Denver's Efficiency Collapse Started Before the Playoffs—That's the Number That Should Haunt This Offseason
The narrative coming out of Denver's first-round exit to Minnesota is built around the series itself: a promising Game 1 win, then three straight losses, a gut-punch finish to a 55-win season. That narrative is not wrong, but it is late. The warning was already written in the regular-season box scores, and it is worth reading carefully before the front office convinces itself this was simply a bad playoff draw.
Start with Jamal Murray. For the bulk of the season he shot 47.3% from the field across 85 games—a legitimate co-star line. But in the final 10 regular-season games, his shot attempts climbed to 20.0 per game, up 2.6 from his prior 20-game average of 17.4, and his accuracy fell to 39.5% from 48.4%. That is an 8.9-percentage-point efficiency drop on higher volume. The two numbers are supposed to move together or at least hold steady; instead they diverged sharply in the exact window when Denver needed its second star to be at his sharpest. More shots, worse results. That divergence did not fix itself when the playoffs started.
Nikola Jokic ran a parallel track. His season-long 56.2% shooting is the kind of number that makes you forget efficiency can erode at all, but in those same final 10 games his field-goal percentage fell to 47.7% from 54.4% as his volume rose to 19.7 attempts per game from 17.6. A 6.7-point efficiency drop for a player who operates at that level is not a rounding error—it is a signal that fatigue and defensive game-planning were already extracting a cost before Minnesota ever ran a single set against him. The best player in basketball was being worn down in April, and the Nuggets were leaning into him harder anyway.
The role-player layer confirms the pattern rather than complicating it. Jonas Valanciunas—now departed for Zalgiris Kaunas on a two-year deal, ending a 14-season NBA run—saw his shot attempts jump to 9.9 per game from 6.8 in the prior 20, while his accuracy collapsed from 61.8% to 51.5%. His minutes surged 29% in that same window. Denver was asking its backup center to carry more offensive load at the precise moment his efficiency cratered. The team was compensating for star fatigue by distributing the strain downward, and that strategy failed at every level of the rotation simultaneously.
The clutch-game record ties it together. Denver finished 16-13 in games decided by five points or fewer—a 55% win rate against their 66% overall clip. That 11-percentage-point gap is not noise; it is a structural tendency. Teams that cannot close tight regular-season games tend not to close tight playoff games, and Minnesota made sure every game after Game 1 was tight. The Nuggets' late-season efficiency collapse and their clutch-game fragility were not separate problems. They were the same problem wearing different clothes: this team's margin for error shrinks under pressure, and the pressure arrived right on schedule.
My read is that the offseason conversation should start here, not with the series loss. The first-round exit was the outcome; the efficiency collapse was the cause, and it predates Game 2 by weeks. Valanciunas's departure leaves center depth at a genuinely alarming level—the production gap between Jokic and the next available option is enormous, and that backup was already showing cracks before he left for Lithuania. Addressing that void matters. But even a healthy backup center does not solve the question of whether Murray and Jokic can sustain their regular-season efficiency when games tighten in April and May. That question lived in the numbers all spring. Denver's front office would be wise to stop treating it as a playoff anomaly and start treating it as the recurring theme it has become.