The Nuggets suffered a frustrating last-second loss on Friday night to their now-rivals, the Minnesota Timberwolves. After last season’s playoff collapse against the Wolves, it felt like this game meant a little extra. The stakes and the tension felt very high for a regular season game in early November.
Given that, it hurt to see the Nuggets blow a 12-point 4th-quarter lead and fail to put away the Wolves yet again. Morale is low and spirits are down. It’s early in the season, but there are serious reasons for concern. There was nothing to laugh about in the Nuggets’ locker room.
But on the other side of the coin, it was nothing but fun and laughter in the Wolves’ locker room. They finished the game on a 10-0 run and kept the upper hand in their rivalry with Denver. That gave them the confidence and bravado to be able to joke around in the locker room after their narrow victory.
Rudy Gobert was in the middle of a press conference at his locker when Anthony Edwards interrupted to talk about a late game play that was thwarted by the Nuggets. The two Wolves players joked about how Nikola Jokic knew the play and diagnosed it before it started and without any of the Wolves players saying anything.
Jokic’s bball IQ has opponents questioning loyalty of teammates
Edwards and Gobert joked that Jokic “knew the play better than us”, that they “have a spy on the bench”, and that they “need to launch an investigation”. The two were clearly being lighthearted and having a laugh, but there was no joke about the reality of what Jokic had done.
Nikola gets most of his attention for his offense, but his overall basketball IQ is off the charts. The T-Wolves stars sounded almost in awe of the way Jokic saw the game and immediately sniffed out their play in one of the biggest moments of the game.
The other takeaway is that the Wolves are a close-knit team in high spirits right now. They are feeling good about the trajectory of their squad and even without Karl-Anthony Towns, they have the Nuggets’ number right now.
Meanwhile, on the other side, even with Jokic’s immaculate play, the Nuggets are in big trouble. They need to solve their shooting woes, they need to find a way to stop hemorrhaging points when the bench is in the game, and they need to get more consistently out of the non-Jokic core players.