the league’s cheapest contender

denver refuses to spend like a champion but might still play like one.

somewhere between jamal murray playing at half-speed, michael porter jr.’s shoulder blades, and aaron gordon’s hamstring that looked like a rubber band left out in the sun, the denver nuggets pushed the oklahoma city thunder — the soon-to-be consensus dynasty — to a game 7. they did it with a seven-man rotation, they did it while shooting 31.5% from three, they did it with a bench that bled points every time jokic sat down to breathe. they did it because they have the best player in the world. full stop.

but you wouldn’t know it if you scrolled through your feeds this week. the nuggets are not sexy enough for july. the rockets land kd, the knicks throw picks at anyone who makes eye contact, the cavs hold their breath waiting for the mitchell experiment to either explode or evaporate. the nuggets? they sneak out the back door of luxury tax hell by torching yet another unprotected first-round pick — the fourth of the jokic era. they do it with the same surgical dread of a dad cutting his netflix subscription to pay the gas bill.

here’s the cold, funny thing about denver: they’re the only team that can set fire to their future and still end up better tomorrow than yesterday. they traded michael porter jr. — a walking insurance claim, an offensive rainmaker, a rebounding savant on a contract that only gets heavier — for cam johnson, who shoots 39% on 3s in his sleep and costs seventeen million less per season. that’s the move. it’s not cute. it’s not bold. it’s just enough to pretend they care about maximising jokic’s prime without actually paying the big-boy luxury tax they so desperately fear.

because of that trade, they pivoted. they bought themselves a little breathing room and used it exactly how every basketball sicko wished they had a year ago. they brought back bruce brown jr., the defensive swiss army knife who was there when they lifted a trophy in 2023. bruce brown is the kind of guy who only works next to jokic: cuts, screens, weird angles, weird energy. it’s not pretty — it’s functional. he left for indiana when denver’s wallet went missing. now he’s back for the veteran minimum. the only thing more insulting than losing him once would have been pretending strawther could do the same job. so here he is again. the ex that still has a toothbrush at your place.

then there’s tim hardaway jr. no one should romanticize hardaway. he is not a stopper. he is not an answer to the thunder’s switch-everything defense. but he will shoot the damn ball, and that alone makes him priceless in denver. the nuggets ranked dead last — 30th — in 3-point attempt rate last season. okc knew it, you knew it, i knew it. so they dared christian braun and peyton watson to beat them from deep. guess what. they didn’t. now hardaway shows up to fling ten threes per 100 possessions like it’s 2016 again. he is, hilariously, exactly what denver needed the day they lost kentavious caldwell-pope and pretended strawther was the answer. another circle closed.

and then there’s jonas valanciunas, the backup big this team has dreamed about for years and might lose before he ever plays a minute. valanciunas could still bolt for panathinaikos athens and a three-year euroleague deal that smells like one last banquet before retirement. and who could blame him? being jokic’s understudy is a miserable gig: you can’t replicate him, you just stand there eating minutes so jokic’s lungs don’t collapse by march. but jonas is good. he is overqualified. he is the best they’ve had since jamychal green in 2021 — a bar so low it barely deserves to be called a bar.

all these moves — bruce back for a hug, hardaway to shoot, valanciunas to eat glass — are the direct children of that porter-for-johnson swap. the cap gymnastics make sense in a spreadsheet. in your heart, they feel like a half-step. because this team, every offseason, every press conference, every cap table, is a tightrope walk between how much you owe jokic and how little you want to spend on him. this is a franchise that will burn the last first-round pick they’re allowed to trade — 2032! — just to duck an apron no one else is afraid to cross. they did it before with jeff green, with kcp, with bruce himself. the nuggets don’t hate winning. they just hate paying for it.

but here’s the poison that keeps them alive: jokic is too good for them to fail. he makes every roster hole smaller, every bad contract less toxic, every rotation mistake less fatal. if you’re bruce brown or cam johnson or tim hardaway jr., you get to wake up knowing every pass you catch is better than the last, every cut means something, every slip screen is a highlight reel waiting to happen. there’s no other player in the league that makes an entire bench upgrade feel so obvious, so idiot-proof.

so here we are. the nuggets didn’t swing for the fences. they didn’t land a superstar. they didn’t even keep porter jr. around to see if his back could hold up another may run. they gave up the pick, they dodged the tax, they reloaded just enough to claim the moral high ground of being “the best they could be” while the thunder, rockets and knicks do the reckless things that make summer interesting. but guess what: denver (+600) are second behind okc (+275) in the title odds. they are still the only ones who know how to make shai sweat, how to keep chet up at night, how to force a game 7 with their stars taped together.

and maybe — maybe — that’s enough. maybe that’s what this team will always be: too smart to spend, too good to break, too scared to die. a perfect little basketball purgatory where the best player on earth does just enough to make you believe he’ll do it again. until, one day, there’s no more pick to trade, no more tax line to duck, no more prime to waste. but for now? bruce is back. timmy’s gonna let it fly. jokic will drop a 40-20-12 just to prove he still can.

the reluctant winners live on. may your luxury tax bill stay unpaid forever.