Strike 3: For any team in any professional sports to win a championship, a whole lot of things have to break just right – including things that are totally out of that team’s control.
It certainly worked that way for the Denver Nuggets when they won the NBA title in the spring of 2023. They stayed relatively healthy as a team. The rest of the NBA’s Western Conference was down a tick. Aging teams like the Golden State Warriors and the Los Angeles Lakers were on the downside. The rebuilt-on-the-fly Phoenix Suns couldn’t make everything mesh. Up and coming teams like the Minnesota Timberwolves and the Oklahoma City Thunder weren’t quite ready. Denver was able to coast to the best record in the conference, resting players for the postseason in the process.
Their window was wide open, and the Nuggets high stepped right through it. To top things off, the best team in the east, Boston, got KO’d in the Eastern Conference playoffs, handing Denver home court in the NBA Finals.
It was the perfect title-winning storm. (These same kinds of things happened for the world champion Boston Celtics this past season.)
As a new season dawns and training camp opens, the Nuggets are focused on everything they can control, like blending in newcomers Russell Westbrook and Dario Saric. But if you’re looking for good news outside the Nuggets bubble, something that isn’t on Michael Malone’s to-do list, there is something that has already broken their way. Strictly for salary cap reasons (something the Nuggets have also been wrestling with internally) one of their chief nemesis in the west has already gotten a bad break.
Those pesky T-Wolves, the group that ousted Denver in the second round of last spring’s playoffs, were more or less forced to trade All-Star big man Karl Anthony-Towns to New York, getting forward Julius Randle in return. It was pretty much a salary dump for the T-Wolves, who like Denver, are up against new salary cap restrictions that didn’t exist when they decided to pay really big money to three of their best players. With superstar Anthony Edwards now eating up the lion’s share of the team’s payroll, something had to give in the twin cities. That something/someone happened to be one of the big factors why Minnesota was able to outlast the Nuggets in that grueling seven game series last spring.
The T-Wolves didn’t get better, they were forced to get cheaper. That’s good news for Denver.
Meanwhile, the Nuggets went all-in on their roster core, giving Jamal Murray a new four-year, $208 million deal of his own. If he can stay healthy, it should be a great deal for Denver. If Westbrook can step up and take some of the burden off Murray minutes-wise and boost the offensively challenged bench unit, then his signing will be a big benefit too. And as far as backup big men go, Saric is probably as good a fit style-wise as anyone Denver could have found to play behind their three-time MVP Nikola Jokic.
Certainly Minnesota can’t be counted out just yet. They still have Edwards, fresh off winning a gold medal in the Olympics, and Sixth Man-of-the-Year Naz Reid gives them an edge of the bench. Growing OKC will be formidable again, and Dallas is the defending Western Conference champs.
Denver has plenty of things to work on that are within their control. Nice to have something break their way that isn’t.
