Following an uninspiring home stand that saw Denver drop two of three games at altitude, Nuggets Nation curiously wonders, “What’s wrong with the team at home?”
Traditionally one of the NBA’s best home teams, our Nuggets flex the league's ninth-best home winning percentage (.656) all time. Since 2016, the season that Nikola Jokic took over as the franchise’s starting center, the Nuggets have enjoyed the second-best home record in the entire association — a streak that includes a league-best 104-30 record at Ball Arena since the 2022-23 season.
Unfortunately, the natural benefit of playing half of your games at altitude (and led by the best player on the planet) has not resulted in a pronounced advantage record-wise this season. As a fan who’s attended dozens of Nuggets games at Ball Arena in the Jokic era, I’m fascinated by why the squad seems less sharp in its friendly home confines this year.
Why Has Denver Struggled at Mile High This Season?
The Denver Nuggets are 23-11 at Ball Arena to this point in the 2024-25 season, and a whopping seven of those 11 losses have come by double digits. Losses by 15 to the Thunder, 27 to the Knicks, 14 to the Cavs, 12 to the Celtics, and 20 each to the Rockets, Lakers, and Timberwolves (in a troubling game last week) stick in the team’s side.
Beyond the aforementioned blowouts the squad has suffered at 5,280 feet above sea level, this season has also seen three home losses against less-than-stellar opponents by three points each:
- Friday, Nov. 22, in an In-Season Tournament bout with the Dallas Mavericks.
- Jan. 3 vs. Victor Wembanyama and the Spurs in an instant classic.
- Saturday against Jordan Poole and the Wizards in the final seconds.
Diving a little deeper, the Nuggets were outscored by their opponents in the first quarter in every one of their first 10 home losses. And despite boasting the NBA’s second-best offensive rating (120.2), Denver’s ORTG plummets to just 111.7 in home losses this season.
Confusingly, Denver registered a good ORTG of 116.5, including an impressive 44 as the team led by 14 after one, in the loss on Saturday night. Sure, digging yourself a hole against the league’s upper echelon will put any team behind the eight-ball. But “playing with your food” against the NBA’s lesser teams and burning energy to come back from a disadvantage remains far from the ideal strategy.
Yet neither of those things happened Saturday night.
Blowing a 14-point first-quarter lead and failing to put away the Eastern Conference’s worst team does not portend well. Was this season’s second loss to Washington an aberration or a harbinger of bad news on the horizon? Time will tell.
From the cream of the league’s crop to teams residing in the league’s bottom tier, these losses all point to the Denver Nuggets’ margin for error at home being significantly smaller than in recent memory. Yikes.
History Suggests This Season’s Home Record is Troublesome
The last time the Nuggets’ home record was this bad was in 2016-17, Michael Malone’s second year at the helm, when the team amassed just a 22-19 advantage at the building then called Pepsi Center. A young Jokic and co. failed to make the postseason that year, landing ninth in the Western Conference.
While I’m confident the boys in skyline blue, Flatirons red and sunshine yellow will qualify for this year’s playoffs, my trust in the traditionally tried-and-true home-court advantage is waning. And for good reason.
The last NBA champion with a home winning percentage outside of the NBA’s top six on the season was the Lakers in the COVID-impacted bubble season. Denver currently sits teetering on that dangerous edge at seventh, with just seven home tilts left to turn things around.
As the team embarks on its current four-game road trip, the ensuing stretch of five straight home matchups presents an opportunity to right the ship before the postseason — or risk falling out of the Western Conference’s top four seeds entirely.
Every playoff appearance of the current golden era — outside of the 2021-22 trip, plagued by injuries to Jamal Murray and Michael Porter Jr. — has seen the Nuggets qualify as a top-four seed and enjoy the home-court advantage, winning in round one. During the injury-marred 2022 postseason, the three-seed (and eventual champion) Warriors knocked off a shorthanded Denver in five games.
No matter how poorly the Nuggets are playing at home this season, going on the road throughout the playoff run feels like an unintelligent path to championship No. 2. Let’s see if the Nuggets can maintain top-four seeding in the West for the sixth time in seven years during the stretch run.