This may be just the start for the Denver Nuggets.
The newly crowned NBA champions โ they got there Monday night, beating the Miami Heat 94-89 to end the NBA Finals in five games โ have five starters that are all 30 and under. They have a superstar leading the way, an elite second option, and a slew of really good players who could have bigger roles elsewhere yet chose to be part of something more meaningful.
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All of that could have been said about the Golden State Warriors when they won their first of their four most recent titles in 2015.
Now, itโs the Nuggets who are following a similar โ and proven โ formula.
โYou know, Pat Riley said something many years ago,โ Nuggets coach Michael Malone said after it was all over. โI used to have it up on my board when I was a head coach in Sacramento, and it talked about the evolution in this game and how you go from a nobody to an upstart, and you go from an upstart to a winner and a winner to a contender and a contender to a champion, and the last step is after a champion is to be a dynasty.โ
Even in a championship moment, Malone is already thinking about more. Riley, the Heat president and a nine-time champion as a coach, player and executive, is wired the same way.
It's not crazy to think the Nuggets can do more. For starters, they have Nikola Jokic.
There are other stars who stand out in their own ways โ Philadelphiaโs Joel Embiid replaced Jokic as MVP this year, past MVP Giannis Antetokounmpo of Milwaukee may be the best two-way player in the league, Dallasโ Luka Doncic is surely going to be an MVP before long โ but thereโs no other Jokic, who has gone from second-round pick to triple-double machine.
Itโs time to end all debate about Jokic. Heโs slow, canโt jump and will never wow anyone with athleticism. And none of that matters. Heโs smart, heโs selfless and heโs unstoppable. Period. End of story. The best player in the playoffs, the NBA Finals MVP, and now the big man from Sombor, Serbia is a champion. The days of any Jokic slander being allowed are officially over.
โI think thereโs more to come, actually, from Jok,โ Nuggets guard Jamal Murray said. โI think we havenโt seen a side of Jok that we are going to see where he can be just pure dominance all the way, the whole game, even more than he has been.โ
Hereโs what the other 29 teams should say when they hear that: โYikes.โ
Murray is to Jokic what Dwyane Wade was to LeBron James, what Kobe Bryant was to Shaquille OโNeal (before it became the other way around), what Scottie Pippen was to Michael Jordan. He is Robin next to Batman, a guy who would be a No. 1 option on many other teams yet checked his ego at the door and made it work in Denver.
Murray has sacrificed some stats. Some spotlight, too. The championship ring that heโll be getting this fall, however, will have exactly the same amount of diamonds as the one Jokic will get. It all evens out.
โTo be here just kind of rounds it out and shows that when we are given the right circumstances and everybody healthy, God willing, we can do it,โ Murray said. โI think when weโre playing our best basketball, we are a very hard team to stop.โ
Itโs difficult to argue that point.
To be fair, this wasnโt the toughest path a team ever took to a title. Denver beat two No. 8 seeds โ Minnesota and Miami โ along with a No. 7 seed in the Los Angeles Lakers and a No. 4 seed in Phoenix to win this championship. But it was dominant. The Nuggets never trailed in a series. They went 16-4 in the postseason. They won 10 of their final 11 games. They left no doubt.
Malone was an assistant coach in Golden State just as the Warriors were starting down the path of becoming the NBAโs immovable object. He left two years before Stephen Curryโs first title to take over in Sacramento, getting fired early into Year 2 there. Then Denver hired him, and his first three seasons there resulted in zero playoff appearances. Usually, that gets a guy fired.
The Nuggets kept him. The debt was repaid in full on Monday night. Patience paid off, and so did institutional belief that Malone was the right guy, that Jokic โ the greatest No. 41 pick in NBA draft history โ would become a great, that Denver was building something the right way.
โYou know, itโs not for everybody,โ Malone said. โThis was the best course for us, and itโs allowed us to get here.โ
It very well may allow them to stay there.
Winning isnโt easy and winning a championship is darn near impossible. There have been five different champions in the last five years now. Three of those titlists โ Toronto (2019), the Lakers (2020) and Milwaukee (2021) โ have since fired the coaches who won those championships. Getting to the top is hard. Staying on top is tougher. Malone knows this, and starting this fall, the Nuggets are going to learn it.
But he thinks theyโre also built for whatever comes next.
โWe're not satisfied,โ Malone said. โWe accomplished something this franchise has never done before, but we have a lot of young talented players in that locker room, and I think we just showed through 16 playoff wins what weโre capable of on the biggest stage in the world.โ
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Tim Reynolds is a national basketball writer for The Associated Press. Write to him at treynolds(at)ap.org
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