The Numbers Denver Can't Explain Away
Everyone remembers the 10-0 closing run. The West's best record. The dominant point differential. What the box score remembers differently is what happened inside that run—and in the weeks that followed.
Jamal Murray shot 20.0 times per game in Denver's final 10 regular-season games, up from 17.4 in the prior 20. His accuracy fell to 39.5%. Nikola Jokic took nearly two more shots per game than his earlier pace and converted them at 47.7%, down from 54.4%. Both stars, simultaneously, pressed harder and produced less. The wins kept coming anyway—the margins were large enough to absorb the inefficiency. That is the trap. Denver went 10-0 while its two best players were quietly breaking down, and the record made it easy to file the whole thing under "load management" or "coasting toward the playoffs." Then Minnesota arrived, and there was nowhere left to hide.
The clutch record tells the same story from a different angle. Denver finished 16-13 in games decided by five points or fewer—a 55 percent win rate against a 66 percent mark overall. That eleven-point gap between their general excellence and their close-game execution is not a quirk of scheduling or opponent quality. It is a pattern. And patterns that show up in October, November, and March do not disappear when the stakes double in April. The Nuggets won Game 1 against Minnesota and then lost three straight. The late-season data was not a warning sign. It was a preview.
What makes this hard to solve in the offseason is that the problem is not personnel, exactly. Jokic is a three-time MVP who has been one of the most efficient offensive players in NBA history. Murray has delivered playoff performances that belong in the league's postseason lore. The issue is not their talent—it is what happens when the game tightens, the pace slows, and both of them start hunting shots rather than generating them. Volume climbs, efficiency craters, and the offense that looked unstoppable in January becomes predictable and stoppable by May. That is a coaching and system question as much as a roster one, and it is the kind of question that no signing can answer directly.
The front office has spent the offseason addressing what it can touch. Matching the Spencer Jones offer sheet—the fully guaranteed two-year, $12 million deal that Oklahoma City dangled—preserves wing spacing and depth, even at the cost of pushing Denver above the second apron. I wrote last week that the Nuggets solved the wrong problem with that move, and I'll stand on it. Jones is a useful rotation piece, not a solution to the core dysfunction. The center depth situation, which I flagged in July, remains genuinely alarming—Valanciunas is gone to Zalgiris Kaunas, and what he leaves behind is a production void that the current roster has no credible answer for. But even a perfect center acquisition would not address why Jokic and Murray's efficiency synchronized downward at the worst possible time.
My read is that Denver enters 2026-27 with a championship core that has a demonstrated, repeatable flaw in high-leverage execution—and a supporting cast that is thinner than the one that won 55 games. Jokic deferring his extension until 2027 is a signal of commitment, not a solution to anything happening on the floor. The window is real. So is the problem. The Nuggets cannot win a title by going 10-0 against teams they're better than and then reverting to late-clock isolation when it matters. The numbers said so before Minnesota did.