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Nikola Jokic wants Nuggets to add more depth this offseason
Nikola Jokic wants Nuggets to add more depth this offseason
Hoping to make their second Western Conference Finals appearance in three seasons, the Denver Nuggets came up just short against the top-seeded Oklahoma City Thunder.
The Nuggets simply ran out of gas, in part due to being banged up without much depth behind superstar big Nikola Jokic.
It was still a fairly improbable run, given that both head coach Michael Malone and general manager Calvin Booth were fired with less than a week left in the regular season.
We still don’t know if interim David Adelman will assume full-time coaching rules (he made a good first impression!). But for whoever takes over at general manager, Jokic stated after Sunday’s Game 7 that the team must address its lack of depth this offseason if they want to compete for titles in a loaded Western Conference.
“We definitely need to figure out a way to get more depth,” Jokic said, according to The Athletic‘s Tony Jones and Sam Amick. “It seems like the teams that have longer rotations, the longer benches, are the ones winning. You look at Indiana and OKC and Minnesota, and they have been great examples of that.”
The Nuggets enter a difficult position this offseason if that remains the goal.
Heading into the summer, they are $4.7 million into the first apron while being roughly $7.1 million away from the projected $207.825 million second apron, according to Spotrac. Outside of Jokic, they have nearly $108 million–or 69.6 percent of the cap–delegated to Jamal Murray, Michael Porter Jr. and Aaron Gordon.
Not to mention, they have Zeke Nnaji‘s $8.2 million and Dario Saric‘s $5.4 million (player option) on the books. Denver has salary to move, but finding potential suitors for, say, Porter or Nnaji could be incredibly difficult.
Moving off those bloated contracts is a requisite to not only add more depth, but give them more flexibility to make other moves and potentially extend in-house options, such as Christian Braun (extension eligible this summer) and Julian Strawther (extension eligible after 2025-26).
Booth helped build a championship contender, but the Nuggets’ current cap sheet is a mess if adding depth is the primary goal. Having high-end depth is at a premium in today’s NBA; heck, we aren’t far removed from Bruce Brown and Kentavious Caldwell-Pope being integral pieces to the Nuggets’ 2023 title run.
If they want to get back to an NBA Title, sacrifices will have to be made, but it will all have to come at the proper cost instead of making trades just to make trades.
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