Up For The Fight: How Denver Has Stayed Upright Without Nikola Jokic
And like five other guys
Denver lost Nikola Jokic for weeks. The commentary was that they wouldn’t win a single game.
And the Denver Nuggets shut everyone up. Every national analyst. Every local voice. Everyone. They just went out and busted their asses and went 2-2 without Joker.
It was an incredible performance from everyone. David Adelman. Jamal Murray. Peyton Watson. Jalen Pickett. Zeke Nnaji. Aaron Gordon1. Spencer Jones. Jared Dudley and JJ Barea.
It was proof of how good a place this locker room and roster are in. It’s proof of the reason why you give guys like Jalen Pickett minutes to develop.2 It’s proof of how connected the team is.
It’s also proof that these guys are among the best players in the world and maybe, just maybe, they also have done more than “exist next to Nikola Jokic” to deserve their contracts.
We just quite simply need to credit the professionalism and how good you have to be to even have an NBA roster spot.
SO NOW WHAT?
I had CB and AG coming back later, and I had projected them to only win a little less than one game out of the first four. They won two.3
I had their chances at winning the Celtics game at just 7.7%. They won outright.
I said the goal should be for them to win 5 of 14 games if Joker comes back in exactly 4 weeks, which it sounds like he’s on track for. They’ve already won four after beating the Bucks Sunday night without Jamal Murray on top of CB, Jok, Cam, and JV.
This honestly takes a lot of pressure off, but then the expectation ramps up. “Well you beat the Celtics and Sixers, so you should beat the Hawks and Bucks and Mavericks.” Except the whole point is that the probability of them beating the Sixers (even without everyone) and the Celtics was never 0%.
And those results don’t really change their odds of beating the bad teams, either.
What it does, though, is buys you time against bad results.
They really only need to win one more. Joker is not in a walking boot and has been doing on-court work. I still maintain he will be back either ahead of or right at his expected return date of January 27.
My adjusted Nuggets win probability projections based on updated numbers and CB and AG being back.
Vs. Pelicans: 61.8%
Vs. Mavericks: 58.3%4
Vs. Wizards: 55.5%
Vs. Hornets: 47.1%
Vs. Lakers: 35.9%
Vs. Wizards: 32.5%
Vs. Bucks: 34.2%
Vs. Grizzles: 49.4%
That puts them between 3-5 or 4-4 in this stretch. Now, maybe I’m wrong and these games do actually set a bar for what to expect. Maybe they go 6-2 or 7-1.
But I would expect them to go 4-4 in this stretch, with better home success and at least two mildly infuriating losses.
For instance, I think they are slight dogs to the Hornets, but they can win that game and lose both the Wizards games for the second year in a row. They might drop the Bucks game at home and steal it on the road. (They are 47% on average across the two games, basically a coin flip.)
The best predictor of future success may be past results, but the NBA regular season is more about night to night probability and variance than most will believe. Not every team will have a letdown against the Nuggets without Jokic. But some will.
