The slopes in Denver are getting quite slippery.
Now a full season removed from their 2023 NBA Championship, the Denver Nuggets find themselves searching for answers. They have progressively lost key pieces from that title team; Bruce Brown went to Indiana in 2024 and now they will be without Reggie Jackson or Kentavious Caldwell-Pope in 2025. A gut-wrenching game-seven loss to Minnesota last season has left a sour taste in the mouths of Nuggets fans and they enter the new year with lots of questions. Nikola Jokic is still (arguably) the best player alive, and he will have to be the answer to most of those if Denver has any chance of putting together a deep playoff run.
Denver Nuggets (Over/Under 51.5 Wins)
Key Adds – Russell Westbrook, Dario Saric
Key Losses – Reggie Jackson, Kentavious Caldwell-Pope
After Bruce Brown signed with Indiana last season, the Nuggets took a big gamble that their young guys would fill the role that Brown played. Christian Braun was the prime candidate, as he showed signs of life in the 2023 playoffs. Unfortunately, Braun did not take the leap many expected and Denver had one of the worst benches in the league because of it. They still have not addressed that role, and with the departure of Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, there is now a hole in their starting lineup that needs to be addressed as well.
The guys that they have kept are not without flaws, either. Jamal Murray has had the worst six-month stretch of basketball in maybe his whole life, culminating in a bench role for the Canadian national team. Aaron Gordon is not getting any younger and dipped in efficiency last year from his 2023 campaign. Denver’s only centers on their full-time roster are Nikola Jokic and DeAndre Jordan, who just turned 36. Their personnel management over the last two seasons has been questionable, at best.
Denver’s biggest question is whether they will get anything from their bench unit. Nikola Jokic will still dominate when he is on the floor but when he isn’t the Nuggets will struggle. They will look to Russell Westbrook to man their second team and hope that the young players they have (Peyton Watson, Christian Bruan, Julian Strawther) give them something when Jokic is not on the floor. Denver has slowly gotten worse over the last two off-seasons and next season their play will suffer because of it. Their only hope would be to play Nikola Jokic 48 minutes a night and because that is not feasible, they will win significantly fewer games than they did in 2024.