The precise and fleeting calculations behind winning a championship are easy for even the most impatient fan to grasp. Creating a roster with impact and depth, ingenuity and balance, skill and experience, all ribboned with that mysterious thread of chemistry. It’s a season-long preparation of staying competitive, avoiding injuries, then adapting and adjusting throughout the playoffs so the group that enters the Finals has metamorphosed into a juggernaut that would worry the one that started the whole journey, back in October.
What gets appreciated less than the teams that take titles are the unique little groupings inside them — the duos, trios, sometimes an entire bench. Not for lack of awareness, but for how fleeting and rare these exceptional orbits have come to be in basketball. Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen, probably the best and longest example at 13 seasons together, were part of an NBA no less competitive, but way less volatile in the velocity with which total team overhauls happened. The speed at which the competitive landscape of the current-day NBA changes puts a countdown on pairings. Whether because of the whims of antsy front offices, or star athletes hoping to scope new situations where they’ll be better compensated in wins, money, notoriety or all of the above, it’s rare we get to see the best of pairings last.
Jamal Murray and Nikola Jokic have kept a good thing going for eight seasons, and now have a title to show for it. It helps — and is a rarity in itself — that the team that drafted them had no qualms about playing a patient game, developing the two and retaining the same head coach so that all three would come to share the same shorthand.
“We did it the right way. Not just basketball wise, but being willing to grow and learn with some guys, and develop a great relationship off the court with my teammates, the guys that I go to war with out there,” Murray tells Dime on a call after practice, sounds of the gym still echoing in the background. “Even some of the coaching staff. It was really bigger than basketball with our group.”
Another rarity, and probably one of the reasons why the core of the Nuggets has stayed intact for so long, is that the basketball Denver plays isn’t methodical. On the floor, the Nuggets are fluid. Jokic can shape-shift from passing savant to unstoppable scorer to cruel and unshakeable spectre on the glass, Murray from taut, arrow sharp snipes to smoothly slipping defenders to take lolling shots in no rush at all.
“I’ve had the pleasure of playing with Joker — coming off the bench together in our rookie days — so we’ve aways had the connection and the chance to grow and build on it,” Murray recalls, listing off names of former teammates. “I’m backing Jameer Nelson and Gary Harris, and [Jokic’s] backing up Jusuf Nurkic. To go from that, to winning a championship seven years later, is pretty cool. And speaks a lot about our group and the guys that we have.”
Around the two, their roster — largely intact through the last handful of seasons — reacts with the same fluency. There’s a storied language, it’s why so many teams wind up looking as confused as they do facing Denver. Like the game, up in that altitude, has lost something in translation.
It isn’t as if other franchises haven’t tried to slow the unrelenting beat of the NBA’s seasonal churn down. The Warriors are the best example, hardwired to rely on their star core until the wheels come off. Miami credits its factory-esque system to mold and polish athletes otherwise considered castoffs. And the Raptors — whether out of stubborn belief or necessity — continue to run it back post-chip. Murray sees this too, but acknowledges there’s just “something special” in Denver.
“You know, talking about the Spurs, Golden State, the teams that have won a chip before,” he notes, “A lot of teams in the league have great players, a lot of guys in the league play well together or have gone far, gone deep, but only a few have been able to go all the way and keep the same team going into the next year.”
It’d be naive to think longevity like the Nuggets have would be possible without being protected, to some degree, by their GMs. Before Tim Connelly left Denver to take the same job in Minnesota, he was regularly cited with running trades by his stars, as he did with Jokic when adding Aaron Gordon to the roster. Connelly was also frankly open about how trades, in general, didn’t sit right and were “kind of gross” to him. Murray echoed a similar sentiment when discussing how much of a rarity it is to keep a team intact.
“We’ve had guys we’re not going to trade just to do it, just for business purposes,” Murrays says. “These guys do a good job of communicating what’s happening or what they’re thinking. I just like how they treat us like human beings that have families and lives and houses and mortgages and all that stuff, you know? It’s nice to get an update every once in a while about work.”
And while the reason current GM, Calvin Booth, gave recently for trading Bones Hyland came across blunt, there’s a frank protectiveness in what he said. Not necessarily seeing a fit or growth potential for a second-year athlete like Hyland in the balance of the current group, who was, in Booth’s words, a “me guy”, he moved him. This is the other side of what support can look like from a front office that has recognized something rare when they see it.
The rarer sight, whether you’re accustomed to watching Denver or not, is the mismatched nucleus at the team’s core. Keeping Murray and Jokic intact at this point mostly looks like giving the two space and stability to orbit around each other. A phenomena just as much of a treat to witness on the floor as off of it.
There’s a photo Murray has on his sparse Instagram grid of him and Jokic together, captured on film. The snapshot, slightly out of focus with light leaks streaked across the top of the frame, is as candid in composition as their poses. Jokic has one giant arm flung around Murray’s shoulders, pulling him tight to his side. Murray flashes a peace sign with the hand not pinned to Jokic. Both grin, glowing against the dark background. Murray shared it last September, just before his return season and what would be the Nuggets title run. Retrospectively, it seems the perfect encapsulation for what’s about to happen for the two, but more than that there’s an intuitive level of comfort that comes across in the snap.
“Well first off, I have that picture framed in my house right now,” Murray chuckles, asked about the photo and how it represents the two of them. “But I would say we just have each other’s back, is the best way to put it. We know we’re not going to play great, we’re going to have bad days off the court which can lead to a tough day on the court — or vice versa. If I see he’s off to a slow start or doesn’t have it going, or he’s being well defended, it kind of shoves,” he pauses to clarify, “not shoves, guides the load on me — and vice versa. If I’m struggling to make shots, or he sees me coming out super aggressive, then he kind of plays off that. It’s a feel.”
“I could have 10 points and we win, or Jo could have four points, four assists and we win — no problem,” Murray says simply. “We got the job done.”
Even if a group, or pair of people manage to stick together through the league’s seasonal spin cycles, relationships change. Especially working ones. One person might want to be the leader or the standout, someone’s growth trajectory could plateau while the other continues to climb. It’s why Murray says his and Jokic’s is flexible on the floor, filling in the gaps for each other depending on the needs of that night versus their own overall goals — though those are pretty much aligned: win another title.
Still, asked if this season is about title defense, and Murray demurs.
“With that mindset comes a lot more though, you know? When we bring it in and we say, ‘back-to-back on three,’ it’s just a mindset. We don’t want to be sloppy, we want to come out sharp and aggressive, we want to come out mindful that teams are going to play that much harder,” he says. “We have to set more short-term goals for ourselves this year to keep us consistently locked in throughout, and not just wait around or shrug a loss off in the middle of the season.”
As much as the Nuggets roster has remained intact through its starting core, Murray points out the young athletes who’ve joined will need to be caught up across the board in order to get into what he refers to as the “rhythm” of the team, in intent and expectation. He knows there’ll be growing pains in that as much as starting a new season with a theoretically clean slate but the feeling of having just won it all still fresh.
“It’s going to be more of a nuisance this year to stay on top of each other,” Murray says. “Last year it was like, we ain’t won it yet, this guy’s getting mad at me, we need to do this to win a championship — yeah I know. But now it’s like, okay, we went all the way, we do this again, we know that they’re going to come back ten-fold, you know what I’m saying? So we have to be ready for the other counter, for a counter on top of a counter.”
Against a Western Conference with jostling contenders and a volatile East, the Nuggets being a comparatively steady, business-as-usual team will serve them well. The fastest way to get any young player or new addition up to speed is by integration — minutes and touches. Trading off who gets them on any given night trickles down to the wider roster from their stars’ altruistic understanding.
“You need your teammates. I can’t get assists without my teammates shooting — and making it. I can’t get assists without them being in the right spots, or running for me, playing for me, or playing for us, playing to win,” Murray stresses. ”Those little things matter and I think that’s what makes our group special. We’re all trying to get a task done and it’s going to be somebody else’s night, every other night.”
That democratic approach extends to his off court partnerships, like the contest to win a custom leather jacket Murray designed with KFC and Starry. In homage to his number, 27 of the jackets as well as autographed pin sets will be available for fans to win via a livestream on the shopping platform NTWRK on October 26. Murray felt the merch should be as accessible for people as the meal that bears his name at the restaurant chain.
The Nuggets tip off the NBA’s season next week against the Lakers in a rematch of the Western Conference Finals. Despite being deftly swept (it was Denver’s first playoff series sweep in franchise history), there’s been persistent bluster from the Lakers when it comes to the Nuggets. It hasn’t fazed Jokic or Murray much. The former spent his summer unwinding at home in Serbia, happily close to his horses again, and the latter made a point of resting, sitting out Canada’s World Cup appearance to do it.
“You play such a long season, all this preparation and you go all the way, and you get tired,” Murray says of the tough decision. “All of a sudden our training camp is a month away, and I’m sitting at Team Canada training camp like, this is my training camp before training camp.”
Murray wanted to be sure his body would be right for the NBA season and felt he hadn’t gotten as much rest as he knew he needed. “Especially mental rest,” he notes. “I just needed to take a trip and go somewhere and take in some water, put my focus somewhere else, so that it’s not all basketball all year round.”
He did, and says it helped him come back with the renewed mentality that he likes to start seasons with, looking forward to practices every morning instead of seeing them as part of the grind, starting back up. Which is crucial when you realize it’s this lightness that infuses what Denver does. It’s in their camaraderie, their clarity, their flowing style of play. It’s in their intensity, the agility of it and the ease they can shut down a team with their fast, fluid communication.
“I think we just have a lot of belief in each other. I don’t know what the outside noise is, or what they think of us, but I just know we have a lot of belief in what we can do. When we want to turn it on, either together or individually, it’s tough to stop us,” Murray says. When they play that way, he notes, his voice lifting with the lightest hint of a smile, “we’re a pretty good basketball team.”