Nuggets fans have been plenty defensive of Cam Johnson this season, and rightfully so. He came over from one of the worst basketball situations in the league in Brooklyn to a team that’s in perennial championship-or-bust mode. He had to adjust his game on the fly and fit into a very established starting lineup, taking over a role for a player who had held it for six straight seasons.
There were always going to be growing pains with Johnson, but the upside for his potential fit was tantalizing and obvious. He struggled immensely with his shot out of the gate, but just as he was really starting to heat up, he went down with a knee injury just before Christmas, missing almost six weeks.
Now, he’s trying to reintegrate himself into what’s still a new situation, as the playoffs rapidly approach, and the team is struggling. There’s no other way to put it. Denver has gone just 3-6 to start the month, all games Jokic has played in, and 3-3 since Cam has gotten back into the mix.
They’re just 36-22 now on the season, only a game up on the six seed in the West, and they’ve gone 16-16 in their last 32 games after a 20-6 start to the season. When Bill Simmons and Zach Lowe discussed the Nuggets on a recent episode of the Bill Simmons Podcast, they talked about all their issues recently, and Bill picked out Johnson.
Johnson has underwhelmed so far in Denver
He talked about Cam’s ability to disappear on the court and how, when he attended a recent Nuggets game, he forgot he was even on the floor. They compared him to Tobias Harris (not in a nice way) as a guy who’s just kind of there. And Bill bemoaned the loss of Michael Porter Jr., claiming that for better or worse, you knew he was out there.
This seems harsh and unfair, but at the end of the day, Bill may have a point. Johnson has been lights out on open threes recently, but is he making enough of an impact? Teams don’t seem to fear him and follow him the way they stayed glued to MPJ, and he hasn’t taken on nearly as much secondary playmaking and attacking as I would have liked.
The idea was that Cam would diversify the role and run more actions, giving the Nuggets a nice off-speed pitch, ideally something they could even lean on or use as a change of pace in crunch time. But unfortunately, we haven’t gotten to see much of that at all, and if anything, it has looked much more like he’s doing a Porter Jr. impression that hasn’t quite landed.
Again, there’s still time for Cam, and judging him on this bizarre mishmash of a season feels extremely unfair. But this is a results-based league, and so far, the results have been pretty underwhelming. If they can’t get this figured out in the next couple of months, there are going to be major questions about Johnson’s future in Denver this offseason.