburne, the implications for failure this season will be drastic.
“If we don’t win it this year,” Michael Porter Jr. told ESPN, “we all know they might have to break it up.”
The ascension of Nikola Jokic has made the Nuggets a juggernaut in the West but the team has been in a steady decline since their championship run in 2023. Starting with the loss of Bruce Brown that summer, the Nuggets lost a key piece to their rotation and became too reliant on their younger and unproven role-players to fill in the gaps.
After losing in the second round last season, the Nuggets said goodbye to another key championship piece: sharpshooting guard Kentavious Caldwell-Pope. Without his floor spacing, the Denver Nuggets have struggled to keep up with the competition, leaving Nikola Jokic to shoulder an unfair burden offensively.
The situation is only made worse by the struggles of Jamal Murray, who has seemingly lost a step or two after years of playing elite-level basketball. This season, through 4 games, he’s averaging 18.8 points, 5.0 rebounds, and 4.8 assists per game on a measly 37.9% shooting. His struggles date back to the Olympic Games, over the summer, when his performance led fans to conclude that he must have been playing through an injury.
The situation has also caused some tension between the front office and coaching staff, who are clearly at odds over the state of the roster.
In short, it’s a failure on all fronts for the Nuggets right now and Nikola Jokic (five-year, $276.1 million contract) is the only thing keeping the team together. At 29 years old, the 3x MVP is doing everything he can to keep his team afloat with averages of 31.5 points, 12.3 rebounds, and 9.3 assists per game on 57.3% shooting.
This season, despite a 2-2 start, the Nuggets are facing some serious pressure to make a run or things could turn ugly. With Nikola Jokic in his prime, the urgency to win now has never been higher and they could resort to some extreme methods in order to return to championship form.
With Jokic and Murray locked in for the foreseeable future, it leaves guys like Michael Porter Jr., Aaron Gordon, and Russell Westbrook completely expendable and trading one or all of them is probably the best way for the Nuggets to get better around Jokic.
Either way, there is a sense that this season will be the last of this current Nuggets squad. With so much at stake and the championship window slowly but surely closing, the Nuggets have to respond in some way if this season turns out to be another dud.
And as a young and expensive offensive wing, trading Michael Porter Jr. may be the best route to finding a deal that can get Jokic the help that he deserves. For now, this current unit is doing everything it can to stave off a breakup and there is still hope that they can turn it around.
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