How the Nuggets discovered Nikola Jokic and set Denver afire
T he decision-makers inside the Denver Nuggets’ front office used to play a parlor game concerning franchise pillar Nikola Jokic.
Had the Nuggets not chosen Jokic with the No. 41 selection in the 2014 draft, a prescient pick that laid the foundation for this season’s surprising success, how high, they wondered, would he have gone a year later after a breakthrough season overseas?
By then, the rest of the NBA would have discovered what the Nuggets already knew: That Jokic, though he does not look the part, has a preternatural gift for the game.
No one could have predicted that Jokic, the team’s first all-star in eight years, would spawn a hoops renaissance in Denver.
The Nuggets are the hottest sports ticket in town, with 18 sellouts this season, four more than all of last season. The raucous environment has made Denver dominant at the Pepsi Center; the Nuggets’ 23-4 home record is tied for the best in the NBA. And TV viewership on Altitude has soared by 93 percent, according to data provided by the NBA, the top growth for any market.
“You can feel it and hear it, man,” veteran forward Paul Millsap said of the budding ex-
“The spirit of basketball in this town has really evolved. It’s up to us to get out there and keep performing for them.” Veteran forward Paul Millsap
citement at the Pepsi Center. “It’s a big difference. The spirit of basketball in this town has really evolved. It’s up to us to get out there and keep performing for them.”
Come April, the Nuggets, currently second in the Western Conference standings, will return to the playoffs for the first time since the 2012-13 season. They have been building toward this moment for years.
The root of the team’s revival can be traced to April 2014, when the Nuggets tracked Jokic, a 7-foot center from Serbia, at the Nike Hoops Summit in Portland, Ore. The annual showcase of prospects routinely brings out dozens of NBA power brokers, and it was there, inside the Trail Blazers’ practice facility, that Jokic proved he could compete against Nbacaliber talent.
While most team executives saw Jokic as a lanky, unsculpted big man and were put off by his lack of classic athleticism, the Nuggets looked beyond aesthetics. They saw a crafty scorer with a shooter’s touch, a center who could handle the ball like a guard.
The only hurdle was ensuring that he was still available when the draft arrived in late June. Ten days before the draft, Jokic’s agent declared that he was pulling his client’s name out of the pool.
The Nuggets asked the agent to reconsider, and guaranteed they would select his client with the No. 41 pick, according to two league sources.
He did, and the Nuggets found their second-round diamond.
The logical question, nearly five years later, is how did so many teams miss on Jokic?
“It’s such an inexact science,” Nuggets president of basketball operations Tim Connelly said of the NBA draft. “Nikola, up to that point, his professional numbers (in Europe) had not been something that would jump off the page, and certainly the body type is one that it’s easy to have questions about.”
Future Houston Rockets firstround pick Clint Capela, a bouncy 6-foot-10 forward from Switzerland, was on the international roster with Jokic in Portland and remembered the week well. Capela was a raw yet highly touted prospect whom Jokic picked apart with his clinical footwork and deft touch around the rim.
“He’s never been (athletic),” Capela joked. “From playing in Europe, he was kind of doing everything already. I remember he hit a couple 3s in a row, a great post-up player. … A lot of players from Europe always figure out a way to play smart and efficient. This is how we play.”
Trey Lyles, one of four future Nuggets on the international roster at the Summit, got spared embarrassment.
“Yeah, (Jokic) was going at everybody,” Lyles said. “I was on his team, luckily, so I got to watch it.”
But Lyles, whom the Nuggets eventually traded for on draft night in 2017, remembers Jokic’s performances vividly.
“Nobody knew who he was,” Lyles said. “I think it was the second day of practice. He just totally went off and was killing everybody.”
After being drafted, Jokic spent the next year tearing up the Adriatic League en route to league MVP honors before starting his Nuggets career in 2015, the same year Michael Malone took over as Denver’s coach.
“The year after we drafted him was the first time we kind of saw glimmers of a guy that potentially could be a showpiece guy,” Connelly said.
At last, it appeared, the Nuggets had a building block.
The Nuggets were a rudderless franchise lacking an identity when Malone arrived. Malone, having been groomed as an assistant on some of the best benches in the NBA before an unceremonious departure as head coach with Sacramento, brought a detail-oriented toughness to his job.
But he didn’t have much talent to work with. If Jokic’s ascension overseas offered potential, then Gary Harris’ debut raised alarm bells.
Harris looked lost during his rookie season in 2014-15 and struggled mightily with his shot. But the Nuggets liked Harris’ intangibles and thought they could mold him into a useful guard.
“He has kind of been emblematic of everything we want to be,” Connelly said. “Draft a good player and a great guy, let him play through mistakes, kind of find his legs in the NBA, and now we’re reaping the rewards.”
In 2016, Malone found a kindred spirit in Jamal Murray, the team’s fearless No. 7 overall pick. But if you query those pulling the triggers inside Denver’s front office, they’d tell you how fortunate they were to get Murray, a precocious point guard out of Kentucky.
“If you’d have asked us on draft lottery night, we’d have laughed you out of the room,” Connelly said.
The moment Murray, adorned in a black tuxedo with an accompanying bow tie, reached NBA commissioner Adam Silver to embrace on stage that draft night, the Nuggets had secured their core young players: Jokic, Harris and Murray.
“The best thing that we’ve done is that we haven’t mortgaged our future,” Malone said. “We’ve kept hold of all of our young assets. … I love the fact that from ownership to the front office to the coaching staff, we realize that Jamal, Nikola, Gary, guys like that, are the future of this team.
“You see a lot of examples of teams that mortgage young assets for a vet for a win-now mind-set, and in the end, they don’t have a whole lot to show for it. We’re building this from within, internally, growing with our players.”
Outside of the Jokic pick, their incremental growth — the Nuggets have improved their total wins each year under Malone — was less serendipitous than one might think. Shrewd decisionmaking by the front office has created a deep roster of young talent that should allow the Nuggets to contend for years to come.
“We thought the best way for a market like ours to be a sustainable, achieving, high-level team was through internal development, to draft, develop and identify the type of guy that’s really going to buy into the same big picture we have,” Connelly said.
The next step for this new iteration of the Nuggets is a postseason berth, which seems like a certainty, and then a long postseason run, which hasn’t happened since 2008-09, when Denver made it to the Western Conference finals.
With boisterous crowds rooting them on at the Pepsi Center, attaining home-court advantage in the playoffs is very much in play. So is some end-of-season NBA honors, perhaps, for Malone, Connelly or even Jokic.
But individual performances aren’t what have fueled this team. Though Jokic is the Nuggets’ best player and leader, the roster has an egoless ambition to take the next step as a franchise — all because the Nuggets saw potential when no one else did.
“You have to along the way stop and appreciate what we’ve done,” Malone said prior to a game last week. “Before the game, the national anthem and the crowd, I was just thinking to myself, from Year 1 to now, what we’ve built, from the ground up, that’s special. We’ve got a special group of players that have committed to becoming the best team we can be.”