Mushy-middle Raptors can take some lessons from Nuggets' path to title

TORONTO — While NBA teams plan, the basketball gods laugh.

It might be a comforting concept for Toronto Raptors fans wondering if there is a plan for a team that seems perpetually stuck in the mud with no clear prospects for advancement.

Consider: The first seeds of the Denver Nuggets' rousing run to the 2022-23 NBA title were sown when a little-known rookie general manager named Masai Ujiri — then working in Denver as the lowest-paid executive in the league — engineered the trade of Nuggets star Carmelo Anthony to the New York Knicks in February of 2011. Part of the deal was the Nuggets having the right to swap first-round picks with the Knicks in 2016. The Knicks pick ended up being the seventh overall selection and Denver — with Ujiri well-ensconced running the Raptors by then — used the pick to draft University of Kentucky freshman Jamal Murray.

Denver was in the early stages of a rebuild and Murray was just their second lottery pick in a decade, and the Nuggets hitting on him was all the more important since — as it turned out — their previous lottery selection, Emmanuel Mudiay, who was taken seventh in 2015, ended up being a bust.

Murray, as every Canadian basketball fan knows, has more than delivered on his promise. Last season — his first after a devasting knee injury that cost him all of 2021-22 — the Kitchener, Ont., star averaged 26.1 points and 7.1 assists over 20 playoff games while shooting 39.4 per cent from three. In the finals against Miami, Murray averaged 21.4 points and 10 assists.

“Well, you know you go back to last year in the playoffs with Jamal, playoff Jamal was real,” said Nuggets head coach Mike Malone. “What he did in the playoffs was just incredible. What he did in the NBA Finals, 20-10-6, you don’t see that very often, when the stakes are at their highest…”

The stakes weren’t all that high on Wednesday night as Murray played his first game in Toronto as an NBA champion and for just the second time since December of 2018, a dearth caused by the pandemic and Murray missing the 2021-22 season due to his knee injury.

But the Nuggets came to play anyway as they systematically grinded the Raptors down with a combination of superior IQ, shot-making and depth in a 113-104 win.

That’s from the Nuggets point of view. The Raptors have to once again answer for falling behind big early on and then finally playing with the appropriate energy when the game was almost out of hand. 

“We were flat in the first half,” said Raptors head coach Darko Rajakovic. “Was it because maybe we missed a couple of layups or open shots, I don't know, but our defence was not good. They scored 40 points in the first half in the paint and we kept it to 22 in the second half. Same players, same people but just different mentality, different disposition. I thought we won the second half but against this type of team you gotta have respect for them from the jump ball but we gotta have respect for ourselves from the jump ball and our energy was, for whatever reason, not there. We got to be much better, we got to be much better.”

It showed up most clearly in the final moments of the fourth quarter after the Raptors — trailing by double figures for most of the game — cut Denver’s lead to five with 5:20 to play thanks to some spirited two-way contributions from Precious Achiuwa in particular. But under pressure for the first time in the game, the Nuggets' DNA kicked in and Murray and his superstar sidekick Nikola Jokic expertly crafted a 9-2 run in the space of two minutes to restore order. An all-in-one-motion catch-and-shoot three by Jokic to beat the shot clock with 59 seconds left proved to be the dagger and helped deliver a homecoming win for his grateful Canadian teammate.

“I think just the whole experience, from takeoff to landing [was great],” said Murray. “I get to see my family and my friends, playing in a familiar gym that I've been playing in growing up, even though I missed some easy shots today. Just the whole environment. I appreciate Toronto for having me on the [video] screen and all that, just little stuff like that means a lot. Obviously, it's good to come here and try to put on a show in front of my friends and family. It's a blessing to be in this position.”

Murray finished with 20 points, six assists and four rebounds on 9-of-22 shooting, while Jokic had 31 points, 15 rebounds in six assists on 13-of-23 shooting. Jokic had 10 points in the fourth quarter, four of them on buckets set up by Murray down the stretch.

Scottie Barnes led the Raptors with 30 points, 10 rebounds and five assists while Achiuwa had 13 points and five rebounds in 25 minutes off the bench. Toronto shot just 9-of-27 from three compared with 12-of-33 by Denver.

The win improved Denver to 19-10 while the Raptors fell to 11-16.

Otherwise the match-up between the should-be rebuilding Raptors and the hoping-to-repeat Nuggets wasn’t as close as the score suggested. Prior to the final frame, the key sequence in the game came when Jokic joined Murray on the bench with a minute left in the first quarter and the Nuggets up by nine. When Denver’s two offensive engines checked back in five minutes later, they were still up by seven. From there, Jokic and Murray stepped on the gas as they helped the Nuggets push their lead to 61-44 at the half. Denver led by as many as 20 in the third quarter, but the Raptors were still in Hail Mary distance to start the fourth quarter, trailing by 15 after a Malachi Flynn three just before the end of the third.

For Denver, it was just another Wednesday night. The Nuggets are very much playing the long game in their title defence. As they try to bring along a young group of bench players and manage the health of their main guns — Murray has missed 14 games already this year due to a hamstring injury and ankle sprain — the goal is to keep their eye on the big prize.

In that vein Murray said that health permitting, he plans to play for Canada at the Olympics this summer — “For sure, for sure,” he said —  but there is a long road to travel before that decision can be made, especially if the Nuggets reach their goal of repeating as champions. 

“It’s a little different when you're trying to defend it. You constantly have that pressure of somebody hunting you and each team does something different really good,” said Murray. “I think we did a good job just handling business tonight, taking away what they do really well, being on the break and run, and we're able to knock enough shots down to win the game. So I think we're in a good spot.”

What is still kind of headshaking from the point of view of the rest of the NBA is how they become champions and favourites to repeat.

As good as Murray has been, he’s the Nuggets' second-best player. No shame in that. Murray is now in his eighth season playing alongside Jokic, who is on a shortlist of candidates for the position of 'best basketball player in the world' and the list doesn’t get past two.

But no one had a clue about that when the Nuggets took a pudgy Serbian centre with the 41st overall pick in the 2014 draft.

Certainly Denver didn’t. Jokic wasn’t even the first Balkan centre the Nuggets acquired on draft night as the Nuggets made a draft-night deal to grab Croatian Jusuf Nurkic, who Chicago took with the 16th pick.

Even in Serbia, no one was expecting Jokic to become a two-time MVP, Finals MVP and sure-fire Hall-of-Famer before his 29th birthday.

“I gotta be honest, he was a talented player but like, nobody saw that he was gonna be this type of player,” said Raptors head coach Darko Rajakovic, like Jokic a native of Serbia. “Jokic, when he was growing up in Serbia, [now] everybody is gonna say how amazing he is and whatnot, but there is a reason he was picked 41 — there was no other example in history to say, this is the path he is going to take to become what he became. He is kind of like a unicorn his whole basketball life story.”

The unicorn has formed a beautiful partnership with Murray, the lottery pick. They can read each other’s basketball minds.

“We're just making reads. We rarely go into the game saying we're going to do one thing,” said Murray. “We just kind of adjust to whatever is happening and we play off that. We know where each other is going to be.”

But as good a player as Murray has been and continues to be in his career, Jokic doesn’t necessarily need someone who can read his mind. The best passing big man in NBA history will do just fine reading yours whether you’re paying attention or not.

He plays in slow motion. He makes passes no one else sees. Apart from occasionally letting a referee have it for a missed call, he looks barely interested, like the kid slouched at the back of math class who turns out to be a brilliant but bored mathematician.

Murray was excellent in his first game back in Toronto with a championship ring on his resume. He finished plays Jokic started and made plays for his two-time MVP partner in the crucial moments of the game. But Jokic did everything, as he does. His presence was both calming and electric, the rarest of combinations.

All of which should provide some strange comfort to the Raptors as they try to figure their way out of the mushy basketball middle they’ve seemingly found themselves in, with no obvious path back to title contention, or even playoff contention.

The Nuggets had high hopes when they drafted Murray and he’s delivered everything they could have hoped for and more.

They had no expectations when they took a second-round flyer on Jokic. He’s turned into the best player in the world.

The message: Plan well and execute, and then hope you get lucky.