A surprising Nuggets run ended with a fatal flaw exposed. Fixing it might be tricky

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OKLAHOMA CITY — The handshakes and hugs among the Denver Nuggets rolled through a silent locker room one by one Sunday evening, as a group pushed to the brink so many times this season acknowledged that an almost improbable playoff run was finished. In the coming weeks and months, Denver as an organization will look to tackle a pivotal offseason. The Nuggets need to hire a head coach. They need to settle on a general manager. They need to figure out what has to happen to get an NBA championship-level core to another NBA championship.

But, at some point, the lack of depth, the lack of able bodies, was going to catch up to this Nikola Jokić and Jamal Murray-led group. It was almost a certainty. You simply can’t keep playing six or seven guys 40 or more minutes a night and expect a healthy roster. And as Sunday afternoon’s 125-93 Game 7 loss to the Oklahoma City Thunder at Paycom Center unfolded on national television, we all saw how starved for depth these Nuggets have been.

For sure, Denver deserves a significant amount of credit for making it to a Game 7 of the second round. And in many respects, the feeling in the organization after exiting the postseason in a second-round Game 7 is a lot more of a positive one than last year’s home-court flameout against the Minnesota Timberwolves. Last year, the fair question was whether the Jokić and Murray core had reached the end of its rope. If anything was proved this postseason, it’s that the Jokic and Murray core has life left, and maybe a lot of it. And Aaron Gordon’s postseason proved that he can play playoff basketball at nearly a star level.

But, as team sources told The Athletic on Sunday afternoon, the landscape of the NBA has changed around the core of the Nuggets. When Jokić and Murray were ascending and chasing what would become that 2023 NBA championship, they were chasing top-heavy teams — superteams. The year 2025 has bred a new NBA, that’s revealed itself in the playoffs. You need great players. But you also need depth. Oklahoma City proved that in this series, and in a Game 7 where it overwhelmed the Nuggets by consistently running guys at Jokić and Murray. The Indiana Pacers are proving that in the Eastern Conference. The Nuggets showed that on the other end of the spectrum, literally limping to the finished line of their season, via Gordon’s strained hamstring.

“We definitely need to figure out a way to get more depth,” Jokić said. “It seems like the teams that have longer rotations, the longer benches, are the ones winning. You look at Indiana and OKC and Minnesota, and they have been great examples of that.”

Indeed, of the four teams who are still alive, only the New York Knicks boast a relatively shallow rotation. And even the Knicks, with Mitchell Robinson and Miles McBride, have two stalwarts coming off their bench. The other three teams still alive go at least nine deep, which is quite the change from yesteryear, when it used to be generally accepted that rotations shorten in the postseason and teams rely heavily on their star players.

Denver’s braintrust saw this up close during a series the Nuggets had multiple chances to take control of, but simply couldn’t, because they wore out down the stretch of games too many times. The good news? The Nuggets clearly still have a championship core. Jokić was sensational during the postseason, and registered two 40-point games in this series. Murray proved that he’s still a playoff riser, someone who is above average in a regular-season setting then plays at a star level when it matters the most. Gordon, before he strained his hamstring in the waning moments of Thursday night’s Game 6, was playing some of the best all-around basketball of his career.

The challenge that Denver executives see looming is how to continue to build around those three. As soon as the Thunder forced the Nuggets to dip into their bench, that’s when OKC forged a major advantage, and that was true for every game outside of Game 6, when Julian Strawther came off the bench and scored the most unexpected 15 points of his career. To further the challenge, the Nuggets have to figure out how to get more depth on their roster, largely without the means to do so. The Nuggets don’t have a pick in the 2025 NBA Draft. They are staring the CBA’s restrictive second apron square in the eye, so there is very little financial flexibility. They don’t have trade pieces who have a ton of value, which means scouring the trade market is going to be difficult.

Denver knows what it has to do, but also that its challenge is easier said than done. But, somehow, the Nuggets are going to have to accomplish it.

“I 100-percent believe that we can win a second NBA championship,” Murray said. “I have confidence in everyone in that locker room. We just came up short tonight. We just have to get back into the gym and get back to it next year.”

Denver’s first order of business in the front office? Figuring out who is going to lead said front office, after firing general manager Calvin Booth in early April. League sources told The Athletic the Nuggets haven’t moved forward in their search for a new GM. The expectation is that interim general manager Ben Tenzer has a chance to win the job full-time. As The Athletic has previously reported, the choice to fire head coach Michael Malone late in the regular season was tied, in small part, to the fact that interim head coach David Adelman’s contract was set to expire after the season. Team president Josh Kroenke wanted a chance to see him in the head-coaching spot. By all indications, Adelman is in a strong position to win the job full-time.

“I love DA (Adelman),” Gordon said. “I hope he’s here next season. I hope he’s our coach. I hope he gets an entire training camp, and I hope he gets an entire offseason.”

Did David Adelman show enough to get the interim tag removed from his head-coaching title? (Photo by Matthew Stockman/Getty Images)

But what would that look like? How can the Nuggets actually improve their roster with such limited means to do so? Russell Westbrook, so good in Denver’s first-round win over the LA Clippers and so destructive to the Nuggets in the second-round loss to Oklahoma City, has a player option for next season. On Sunday, he flippantly told reporters that he didn’t know whether he would pick up the option, before heading out of the locker room.

Westbrook was equal parts exhilarating and frustrating in Denver’s playoff run. The Nuggets probably don’t defeat the Clippers in the first round without Westbrook. They probably have a better chance to defeat the Thunder if he wasn’t on the floor as much as he was in the second round. He became unplayable against Oklahoma City. But the issue is, the Nuggets had no choice but to play him.

That connudrum tells the story of how little depth Denver truly had by Sunday afternoon. By the time Game 7 rolled around, the Nuggets were subbing Westbrook into games and simply hoping for the best. In the meantime, the Thunder were coming off the bench with Cason Wallace and Alex Caruso and Aaron Wiggins, and those three were changing games.

Heading into the offseason with that in mind, the logical choice for Denver is to revisit trading Michael Porter Jr. When healthy, MPJ is one of the best shooters in the league, and one of the only wing shooters in the league with real size (6-foot-10). He gutted out a sprained left shoulder in this playoff run that he wouldn’t have played on in the regular season. He is a very good starter-level player, but he is probably expendable if the Nuggets want to make changes to their rotation.

While it’s true that the 26-year-old had a strong year, the prospect of him being involved in a trade at the February deadline was very much in play. To cite one scenario, The Athletic previously reported that the Nuggets gave serious consideration to trading for Zach LaVine, then of the Chicago Bulls. But that’s where the uncertainty of the front office comes into play. There isn’t any tangible way to know what’s coming in the offseason, because the decision-maker isn’t yet in place.

What the Denver higher-ups are most heartened by is that the Nuggets’ core rediscovered a joy for playing with one another. Their run after the firings of Booth and Malone was truly impressive. It was less than two months ago, but it feels like a lot more time has passed. But remember the place this Denver team was in. The Nuggets were playing listless basketball. They looked like they were frankly checked out on their season. They were staring at a possible play-in tournament berth, after being in the upper crust of the Western Conference for much of the season. And then, with the house cleaning, they looked like a completely different team.

“The thing I was most proud of was the Sacramento Kings game,” Adelman said, speaking of the first game after Malone and Booth were fired. “That was an absolutely must-win game, and the guys went in there and got it done.”

Denver went from one of the worst defensive teams in the league to playing its best defense of the year. The Nuggets went from a team that didn’t display a bunch of mental toughness, to winning a Game 4 on the road against the Clippers to revive their first-round series. Denver went from going through the motions, to an entire bench surrounding and chest-bumping Strawther after his second-round Game 6 heroics at Ball Arena.

The Nuggets will lament some things in this series loss to Oklahoma City. They had a chance to take control by winning either Game 4 or Game 5, and had fourth-quarter leads in both, and found a way to lose both. There were times where they looked like the better team. And there were times they looked like a team capable of climbing the mountain yet again.

But they didn’t get it done. And the pressure for this Denver team is to find a way to maximize the remaining prime of the career of Jokić. And that, in and of itself, is a gargantuan task.

“We didn’t win it,” Jokić said. “If we could have, we would have. I don’t believe in the if stuff. We had an opportunity to win a championship this year, and we didn’t win it.”

(Photo: Joshua Gateley/Getty Images)

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