Cam Johnson is not a bad defender and may be an upgrade over Michael Porter Jr., but he poses a sort of quandary with his contrasting skills. For a 6’8” wing player, he’s not a great lateral mover and struggles guarding smaller, shiftier players on the perimeter. This isn’t a huge problem, as he’s capable of guarding up. The problem is that he’s also a below-average rebounder for his position, and would now, essentially, be playing power forward on defense.
The positional switch isn’t a huge deal. Christian Braun is a very solid defender with great size and length for his position. He’ll be able to take the opponent’s best lead guard on most nights without issue. Denver also has the luxury of moving Aaron Gordon down and allowing him to match up with the league’s better wing players like Kawhi Leonard and LeBron James.
But when you put it all together, you’ve now got Braun and Gordon on the perimeter, with Jamal Murray covering a bigger player, and Johnson, who averages 3.9 rebounds a game for his career, thrust into the paint.
That’s putting an awful lot on the massive shoulders of Nikola Jokic. Sure, the three-time MVP is capable of carrying the team in uncharacteristic ways, but the whole point of this offseason and adding depth was to keep him fresh and lighten his load. Instead, Jokic, who averaged a ridiculous 12.7 rebounds per game last season, may have to do even more to keep the Nuggets around league average in that department.
Will Nuggets get creative with bigger lineups?
Perhaps this just means we won’t see the starting lineup quite as much as we expect. Not for nothing, but going from MPJ’s 7 rebounds a game to Johnson’s 4.3 is a pretty big gap. The team was already from from elite on the glass despite having Jokic, and the starting lineup likely got a lot worse.
Luckily, the added depth means plenty of new options for David Adelman, including potential rebounding from the likes of Jonas Valanciunas, DaRon Holmes, Bruce Brown, and Peyton Watson. It’s unclear what lineups will be feasible on both ends, but there are plenty of choices, and surely, Adelman and his staff can find the right combinations.
There’s no reason to think the Nuggets won’t figure it out, but this is also shaping up to be a much bigger problem than people are anticipating. Johnson will bring a lot of great things to Denver, but this is one way that things may actually get a bit trickier.