Lisa Bluder, who coached Caitlin Clark in college, offered a take on team culture that the Denver Nuggets need to hear if they hope to help Nikola Jokic win again.
As the Denver Nuggets search for answers after a second consecutive second-round exit, all eyes are on Nikola Jokic. The three-time MVP and 2023 NBA champion already has a safe place in history, but there are questions surrounding Denver's ability to improve its roster to the point of contending again.
There may be paths to improvement on the open market, but the best answer to how they can maximize the remaining years of Jokic's prime has been provided from the collegiate ranks.
Lisa Bluder spent 24 years coaching the Iowa Hawkeyes, as well as 10 leading the Drake Bulldogs and another six at the helm at St. Ambrose University. During the final seasons of her illustrious career at Iowa, Bluder coached the face of the recent era of college basketball: Caitlin Clark.
In a recent interview with Elise Devlin of The Athletic, Bluder explained that the key to her and Clark's success was establishing a culture that wasn't star-centric, but instead welcomes a star's presence.
"But I also think sometimes people think culture is … I don’t know, people think, “Oh, we got Caitlin, so we got a good culture.” No, we had a good culture, and that’s one of the reasons we got Caitlin. So it’s a work in progress all the time. Because you have to reestablish that culture every single year."
Bluder's take on building a team culture should be at the heart of everything that the Nuggets do during the 2025 offseason.
Nuggets must build a team Nikola Jokic can thrive on rather than carry
Bluder's approach enabled Iowa to make back-to-back National Championship Game appearances in 2023 and 2024. They also won three straight Big Ten Tournament titles, as well as the 2022 Big Ten regular season championship.
Clark, meanwhile, won every National Player of the Year award under the sun in both 2022-23 and 2023-24 before ultimately going on to become the No. 1 pick in the 2024 WNBA Draft.
Clark and Jokic are far from carbon copies on the court, due in no small part to the positions they play. The similarity they share, however, is that they've earned their success in high-usage roles that ask them to lead their team in scoring and facilitate the offense.
The Hawkeyes enabled Clark to translate her individual success to team results by building a culture that she thrived in—and the Nuggets must learn from that approach with Jokic.
For as brilliant as Jokic is, no individual player can regularly carry the type of burden that's so often placed upon his shoulders. He finished the 2024-25 regular season ranked No. 1 in the NBA in passes made per game, as well as No. 6 among qualified players in field goal attempts.
A more refined search reveals that he averaged 2.8 more shots than any of his teammates, as well as 4.2 more assists.
It's admittedly difficult to justify an argument for giving Jokic less touches, but there's something to be said about how a lighter workload could enable more sustainable success. He did, after all, average just 0.2 more shots and 2.4 more assists than Jamal Murray during the 2023 NBA Playoffs.
Complementing Jokic with players who fit his strengths and weaknesses is undoubtedly essential, but if the Nuggets want to win another title, perhaps building with Jokic would be a smarter approach than simply building around him.