Time's Up: Denver Has Survived But It's Time To Dominate
Why the Nuggets can still win the title
It’s been difficult to find stopping points to write on the Nuggets because their condition changes every 45 seconds this season with injuries.
I’ve been working on a full breakdown of exactly how the Thunder have stymied Nikola Jokic, the challenges against that team, and what that matchup looks like down the road.
For now, some thoughts on where Denver is at and what the rest of the season looks like.
THE 40-20 FAILURE
Longtime followers will know how often I talk about the 40-20 rule.1 For the uninitiated, 91% of all NBA champions have won 40 games before losing 20.
The four exceptions are the 1995 Rockets2, the 2004 Pistons3, the 2006 Heat, and the 2021 Milwaukee Bucks4.
The Nuggets lost game 20 last Monday to the Cleveland Cavaliers in collapsing fashion.
This a glass-half-full-glass-half-empty scenario.
On the half-full side, it is rare for a team to have as many injuries as Denver has had and be the level of team they are. There are teams that have had more injuries5, and teams that have had more injuries to key players, and great teams that hat have had injuries, but not teams in the Venn middle of all three, that I can recall.
The Nuggets can hit their stride in March, return to form, finish with a top-3 seed, and win the title. They’re good enough… at full strength.
The half-empty side is that you can’t assume no team has ever been in this position. There have probably been teams I can’t remember who were great and would have been good enough to hit 40-20 but were injured… and didn’t win the title anyway.
After all, it’s not “if you hit 40-20, you win the title,” it’s that if you don’t hit it, you are very unlikely to based on all of NBA history.6 There will be at least two other 40-20 teams in the West playoffs and only one team will make the Finals.
A comparison I had hope for when AG first was injured was the 2011 Mavericks. They lost Caron Butler for the season early in the year, then, after a great start, Dirk Nowitzki went down for a few months. But guess what? That team still hit 40-20.
As a fan, you should believe in the team anyway. They’re a championship-level team, fully healthy. The 40-20 failure, though, does reflect the theory that this just “isn’t their year” though. Let’s talk about that.
