Jazz-Related Reflections As NBA Season Concludes

The Nuggets win the 2022-23 championship. (David Zalubowski via sltrib.com)

There’s a certain kinship among fanbases in non-glamor markets, so watching a pair of understated, homegrown superstars from Denver make it all the way to the NBA’s mountaintop has to be somewhat endearing to Utah Jazz fans.

Sure, those are division rivals celebrating across the Rocky Mountains, but the story of the 2022-23 NBA champion Denver Nuggets has to be a bit encouraging to Colorado’s western neighbors. After the buzzer of the Game 5 win, Finals MVP Nikola Jokic quietly made the rounds to every member of the runner-up Heat, then soft clapped on the sideline, then demurred in his postgame interview about how the club’s first NBA title feels good because “now we can go home.” He’s an atypical superstar, on and off the court.

Jamal Murray seemed to balance the stoic Jokic, weeping on the dais as he reflected on the road back from a tough injury. But he hardly fits the megastar mold himself; he’s never appeared in a single All-Star game despite being the undisputed second best guy on the newest title team.

In fact, outside of Jokic, the entire Nuggets roster boasts a combined ONE All-Star appearance. Uno. And that one belongs to DeAndre Jordan, who played all of three minutes in the Finals.

Here are some Jazz-tinted thoughts now that the Nuggets are champs — about the Nuggets, the playoffs in general, and what Jazz fans can draw from the last eight weeks of basketball.

Homegrown

For teams outside the glamor markets — like the Jazz — a championship is always going to be a lot more likely to come the way Denver did it: by hitching their wagon to the right candidates for in-house development.

Denver’s two best were drafted by the franchise and grew into building blocks. A third Nugget draftee, Michael Porter Jr., is a project in process, and Christian Braun appears ahead of schedule.

The rest of the playoff rotation was formed by nailing their moves for complementary guys. The acquisitions of Aaron Gordon and Kentavious Caldwell-Pope were pretty gutsy. Both trades cost the Nuggets starter-level talent, and the Gordon trade also required a first-round pick. Bruce Brown was an exception signing, and Jeff Green was signed off the minimum-contract bargain heap. Those eight are the only Nuggets who saw double-digit minute averages in the postseason.

Some people think the Nuggets are the argument against tanking because Jokic was drafted late, but that kind of misses the point. He might have been the 41st pick, but Denver absolutely positioned themselves for this title run through a protracted stretch of non-competitive basketball. Their losing season in 2013-14 set up the Jokic pick also gave them a lottery pick they’d use to trade back to get Harris, a player that was later central to the Gordon deal. The next year they were bad again and got Emmanuel Mudiay in the mid lottery. Jokic finally debuted the following year, but that 33-win campaign lined them up to draft Murray with the seventh pick in 2016. And because they were focused on development over results in 2016-17, they started to realize what they had in Jokic and Murray.

That’s what a rebuild is: teams take the foot off the gas, take multiple draft shots, see which guys pan out, and then ultimately start building once a star core announces itself. So yes, Denver very much rebuilt their way to the current title core, even if Jokic was famously drafted while ESPN was busy selling Quesaritos.

But even if you don’t consider the 2022-23 Nuggets to be the outcome of the most direct form of “tanking,” the point here is that the Denver front office went and found their cornerstones, let things congeal, and then made the right moves around the margins.

That’s likely how the Jazz will have to do it. And they’ll likely need a healthy dose of the other thing Denver needed to make this work: patience.

Patience

In one of the “Sounds of the Game” clips ABC served up after the Finals-ending Game 5 win, you can hear Murray telling Nuggets governor Stan Kroenke thanks for sticking with him through injuries and postseason disappointments. “Y’all could have gone a different route, I appreciate you staying with me. We got it done.”

In reality, the Nuggets’ brass deserve credit for continuing to reimagine how to build on the Jokic-Murray tandem. The duo first played together in 2016-17, but it wasn’t until the following season that both were made full-time starters. From there, they really tried three distinct supporting casts before finding one that broke through:

• Harris, Paul Millsap, Will Barton and Wilson Chandler first flanked the pair.
• Monte Morris and Jerami Grant eventually joined Harris and Butler on the wings, with a little Malik Beasley and Torrey Craig sprinkled in.
• Eventually they’d overhaul that entire group and the top minute-getters after the stars this season were KCP, Gordon, MPJ and Brown — all relatively new arrivals.

It probably took some serious gumption to keep trying different spokes around the Murray-Jokic hub. Or, as former Jazz center Rudy Gobert put it on Monday night, they “failed over and over in the previous years, didn’t quit on their guys.”

That’s not to reignite the debate over whether the Jazz should have tried one more construction around their All-Stars before moving on from Gobert and Donovan Mitchell. This particular writer was actually a proponent of such a “remix” almost exactly a year ago, but then was swayed by constant chatter indicating that the Gobert-Mitchell relationship had run its course. That Murray and Jokic seem to genuinely like each other gave the Nuggets a little more leeway to keep tinkering.

But it’s worth remembering with future constructions that sometimes it takes a few tries to get the right pieces in place around your studs.

82 still matters

After all of the “does the regular season even still matter?” stuff from early in the playoffs, the title was ultimately claimed by a No. 1 seed that was second in 538’s preseason championship odds.

There was a period in the second round when every single seed was still active in one conference or the other. That was fun. The mayhem continued with 7th-seeded Los Angeles making the Western Conference Finals and the 8th-seeded Heat making it into June. But in the end, the regular season actually a pretty decent predictor of the end result.

Even the Heat were fifth in 538’s preseason title odds, so let’s not ret-con this season into being one where nothing made sense in the end.

There were surprises, of course, but most of those have explanations. Milwaukee’s flameout can be blamed on injuries and a bad playoff matchup. The Clippers were once again derailed by bad health. Brooklyn blew up their volatile star pairing. The Lakers’ surge to the final four can can be explained by midseason roster changes. It wasn’t that their new arrivals transformed their season, but moving on from Russell Westbrook gave them some clarity about who they were and created more runway for Austin Reaves.

The number of underseeds advancing speaks the general level of parity in the league right now, but was anyone actually surprised that, say, the reigning champion Warriors beat the playoff virgin Kings? Or that the Grizzlies fell to an all-time great amidst all their drama?

Stuff happens. But in the end, the team holding up a trophy is one of the ones that took the 82-game grind very seriously.

Here we go again

The main takeaway for the Jazz after Monday night: everybody’s back to 0-0 now.

The draft is next week. New rules will kick in on the financial landscape right after that. A number of disappointed teams are seeking ways to answer existential questions, and some frustrated players are shopping for new homes in a way that could shift power structures.

The Jazz will have opportunities to pounce. They have cap space, more than a dozen future picks, young guys on tradeable contracts, and a pair of executives that have proved themselves willing to make moves. They have a coach they believe in, an unexpected first-time All-Star, and intriguing young talent.

Will they get a chance to trigger a celebration like the one happening elsewhere in their time zone right now? That part remains unclear, but if it does happen, it could very well be as the result of decisions made in the next several weeks.