NBA
PREVIEWguard is what I’ve done all my life. It’s a simple game.”
Still, playing with Jokić requires that the top basketball
players in the world relearn what it means to be open. “There’s
nobody like him,” Murray says. “Nobody like Joker.” Their
first season together was, for Murray, an effort in understand-
ing all the ways the ball could be delivered. By the next year
he had won the starting job and last season their synergy
drove Denver to the second seed in the Western Conference.
“I think the best pick-and-roll combo in the whole NBA last
year was Nikola and Jamal—but it was Nikola handling
and Jamal screening,” says Nuggets coach Michael Malone.
“How many teams can say their starting point guard is
their best screener?” Deploying Murray in this way gave
him the time he needed to develop at his own pace, free
from carrying the weight of
an entire offense. Only now, as
the Nuggets ramp toward title
contention, are they findingfor their input on an assort-
ment of topics. When asked
which player was the most
likely to have a breakout sea-
son, they chose Murray. With
the benefit of hindsight, Mur-
ray respectfully disagrees with
the panel’s conclusion. “Hell
no,” he says when asked if last
year— featuring career highs
in points (18.2 per game),
rebounds (4.2) and assists
(4.8)—qualified as a break-
out campaign. “I appreciate
the GMs thinking about me in
that way. I also saw it myself.
It didn’t happen last year.”
Part of the reason: inconsis-
tency, that plague of youth. It’s challenging for a promising
scorer to shoot steady percentages when every matchup in
the NBA varies so dramatically. A 22-year-old guard will
have a hard time working as a playmaker when he’s only
just begun to understand the reads behind those plays. “I’ve
just got to be disciplined,” Murray says. There is both a wild,
impulsive streak to Murray and a clear desire to calm it.
Structure is what he knows; his father, Roger, who manages
his son’s career, trained him to be free of distractions. No
cellphone. No television.
Murray says that one of his earliest memories was learning
to meditate—to find the focus and intention buried in dailyOf course, the trouble in building around one anomaly
is that it all but demands others. If Jokić runs the offense,
where does that leave Denver’s nominal point guard? Creative
enterprise in basketball is a zero-sum game: To give the ball
to one playmaker is to take it away from another. So in a
golden age of point guard play, the Nuggets began their search
for a young player unconcerned with the usual trappings of
his position. “We didn’t think we needed a ball-dominant,
walk-the-ball-up guy who’s going to play pick-and-roll and
have the ball in his hands 10, 15 seconds a possession,” says
team president Tim Connelly. So with the No. 7 pick in 2016,
Denver drafted Jamal Murray.
With his selection, Murray became the first true addition of
the Jokić era. Denver had already begun to frame its business
around this curiously talented center just a year into his NBA
career. Scouting Murray wasn’t only a matter of understanding
his game, but also of how it might align. Where some teams
may have been torn by the fact that Murray ran the offense
for the Canadian national team but played off the ball in his
one season at Kentucky, the Nuggets saw their future.
“It’s just basketball, at the end of the day,” Murray
says. “I know how to come off a handoff and a pin down.
I played the two guard in college, and playing point
62
THE NUGGETS ARE BUILT ON AN ANOMALY.
Even in the NBA’s grand tradition of centers, none has dominated
the game quite like Nikola Jokić, a 7-foot virtuoso who could find
the passing angles in a hedge maze. Once Jokić started fling-
ing no-look, cross-traffic bounce passes with perfect precision,
there was no going back. After just his first season it was clear
he would be the face—and fulcrum—of the team. Everything
else would have to fit accordingly.BART YOUNG/NBAE/GETTY IMAGESMIDRANGE ROVER
Murray put up a
team-high 15.6 shots
per night, but an
increasing number
were from inside the
arc; only 34.9% of his
attempts were threes,
down from 47.1% two
years ago.