Jamal Murray approaching unlikely but impressive franchise milestone

For most of the offseason, everything about Jamal Murray’s future has felt up in the air. It was a weird twist of fates that happened very suddenly, but less than a year after co-starring in a title run for the Nuggets, it appeared that his time in Denver was running out.

Murray was injured right before the playoffs started and missed multiple weeks. He came back and played in every playoff game, but picked up another injury along the way and was underwhelming outside of a few performances. To make matters worse, he followed that up by struggling mightily for Team Canada at the Olympics.

On top of the injuries and struggles, Murray was in the midst of contract negotiations. The sides were reportedly close to a max extension in June, but things lingered for months with reports claiming the sides were at odds as Murray was set to enter the final year of his deal.

Out of nowhere, fake trades started popping up and there was reason to start wondering if the Nuggets would actually be better off dealing Murray if they weren’t going to extend him. But the crisis was averted and Calvin Booth and company finally reached an agreement with Murray who signed a four-year, $208 million max extension on Saturday.

Now that Murray is locked up, for the first time in a while it’s starting to feel the vibes in Denver are good. The roster is locked in, the rumors have (mostly) gone away, and it’s time to just focus on basketball - which the team should be pretty good at.

Jamal Murray approaching top 10 for games played in Nuggets franchise history

Since Murray is officially here to stay, it’s nice to just think of him as a basketball player again and focus on his on-court achievements. One of those is rapidly pushing him into some historic territory.

As Adam Mares of DNVR Sports recently pointed out, Murray is just 50 games played away from taking over 10th place in Nuggets regular season history. We don’t exactly think about Murray as some kind of Iron Man, but with another 50 games played, he’ll have 520 under his belt for his career.

That will move him ahead of Ralph Simpson for the 10th most regular season games played in the history of the Denver Nuggets. The only other active player in the top 10 is Nikola Jokic, who sits in 5th place with 675 under his belt. Alex English is the franchise’s all-time leader, having played in 837 regular-season contests for the Nuggets.

Instead of focusing on Murray’s shortcomings and recent struggles, it’s nice to take a moment to appreciate all that he has done and his overall consistency. In today’s age of player movement and load management, it’s damn impressive to see a player crack a list like this for a franchise that has been around since 1967.

Murray has taken a lot of heat lately, some of it rightuflly so. But a lot of the hate has gone too far and has been out of bounds. Murray got to camp early, which seems like a good sign. Hopefully, he’s motivated and ready to go, and he’s going to send a message to the league this season.