Whiffing on a first-round draft pick is never ideal, but it happens to just about every team at some point. Doubling down on the bad selection and compounding the pick is when things get ugly, and that’s exactly what the Nuggets have done with Zeke Nnaji.
Denver selected Nnaji with the 22nd overall pick in the 2020 draft, only to watch players such as Immanuel Quickley, Payton Pritchard, Jaden McDaniels, and Desmond Bane all get drafted within the next 10 picks. The draft is a crapshoot, especially after the lottery, so it’s hard to ding the Nuggets too badly, especially as they’ve been one of the better drafting teams in recent years.
But it’s hard not to think about what could have been, especially with the impact that the aforementioned players have made. Quickley was a major piece in a trade that returned OG Anunoby, and he’s now the starting point guard in Toronto.
Pritchard played a key role in helping the Celtics win a championship in 2024 and followed it up with a Sixth Man of the Year campaign. McDaniels has turned into one of the best perimeter defenders in the league and is now part of a core that has led the Timberwolves to consecutive Western Conference Finals.
And Bane has been one of the best non-All-Stars in the entire NBA, recently being traded for four first-round picks. It’s safe to say that drafting any of those players instead of Nnaji would have significantly improved the Nuggets’ fortunes in recent years.
Nnaji extension has made draft pick even worse
But teams can recover from a bad pick in the 20s, what made it worse was inexplicably offering Nnaji a four-year, $32 million extension before his rookie deal was up. He showed a few nice flashes and Calvin Booth thought he was beating the market to value. That couldn’t have been further from teh truth, and the deal has been plaguing them ever since.
Now, he wastes away at the end of the bench with a virtually untradeable contract. Denver can either pay to get out of the deal or wait until it expires, wasting a valuable roster spot and significant salary as the team tries desperately to build a championship roster.
The team has done a great job this summer despite Nnaji, but that deal will still be weighing them down like an anchor until they can dump it to another sorry team, or painfully wait for it to expire in 2028.