Nikola Jokic’s shrinking prime — and the disconnect brewing inside the Denver Nuggets as they try to salvage it

THE DENVER NUGGETS’ franchise player sits at his locker after a preseason loss to the Phoenix Suns, alone with his thoughts.

Nikola Jokic’s chronically sore right wrist is wrapped in ice, making it hard to text on his phone. He gave up social media years ago, so there’s nothing to scroll through. And rarest of all, he does not have headphones in. Very little noise will be coming into — or from — the NBA’s three-time most valuable player.

For 10 years, Jokic has sat at this same locker and gone about his business, rarely creating even a hint of drama. He is the kind of low-maintenance, foundational superstar that franchises dream about. He doesn’t subtweet to exert leverage on the front office. He doesn’t authorize whisper campaigns or have others voice frustration over the proverbial “desire to win.” He doesn’t call his co-star, Jamal Murray, a “Black Swan” or a “White Swan” when he’s not aggressive enough.

If he has an opinion on the tension between the Nuggets’ front office and coaching staff on how best to extend his prime, he’s not sharing it. “That’s not my job,” Jokic said during a wide-ranging interview with ESPN. “I’m just trying to play basketball, and I’m happy if we have a chance every year.”

Everyone in Denver knows the stakes for this season. General manager Calvin Booth has said the team is five years into what the Nuggets hope is a 10-year prime for Jokic, who has done nothing so far but average a career-high 31.5 points, 12.3 rebounds and 9.3 assists in 39 minutes through four games.

The Nuggets have an ownership group that has historically avoided paying luxury taxes and a front office hard-capped by the NBA’s restrictive collective bargaining agreement. They’ve lost Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, Bruce Brown, Jeff Green and Reggie Jackson from the 2022-23 championship roster — a role-player talent drain that has strained the relationship between head coach Michael Malone and a front office financially limited in what it can do.

“There was this urge to compete, especially from the players and the coaches and even myself,” Booth told ESPN. “You want to win, especially coming off the heels of winning the championship. And that’s probably where the tension started.

“What are you guys trying to do? Are you trying to win? Are you trying to develop? I think everybody had the best intent going in. There was buy-in. But I think competition and the focus on that can distract you from the buy-in.”

Back inside the locker room, Jokic is quiet. His team had just lost to the Suns, even though Phoenix didn’t play its three stars. His coach publicly called out his team’s conditioning after the game, saying he’d left his stars in the game in the second half so they could work on theirs.

All the questions about the Nuggets’ shooting and depth, and whether the young players the team is counting on to replace key contributors from the team that won a title in 2023 can ultimately do so, remained uncomfortably in the air.

“I think people in general, they always want more and more and more, but they don’t know what they have,” Jokic said. “I’m really happy we have one title — a lot of very good players don’t win.”

But the Nuggets have the best player in the world on their roster — whose prime, by Booth’s own definition, is more than half over.

Which raises perhaps the most important question in the NBA: How do they maximize what’s left of it?

“If we don’t win it this year,” forward Michael Porter Jr. told ESPN. “We all know they might have to break it up.”

BOOTH UNDERSTANDS THE dilemma and doesn’t hesitate to address the issues with how quickly Malone has integrated younger players — a common, but delicate, dance for championship-level teams.

The Golden State Warriors have gone through a similar stretch the past five years as they sought to develop three lottery picks while preserving Stephen Curry’s championship window, their infamous two-timeline approach that has led to considerable internal and external consternation.

“It’s hard,” Booth said. “You’re a coach, you’re trying to win the next game, and you want to see a proven product. I think that’s where conceptually, even though it sounds like a good concept and the coaches bought into it, once you start getting into it and competitive juices going again, you get why [Malone] had a tough time with it sometimes.

“There’s no enemies, there’s no villains in this. We did play very well in the regular season. We played a lot of young guys. We basically did what we set out to do. I think our team is in a good position because we did that.”

When they lost to Minnesota in Game 7 of the Western Conference semifinals last season, after squandering a 20-point second-half lead, the Nuggets became the fifth consecutive defending champion to fail to make it out of the second round of the playoffs.

By the time Denver got to the end of the season, Murray “was basically on one leg,” as one team source put it. Aaron Gordon had a shoulder issue. Jokic’s wrist was killing him. Caldwell-Pope had hamstring issues.

When it came time to close out the Timberwolves, the Nuggets just didn’t have enough left. The veterans ran out of gas, and the young players who were supposed to have the juice to contribute, didn’t.

“It’s a matter of want and effort,” Gordon told ESPN. “Championships aren’t easy to come by, by any means. So we just got to play really f—ing hard.”

There was direct evidence of Malone’s lack of trust in the younger players in that Game 7. Only Christian Braun played meaningful minutes, and he had just 5 points, 3 rebounds and 3 assists. Peyton Watson and Julian Strawther didn’t play.

“I have empathy for Mike there because rookies are actually generally pretty bad in their early NBA time,” a rival general manager told ESPN. “You normally aren’t a playoff positive player until at least your second year, and that’s some of the better picks.”

After the 2023-24 season, the Nuggets’ front office became even more committed to its plan to build around the championship core with the younger players they’d drafted and hoped to develop, but not before at least exploring one other option.

League sources said the Nuggets inquired about Paul George this offseason, but talks never escalated because Denver refused to discuss Braun, Watson or Strawther, and the Clippers weren’t interested in solely taking back future salary — likely the $147 million owed to Porter and Zeke Nnaji.

Nnaji is the Nuggets’ fifth-highest-paid player and perhaps the best example of the disconnect between Booth’s strategy and Malone’s on-court decision-making.

In Nnaji’s rookie season (2020-21), the 6-foot-9, 240-pound power forward shot almost 41% from 3. He shot over 46% from 3 in his second season, after which Booth rewarded him with a four-year, $32 million extension, thinking he’d develop into a key contributor behind Jokic.

After signing him to that deal, however, Nnaji played the fewest minutes per game since his rookie season and shot just 26.5% from 3. He played a total of 14 minutes in the 2024 playoffs. This season he has played in just one of the team’s first four games.

These are the bets that have to work for the long-term strategy to pay off — but the ones hardest to stomach when you’re up against a hard cap and your superstar is ready to win, now.

“I feel like winning the championship is a combination of experience and juice,” Booth said. “A lot of times, the younger guys have the juice.”

That combination first requires the core four players to be great and healthy, and thus far, only Jokic and Gordon have delivered. Porter is shooting 39.6% overall and 29.6% on 3-pointers, and averaging just 13.3 points per game, the lowest of his career as a starter.

Murray’s subpar performance has been even more vexing. The Nuggets have long shown faith in him while he recovered from various injuries or struggled with consistency on the court. He rewarded them during their championship run with the best basketball of his career.

They showed faith in him again this offseason by signing him to a max contract extension worth $208 million, despite a disappointing 2024 playoffs and Olympics with Team Canada.

Denver expected he’d come into camp with something to prove. Instead, he has continued to struggle with his shot and his conditioning, sources said, concerning the Nuggets. In his first four games this season, Murray has shot just 37.9% overall and 35% on 3s.

“The only way they are going to win is if Murray is really good,” a rival executive told ESPN. “Joker is the best player in the world, but they’re going to run him into the ground if he keeps playing this much.”

BOOTH’S OFFICE ON the top floor of Ball Arena is remarkably bare for an executive who has had as much success in his first two seasons as Booth. There are nondescript black leather couches and chairs, and empty walls, with a view of downtown Denver through the large corner office windows. There’s one cabinet filled with books, memorabilia and championship champagne bottles, reminders of what the Nuggets achieved just two years ago.

But the rest of the office is empty, suggesting there’s still much to accomplish. Booth will be the chief architect of whatever comes next as the Nuggets have for months been speaking to him about a contract extension, multiple sources said, and a deal is expected soon.

Booth made his name during that 2022-23 championship season by bringing in eight new players to a roster that had mostly underachieved in the playoffs outside of a run to the conference finals in the bubble in 2020. None of those players were stars, but each played a critical role on the championship team.

Booth, who had been a role player throughout his nine-year NBA career, saw how each of those veteran players — most notably Brown, Green and Caldwell-Pope — would complement the team’s core of Jokic, Porter, Murray and Gordon.

By that point, Jokic had won two MVP awards for his individual brilliance — and his ability to carry the Nuggets while Murray was out because of a serious knee injury — but it was time to surround him with more talent and the right kind of role players. “It’s pressure,” Booth said. “But it’s a healthy pressure. I like challenges. Part of the enjoyable part of the job is problem solving.”

A book in Booth’s office offers a clue as to how he approaches the challenge of roster building around Jokic given the financial realities of the new collective bargaining agreement, which was agreed upon just months after Denver won its first title.

The orange-covered Wall Street Journal best-seller, “Barking Up the Wrong Tree,” takes a scientific and data-driven approach to understand what actually determines success, questioning longstanding beliefs and clichés in a contrarian but ultimately nonconfrontational way.

This is the type of approach Booth took when he assumed the position from his previous boss, Tim Connelly, in summer 2022. He assembled a 34-page report on previous champions, looking for trends or defining characteristics like height, length, age and roster composition.

And it’s the type of approach he has taken in each of the past two offseasons when the Nuggets opted to let the same role players who’d helped them win their first title leave in free agency, in favor of locking up the team’s four core players and opening up minutes for the younger, cost-controlled players the team drafted and hopes to develop in Braun, Watson and Strawther.

“The other part of the Christian and Peyton equation is,” Booth said, “I always saw those two matching up to [Boston Celtics wings] Jayson [Tatum] and Jaylen [Brown].”

He believed, and still believes, those players could contribute to the Nuggets’ next title team.

“I think there’s a misconception that championship teams or Finals teams don’t play young guys,” Booth said. “That is totally off base. In Tony Parker’s rookie year, he played 34 minutes of a game in the playoffs. The next year, the [San Antonio Spurs] won a championship. Tony, Speedy Claxton and Manu [Ginobili] were all in there. In [2009-10], the Lakers played Trevor Ariza and Andrew Bynum, when he was just a baby.”

Braun was not a major contributor in 2023 but did score 15 points on 7-of-8 shooting in Denver’s 109-94 win over the Miami Heat in Game 3 of the Finals. Still, the Nuggets, with an average age of 27 years and 297 days old, were the second-youngest NBA champion since 2000, trailing just the 2008-09 Lakers, who repeated.

The third-youngest team since 2000? The 2014-15 Warriors, the beginning of the dynasty.

MALONE IS WIRED completely differently. He is competitive and combative over everything, even, rather famously, over how a sideline reporter shortened his first name to Mike. He’s also eighth in wins (463) among current head coaches and the fourth-longest-tenured head coach in the league, behind Gregg Popovich (Spurs), Erik Spoelstra (Heat) and Steve Kerr (Warriors) — a quartet that has a combined 12 championships.

Malone, Booth and owner Josh Kroenke did a joint news conference in May to project a united front and tamp down on leaguewide chatter about their frayed relationship.

But Malone’s job is to win games, and he’s not shy about pointing out deficiencies in his team, or his organization, when he sees them.

After the preseason loss to the Suns, Malone called his team out of shape and the rest of the NBA “soft” for being afraid to do conditioning drills in the preseason. Two nights later, after another preseason loss to Oklahoma City, Malone was asked whether Denver was motivated to avenge last season’s second-round loss to the Minnesota Timberwolves.

“I haven’t seen it,” he said.

After two wretched shooting performances to open the regular season, Malone brought up the loss of Caldwell-Pope in his post-game news conference.

“Going into the season, shooting [was] a concern of mine,” Malone said. “You lose a guy like KCP, who was a 40% 3-point shooter, you know what I mean? I thought Christian Braun was great tonight. [But] Christian Braun is not going to be KCP. I think we all have to understand that, which I think we do, and embrace CB for who he is.”

The Nuggets had an opportunity to get something back for Caldwell-Pope, league sources said, by agreeing to a sign-and-trade with the Dallas Mavericks, who offered Tim Hardaway Jr. or Josh Green, but Denver ultimately declined to do it, believing Braun could fill the role.

Dallas moved on to Klay Thompson via a sign-and-trade with the Warriors. Caldwell-Pope ended up signing a three-year, $60 million contract with the Orlando Magic as the Nuggets prioritized signing Murray and Gordon to extensions.

But public comments such as the ones Malone routinely makes, lamenting the loss of skill and experience he must replace, have done little to quell the tension. Additionally, the Nuggets’ uneven start — Denver is 15th in offense, 19th in defense, 23rd in shooting and 28th in bench production — has raised concern even further.

THE ONLY OPINION that truly matters is Jokic’s, and Booth said he seeks it often.

“[He] has earned the respect of check-ins and seeing, ‘What do you think about it?'” Booth said. “There’s a fine line — if there’s somebody that he’s played with for a long time, I wouldn’t put that responsibility on him. … But we try to involve him as much as we can.”

He said, for example, Jokic was a big proponent of signing Russell Westbrook to be the team’s backup point guard. “I think more than anything, [Jokic] loves [Westbrook’s] passion for the game,” Booth said.

But on bigger-picture issues, such as the best way to construct the team around him under the new collective bargaining rules, whether to entrust younger players with bigger roles or sacrifice flexibility and depth to retain veteran free agents, Jokic demurs.

“I’m just here to play basketball,” he said. “I don’t understand contracts, this and that, years and CBA. … That’s not my job.”

What he does have is a strong opinion on how the younger players need to approach the responsibility they’ve been given.

“I think they need to want that from themselves, too,” Jokic said. “I think they need to be the best version of themselves.”

There are many ways to interpret those 20 words.

But Braun, the 6-foot-7 swingman drafted 21st out of Kansas in 2022, might have the best take. “He cares more than anybody, literally more than anybody,” the 6-foot-7 wing out of Kansas said of Jokic. “He’s in here working more than anybody. He’s in the training room more than anybody. He wants to win badly, and that’s who he is.”

In other words, Jokic leads by example. Everyone else had better follow. Jokic’s star turn, and his public comments and attitude, has left some with the impression that basketball is just a job to him. That he’d prefer to be home in Sombor, Serbia, training his horses — delightfully off the grid — and completely disconnected from the NBA world.

Braun has the opposite impression. “He’ll call to check on you, talk to you, talk s— or just have a funny conversation. …I don’t think he disengages with the world. I think he’s working his ass off because he always comes back here and he’s in just as good or better shape every year.”

It’s a quiet effort to stay connected — with the franchise he leads and the young players he knows he needs.

“I don’t like when I’m going to have too much time off,” Jokic said. “Then I get too loose.”

He said he took just a week or so off after leading Serbia to the bronze medal at the Paris Summer Olympics.

If it were any other superstar, the line of questioning would shift to whether this abbreviated rest period reflected a desire to respond to last season’s second-round playoff loss to the Timberwolves.

“It’s easy to be a general after the war,” Jokic said. “They won that battle that night and the series. We had our chances, but we didn’t take it and they won it.

“I don’t really comment and look at other teams. I mean, that’s how I was raised: Be big in victory, be big in defeat. That’s how I’m doing my whole life. It’s not something that I’m trying to do, it’s just in my nature.”

Even if Jokic says he doesn’t look at other teams, or analyze the broader NBA landscape, he understands his own. And his desire to win in Denver is unrelenting.

Whether his franchise has positioned him to do so remains to be seen.