Jokic Played 34.5 Minutes a Night Last Season. The Number Behind That Number Is Denver's Real Crisis.

Start with the depth chart percentage, because that's where the emergency lives. Nikola Jokic accounted for 88% of Denver's center production last season. Jonas Valanciunas accounted for 12%. Those two figures sum to 100%, which means that as of this week, the Nuggets' center position is functionally one player deep. Valanciunas signed his two-year deal with Zalgiris Kaunas on July 15th, and what left with him wasn't just a backup — it was the only number standing between Jokic and zero.

I've written twice now about the efficiency collapse that defined Denver's late-season arc, and both times the Valanciunas subplot was lurking in the margins. Here it deserves the main stage. In the final 10 games of the regular season, his minutes jumped 29% — from 17.3 per game to 22.3 — as the coaching staff leaned harder on him to absorb load from a fatiguing core. The result was predictable in retrospect: his field goal percentage dropped from 61.8% to 51.5%, a 10.3-point collapse that mirrored what was happening simultaneously to Jokic and Murray. The backup center was being asked to do more precisely when he had the least left to give. That's not a Valanciunas indictment — that's a roster construction problem that the front office is now staring at without its only available solution.

The production gap left behind is not subtle. The depth analysis puts it at 49 production units between Jokic and the next center option, with that backup registering at roughly 30% of league-median starter output. And that was with Valanciunas still on the roster. Now the drop is from 88% of center production to whatever an unproven replacement can offer. Jokic averaged 34.5 minutes per game across 75 appearances last season — already a significant workload for a player who functions as Denver's primary scorer, rebounder, and playmaker simultaneously. The question the numbers force is this: what happens to those 34.5 minutes when there is genuinely no one behind him? They don't shrink. They grow.

That's the mechanism that should frighten Denver's front office. Jokic's efficiency fell from 56.2% for the season to 47.7% in the final stretch, as his shot attempts climbed from 17.6 to 19.7 per game. The pattern is clear — when the workload spikes, the production quality degrades, and it degrades at the worst possible moment. A thinner center rotation heading into 2026-27 doesn't just risk Jokic's health; it structurally guarantees the same fatigue curve that derailed the playoff run against Minnesota. You cannot ask one player to carry 88% of a position's production through an 82-game season and then expect peak performance in a series where every defensive adjustment is designed specifically to wear him down.

My read is that this is the single most urgent roster decision Denver faces before training camp — more urgent, even, than the guard depth gap, which at least has Christian Braun and Tim Hardaway Jr. providing some functional floor. At center, the floor right now is the concrete below the floor. The front office has no grounded options I can point to from the news corpus, which means the urgency is real and the solution remains publicly unresolved. What I can say is that Jokic deferred his extension until summer 2027, which signals commitment but also signals that the evaluation period is live. A franchise center who watched a first-round exit and then watched his only backup board a flight to Vilnius is paying attention to how this offseason unfolds. The 55-win regular season bought credibility. The Minnesota collapse spent it. Finding a backup center isn't a depth move — it's the price of keeping the window open.