It’s about to turn into silly (stupid?) season for NBA fans. It’s when proposed roster moves – some silly, and some downright ludicrous – start popping up all over the place. Right now, any idea, no matter how implausible, can be thrown out for debate.
For starters, it’s no secret the Denver Nuggets are currently trapped in salary-cap hell. As things stand, even if they wanted to, they couldn’t just “run it back” next season with the same deeper, more talented (and often injured) roster that was constructed at this time one year ago. They’re going to be forced to make one or two major moves that somehow, some way, reduce their overall salary obligation for next season and still keep them competitive.
So you want to be an NBA general manager?
Nikola Jokic is likely to sign a enormous (and well-deserved) max contract extension that will eat up even more of Denver’s cap space, so he’s not going anywhere. Everyone else? Available for trade.
Jamal Murray is set to make more than $50 million next season. Aaron Gordon makes just under $32 million, and Cam Johnson is set to earn $22.5 million in the final year of his current contract. It’s unlikely that all three of these highly impactful players will be Nuggets next season. Will two of them remain? Only one, maybe? Toss in the impending Peyton Watson free-agency decision, and this roster could look a lot different next fall.
The Nuggets will be forced to downsize, the only question is how much. But the real question is what can they do to rebuild and remake the team around ‘Joker’ to make it better, not just cheaper.
There isn’t a ‘minor’ move that will improve this basketball team.
There are a lot of inexpensive options out there. The Nuggets need an outside shooter, especially if they’re forced to move on from Murray. They could try to go cheaper, perhaps signing someone like Quentin Grimes from Philadelphia or Bennedict Mathurin from the Clippers, but would that make them better? Of course not. Would the Lakers let Austin Reaves get away? Probably not, but wherever he lands he’s going to cost upward of $35 million per season… at least.
Could this summer be the time for the Denver Nuggets to literally go big or go home? As in really big?
Let’s just throw this out there: What about the notion of former two-time MVP Giannis Antetokounmpo joining the Denver Nuggets via some sort of sign-and-trade arrangement?
Ludicrous? Perhaps. But maybe not. Does Giannis have anything left in the tank? It’s been a minute since he was a dominant player in the league. The big question is whether or not the former two-time MVP could resurrect his game playing alongside three-time MVP Jokic. Could he share the ball – and could he withstand the rigors of playing a full season with half the games at high altitude?
For his part, Jokic is not a stranger to the “two bigs” system. It’s played plenty on his Serbian national team. It’s also employed often by division rivals Oklahoma City and Minnesota with great success. Yes, the league is becoming more and more three-point centric, but it still takes a powerful inside presence at both ends to become a champion. Like Jokic, Antetokounmpo isn’t necessarily known for his defense, but he is 6’11”, which helps in a division that still has 7’5” Victor Wembanyama in it.
The 31-year-old Antetokounmpo is set to make more than $58 million next season, meaning the Nuggets would have to trade Murray for sure, and probably Johnson, too – and they’d be still hard pressed to re-sign Watson.
If they kept Gordon under this circumstance, they’d possess a formidable front court – and have all sorts of questions in the backcourt.
See the dilemma?
There are very few scenarios where Denver can be stronger up front and stronger in the backcourt that don’t involve tremendous improvement from current Nuggets players like Christian Braun. Aside from that, there’s simply no easy solution to what the Nuggets need to get done over the summer. While a Jokic-Giannis pairing sounds fascinating, in reality, it might make winning more difficult in the long run.
Someone in the Nuggets front office needs to come up with something that isn’t so… silly.
