NBA
PREVIEW
that went the distance, bringing Denver within a possession
or two of the conference finals. Murray proved to be up for
the moment, though perhaps not yet for every moment.
The Nuggets understand that to take his next step, Murray
must first find his equilibrium. To that end they could offer
no stronger vote of confidence than the five-year, $170 mil-
lion extension struck with Murray last summer. No deal of
that magnitude could be justified on ebb and flow alone.
“With that contract,” Connelly says, “comes more
responsibility.”D
EEP IN the Pepsi Center, there is a long banquet
table sardined with memorabilia, every piece await-
ing a signature. Murray is multitasking. As his pen bobs and
weaves down the line, across basketball after basketball and
jersey after jersey, Murray explains the delicate balance of thedribble handoff —at least in part. “I don’t want to give away
all my secrets,” he says. Murray then compares the reads out
of a handoff to the reads of a pick-and-roll, and contrasts the
way opponents will often defend them. Because a handoff
entrusts the decision-making power to Jokić up front, the
enter sequence has a different punch; if any defender any-
where decides to help, Jokić will sling a pass to the open man
he left behind. With the pick-and-roll, on the other hand....
Murray moves to sign a glossy photograph that stops him
in his tracks: a shot of him, in Denver’s dark blues, rising up
to the rim over LeBron James. There’s a catch. When Mur-
ray soared early last season for what could have been the
throwdown of his career, he clanged the ball off the back rim
instead. “I should’ve dunked that s---!” Murray says through
a laugh. He pauses to admire the photo and a moment
that could have been. “Damn.” A few seconds pass beforelife. When a teenage Murray would feel his mind wander
during an exam, he meditated. Before Murray would run
track, he meditated. Even now, when Murray feels his game
start to drift, he meditates. “I get to be honest with myself,
without having anybody’s opinions or worries on my back,”
he says. “Just kind of look at myself, look at what I can do to
get better, and go out there and do it.”
Putting those adjustments into practice will always be
easier said than done. Denver has accepted the fluctuations
in Murray’s game as a fact of life, illustrated most clearly
last April, in the first two games of his playoff career. In his
debut against the Spurs, Murray shot just 8 of 23, buckled
on defense and back-rimmed a wide-open jumper that would
have given the Nuggets the lead with nine seconds left. For
the first time ever a team’s starting center handed out at least
14 assists while its starting point guard finished with none. It
was a gutting loss, in part because it seemed to corroborate a
prevailing skepticism: Maybe Denver, the youngest team in
the playoffs, wasn’t ready for all this. After the final buzzer
Murray stormed up to the practice court at the Pepsi Center
to try his hand at time travel. Now he would make the go-
ahead jumper, the catch-and-shoot three, the uncontested
19-footer. The universe would be brought to order.
“I’m used to rough starts,” Murray said after his postgame
shootaround, still agitated. “So I’ll bounce back.”
What came next was distressing: 25 minutes of hell to
start Game 2, in which Murray compromised Denver on both
ends and failed to hit a single shot. Two losses at home and
the Nuggets’ season would effectively be over. Their roster’s
viability would be called into question. Down seven entering
the fourth quarter, it would have been reasonable for Malone
to consider his alternatives. “But I knew full well it wasn’t just
about that moment,” the coach says. “If I would have taken
him out then, that would have been really detrimental to his
growth as a player—and to us as an organization. Sometimes
you have to take a step back and think big picture.”
After three of the worst quarters of Murray’s professional
career, Malone told Murray that he loved him. That he be-
lieved in him. That he trusted him.
“And he goes out there and wins us that game,” Malone
says. Murray climbed his way out of the gutter for a near-
perfect frame: 21 points on 8-of-9 shooting in what would be
a series-saving 39-point quarter for the Nuggets. There were
the rhythm jumpers, where Murray seemed to almost skip up
and into his shooting form. There were the heat checks, like
the series of increasingly elaborate step-backs that Murray
converted over Derrick White. Then there was the coup de
grâce: a daring three in transition, for which Murray was so
eager he could barely set his feet before firing away.
“He made me look like I knew what I was doing,” Malone
says through a smirk. We can’t know what would have hap-
pened if Murray had been benched. We can only assess what
happened: a gutsy first-round win over the veteran Spurs,
followed by a series against Damian Lillard and the Blazers
64SPORT S ILLUS TR ATED- OC T OBER 21–28, 2019
NEXT BIG
THINGS
So who is poised for a breakout this year?
These four youngsters will play crucial roles
for teams with playoff aspirationsMITCHELL LEFF/GETTY IMAGES (RICHARDSON); ROB TRINGALI (LEVERT); GREG NELSON (WHITE);
KENT SMITH/NBAE/GETTY IMAGES (ADEBAYO)