Denver Nuggets Offseason Review: Take A Load Off Jokic

Finding balance after an uneven season.

Photo by Rafael Figueroa on Unsplash

TL;DR DENVER NUGGETS

• Traded Michael Porter Jr. for Cam Johnson and a trade exception, which they then used when they…

• Traded Dario Saric for Jonas Valanciunas

• Signed Bruce Brown (1-year, minimum)

• Signed Tim Hardaway Jr. (1-year, minimum)

• Offered Nikola Jokic maximum extension, declined for a better financial outcome later

• Pending Christian Braun extension

• Pending Peyton Watson extension…?

ADDITIONS

• I wrote about it over at The Dig, but you really have to have covered the Nuggets up close to understand the Cam Johnson upgrade over MPJ.

  • I wrote on MPJ’s departure and what he meant to the team here.

  • Porter really is a special shooter. Whenever the “Should they trade him?” or “Will he get it?” questions came up, and I had real doubts he would, I still always said you can’t trade him because “He’s a 6-10, 50-40-90 shooter.” It was that simple.

  • But in large part due to his injuries, in some part due to his limited usage and touches, and some part due to his skill and who could defend him, Porter’s on-ball game never really flourished.

  • Johnson, on the other hand, has a real floor game. He’s patient. He can pull-up. He can make second-level reads. He doesn’t need the ball to be effective, but can create if given it without just resetting the offense.

  • Porter was valuable because teams had to respect him on the weakside. Johnson will be more valuable because teams will have to respect him at all times.

    • It was commonplace for Porter to have hot starts to games, hitting two threes in the first four minutes. Opponent timeout. Then they would change coverage, conceding that he had made them pay, and would stay home on him. Porter would disappear for long stretches, then.

    • The hope is that Johnson not only can act as a spot-up weapon (60% eFG catch-and-shoot) but create more in handoffs and catch-and-drive situations.

    • Johnson’s not a good pull-up shooter — at least not last season — but he has an in-between game. With Porter it always felt like a bomb was going to go off if he didn’t figure out what to do with the ball immediately. With Johnson, he can drive, probe, etc.

  • The defensive upgrade is obvious, but the bigger part of it in my mind is the cascade.

    • When Porter was out there, you could not effectively hide Murray. When Porter and Murray were out there, it was harder to help Jokic.

      • You need to help your great offensive players most of the time. That’s typical.

      • But the stress of those three meant that there simply was no way for AG (who had a bad defensive year individually before the playoffs) and CB (learning to be the primary No.1 defender and also play more games and minutes than any season in his career) to compensate.

      • It wasn’t that KCP was an elite, all-world defender. It was that KCP and AG were better positioned to cover for the other three, and you could quickly get to lineups with both of them that thrived defensively.

    • To that end, just as Russ was a Bruce replacement last season¹, Johnson acts as a KCP replacement despite not playing the same position or same way. It’s not that Johnson’s elite defensively. It’s that he can more capably cover for both his assignment and others.

    • Communication improvement alone with CB having another year will be a massive upgrade on that end. Porter was always just trying to do his job, which primarily meant getting caught weakside in rotation as low man between dunker and corner while Jokic played at the level of the screen.

• Bruce Brown was genuinely, truly bad in Toronto and New Orleans. He was fine in Indy, but didn’t fit even before the trade for Pascal.

  • This is absolutely one of those “you gotta be there” deals. Bruce just means something to the locker room, the organization, to the fans, to the city. He belongs here. He wears a cowboy hat and boots, for fuck’s sake. He never wanted to be anywhere but Denver, and clearly missed it every moment he was away.

  • Bruce will have bad games, moments, stretches. If he struggles in November, there will be a lot of talk about buyer’s remorse and I’ll have to be on podcasts yelling about how how he’s earned the time to pull out of it.

  • One immediate impact he can have is just what I refer to as “fullback dives” where Brown will get the ball off a rebound or steal, put his head down, and just go coast to coast to apply pressure at the rim. Russ, of course, is great at this, but the difference is that he’s on every team’s scouting report about this and sometimes tries to speed up too much, costing him the layup.

  • Christian-Bruce-Cam-AG lineups are going to be excellent defensively, regardless of who is at the fifth spot. They just all know what the fuck they’re doing and compete.

• The Nuggets have tried counter-solutions to the backup center position. Traditional springy players. Smallball pick and pop threats. But this is the closest they have ever come, with Valanciunas, to being able to replicate Nuggets offense in the second unit.

  • It’s of course not that JV is Jokic as a passer or scorer. But he’s a beast of a man, and so when you run handoff possessions, it’s as hard to get around him over the screen. He can pop a little bit. He can roll for the floater.

  • I’m not sure what to make of the Jokic-JV double-big concepts that Adelman referenced this week. I don’t know what team doesn’t immediately counter-program with a stretch four.

    • Say it’s Houston and Denver deploys Jokic-JV vs. Adams-Sengun. Why doesn’t Ime just immediately pivot to Jabari? But you do take the double big advantage off the board and that matters.

  • JV is a straight up drop big. That’s all he’ll do. So those backup minutes with Murray and/or Strawther will be ripe for point guard picking, but they should still be able to balance it better than they did with DeAndre Jordan (who was only a -3.3 in on-court net rating last year, btw).

• THJ sounds better than he will be. It’ll be a few weeks before grumblings about a cold shooting spell or the defensive numbers spill out. But if you have an injury cluster and you need wings, THJ will get you through those weeks in December or January. Capable redundancy, just in terms of not being unplayable, is undervalued. If he has a great shooting season? All the better.

LOSSES

• If Johnson has a down year shooting, it will hurt to not have Porter. That’s basically it.

  • Porter’s reliability as a shooter was massive, and Cam is a much more human shooter.

• The rebounding side of Porter won’t be missed much. He had the ability to have good rebounding games, but was not a consistently great rebounder. Denver may struggle on that side again, however.

• Russ is Russ. They’ll miss the energy and fire he brought, but they won’t need it with a better team, if he’s not brought back.

• If they don’t keep DJ around, I’m going to miss the hell out of covering him. He was genuinely helpful for the team as a teammate and presence, too.

• I will never stop feeling bad for Dario Saric with what happened to his career after the injury in Phoenix. But getting anything from JV is a massive upgrade and they should get a lot.