Denver's Perfect Finish Was a Lie the Numbers Were Screaming the Whole Time

Start with the winning streak, because that's where the myth lives. Ten wins to close the regular season, a plus-10.5 point differential over that stretch, a 55-28 final record that looked like a team peaking at exactly the right moment. The vibe in Denver heading into the playoffs was momentum. The number that mattered was something else entirely: 16-13 in games decided by five points or fewer. A 55% win rate in close games against a 66% overall winning percentage—an 11-point gap that doesn't show up in highlight reels but shows up, reliably, when a playoff series tightens and the margin for error shrinks to nothing. Denver didn't lose to Minnesota because they ran out of talent. They lost because the closing ability that a dominant regular season obscures had been quietly absent for months.

I've written twice now about the efficiency collapse that preceded the first-round exit, and the numbers keep pulling me back to the same uncomfortable place. In the final 10 regular-season games—the very stretch being celebrated as a momentum surge—Jamal Murray's field goal percentage fell from 48.4% to 39.5% while his shot attempts climbed from 17.4 to 20.0 per game. More shots, fewer makes, more losses in close games. Nikola Jokic ran a parallel track: shooting percentage down from 54.4% to 47.7% as his volume rose from 17.6 to 19.7 attempts per game. The wins kept coming because the margins were wide enough to absorb the inefficiency. The playoffs don't offer that cushion. Minnesota took it away, and Denver had no answer.

Here is the piece of the collapse that hasn't gotten enough attention, though: Jonas Valanciunas was already cracking before he signed his two-year deal with Zalgiris Kaunas and left for Europe. In that same final 10-game window, his minutes spiked 29% to 22.3 per game—a sign that Denver was leaning on him harder as the rotation tightened—and his shooting accuracy dropped from 61.8% to 51.5%. A 10.3-percentage-point plunge. The backup center was being asked to do more precisely when he was doing it worse. That's not a depth chart. That's a structural fault line running directly under the foundation.

Which brings us to where the roster stands right now, and this is the number that should be stapled to every front-office whiteboard in Denver: the production gap between Jokic and the next center on the depth chart is roughly 50 points of production, with whoever occupies that second slot sitting at approximately 23% of league-median starter output. Valanciunas, flawed as his late-season numbers were, at least provided a recognizable NBA body at the position. He appeared in 74 games, averaged real minutes, and shot 58.2% on the season. That's gone now. What remains at center behind a 75-game Jokic is, functionally, nothing that can be trusted in a playoff rotation.

My read is that this is the most urgent basketball problem in the Western Conference right now, not just for Denver but as a case study in how a dominant regular season can paper over structural fragility. The 10-0 finish didn't fix the clutch-game problem. It didn't fix the efficiency cliff. It didn't fix the center depth. It just delayed the reckoning by four games, and then Minnesota administered it in three straight. The front office has been covering this beat all summer—I've watched the Valanciunas departure land, watched Jokic defer his extension to 2027, watched the wing health questions accumulate with Watson, Gordon, and Trevon Brazile all carrying day-to-day tags as training camp approaches. The core is real. The window is real. But a 55-win record built on wide margins and a soft closing record is not a team ready to win a championship. It's a team that needs to stop believing its own highlight reel and start solving the problems the box score has been flagging since March.