The 10 greatest Nuggets in history, ranked by Player Efficiency Rating (PER)
By Ben Handler
Other notable Nuggets
Some fans may be wondering why some of their favorite Nuggets over the years didn’t make this list, so let’s take a look. The great Colorado-bred point guard of the 90s and 2000s, Chauncey Billups had two different stints with the Nuggets and finished his career with an 18.2 PER playing for the team.
Legendary shot-blocking big man Dikembe Mutombo had a PER of 17.2 over his five seasons with the Nuggets in the early to mid-1990s. All-Star point guard from the 1980s, Lafayette “Fat” Lever played six seasons with the Nuggets and put up a PER of 19.1.
And current Nugget, and Nikola Jokic sidekick, Jamal Murray has a PER of just 16.8 over the course of his seven-year NBA career in Denver. However, the true mark of a playoff riser, Murray’s PER jumps all the way to 21.9 in the postseason.
Player efficiency rating is far from the end-all-be-all, but it is clearly a useful statistic, that along with context and nuance can be very helpful in evaluating basketball players. I’m sure someday someone else will invent a new formula to measure these things and help settle GOAT debates. But for now, Hollingers PER may just be the best we’ve got.