Another night in the NBA where a bunch of teams got better and the Nuggets stayed the same. The Nuggets entered Wednesday night’s 2025 NBA Draft with zero picks, and that’s exactly how the night ended as well.
There was some optimism that the new front office duo of Jon Wallace and Ben Tenzer might identify a player they coveted and make an aggressive trade into the first round. But that hope was clearly fruitless, as it has been for the past several transaction cycles.
The Nuggets are obviously short on assets; they can only trade picks far out in the future, and their young players with trade value are all important to the rotation, but the future is now with Nikola Jokic on the team.
Nuggets continue failing to maximize prime of Jokic
This is just the latest example of the Nuggets letting time slip away. They won the title in 2023, and it seemed like the good times would never end. But since then, Denver has been bounced in the second round in back-to-back years, they’ve seen multiple rotation players walk out the door, and Jokic turned 30.
Aaron Gordon and Jamal Murray aren’t getting any younger either, Michael Porter Jr. hasn’t shown enough improvement, and the young players (outside of Christian Braun) haven’t come along as fast as they’ve been needed to.
Meanwhile, the team has taken chances on veterans like Reggie Jackson, Dario Saric, and, most recently, Russell Westbrook, and the team has gotten shallower and worse each year. The ownership group finally seems to have realized the level of urgency needed, as they fired Michael Malone and Calvin Booth, but so far, we’ve yet to see positive change.
Nuggets need to crush free agency
Maybe the Nuggets will trade into round two, but that’s not moving the needle. They are going to have to maximize free agency, which won’t be easy. Adding a playoff rotation player with the taxpayer midlevel exception ($5.7 million) is absolutely paramount, and if they can add another useful player or two on minimum deals, that would be massive.
Beyond that, they’ll have to pull off a trade to improve the roster, and again, we’ve seen absolutely zero reason to believe that that’s happening any time soon. It was another quiet night for the Nuggets. Many more of them, and this title window will pass them by.