After the Denver Nuggets won their first NBA championship in franchise history in 2023, the team came up well short of another title the following year. Denver lost to the Minnesota Timberwolves in seven games in the second round, and to add insult to injury for the Nuggets, three of their four losses in the series came at home.
ESPN’s Zach Lowe said that if the Nuggets suffer the same fate in the 2025 NBA Playoffs and are once again a second-round exit, there could be major changes in Denver.
“If they lose in a similar round like a second round again this year, this feels like the year where if that happens, the next season something big is gonna change,” Lowe said of the Nuggets. “I don’t know what it is. I just know this core is enormously expensive. Aaron Gordon is gonna soon be up for a big extension that will give him a bigger salary number. The bench is young and untested. There are more questions than there really should be about a team that was the no-brainer favorite to win the West last season and fell two rounds short of where they wanted to get. If they don’t get where they need to get this season, I think something there is gonna change.”
The Nuggets may be worse on paper than they were a season ago. For one, Denver was unable to retain guard Kentavious Caldwell-Pope in free agency. Once his second season as a Nugget came to an end, Caldwell-Pope agreed to a three-year, $66 million deal with the Orlando Magic.
Caldwell-Pope was one of the few consistent 3-point threats last season on a Nuggets team that didn’t shoot the ball from deep at a high level collectively. In the 2023-24 regular season, he shot 40.6 percent from deep, which was the second-best 3-point percentage of any Nugget.
The Nuggets — as a team — knocked down 11.7 3s made per game. Only the Magic, Detroit Pistons, Portland Trail Blazers, Chicago Bulls and Toronto Raptors buried fewer shots from deep per contest.
In addition to losing Caldwell-Pope to the Magic, another one of Denver’s top guards from last season decided to switch teams. After Reggie Jackson averaged 10.2 points and 3.8 assists per game in a bench role with the Nuggets, he signed with one of the top contenders in the Eastern Conference in the Philadelphia 76ers.
Perhaps one of the team’s newer guards — Russell Westbrook — will help to soften the blow of losing Caldwell-Pope and Jackson. Westbrook might no longer be a triple-double machine like he was at his peak, but he still averaged 11.1 points, 5.0 rebounds and 4.5 assists per game playing for the Los Angeles Clippers a season ago.
In light of Lowe’s words, if fans of the Nuggets want to see the team’s current core play together for the foreseeable future, they should hope that Denver makes a deep playoff run next year.
