Waking up to find out that Nikola Jokic avoided a serious knee injury and will be reevaluated in four weeks was an incredible sigh of relief for the Nuggets. The Joker will be back in a month or so, and the team should be good to go long before the postseason begins. But unfortunately, this injury timeline means the front office won’t get much of a look at this rotation at full strength before the trade deadline.
In some ways, this shouldn’t be a big deal. Most of the heavy lifting was done in the offseason anyway. The new co-GMs had a clear vision after the way the last couple of seasons ended, and they wanted to round out the roster with functional depth around the star players.
So far, it has mostly been a successful experiment, and things look good, but rosters are rarely complete in the summer. In an ideal situation, the Nuggets would have been able to play together for a few months. Jon Wallace and Ben Tenzer would have gotten a solid look at things and a useful sample size to make some conclusions and figure out what the team needs to get over the hump.
Unfortunately, this is no longer an ideal situation as Denver lost their first starter, Christian Braun, just 11 games into the season. Aaron Gordon went down just two games later. Then it was Cam Johnson. And now Jokic. As great as it has been to have extra depth and to be able to plug guys in for injured starters, we still don’t have a great idea of what this team can look like at full strength.
Nuggets’ front office must do some creative thinking
While this is a minor inconvenience, it’s still some serious first-world problems. This is why Tenzer and Wallace get paid the big bucks. They are going to have to look at the small sample size from the first weeks of the season, look at what they’ve seen from other guys in bigger roles, and extrapolate some ideas while projecting forward.
It’s not an easy task, but the important thing is that Jokic will be back. Figuring out pieces around the margins to make it all work around a guy like the Joker shouldn’t be that difficult, and the basketball acumen and IQ should be enough to make it work.
They don’t have to go out and do anything drastic, but it would be great to find a way off of Zeke Nnaji’s contract, to add a veteran backup point guard, to get Spencer Jones onto the roster, and to creatively add one or two more rotation players who can help with a playoff run.