Through two rounds of the NBA playoffs, Nuggets starters Jamal Murray, Nikola Jokic, Christian Braun, and Aaron Gordon ranked one through four in the NBA in total minutes played. To some extent, that was a byproduct of Denver being the only team to play two seven-game series, but those four Nuggets all averaged between 37.3 and 41.3 minutes per game during the postseason, reflecting the team’s lack of reliable depth.
“We definitely need to figure out a way to get more depth,” Jokic said the Nuggets’ Game 7 loss on Sunday, per Tony Jones and Sam Amick of The Athletic. “It seems like the teams that have longer rotations, the longer benches, are the ones winning. You look at Indiana and OKC and Minnesota, and they have been great examples of that.”
Adding depth won’t be the easy for the Nuggets, who are hamstrung to some extent by maximum-salary contracts for Jokic, Murray, and Michael Porter Jr. Denver projects to operate in tax apron territory next season, lacks appealing trade chips, and is the only team that doesn’t have a pick in this year’s draft.
As Jones and Amick observe, it would be logical for the Nuggets to explore trading Porter, who is the most expendable of the team’s highest-paid players. Troy Renck of The Denver Post comes to the same conclusion, lauding Porter for gutting it out through a shoulder injury in the postseason but arguing that his inconsistency has become a liability for the club.
An April report indicated that Nuggets ownership has a particular fondness for Porter because he played his college ball at Missouri, the same school Stan Kroenke and Josh Kroenke attended. However, the prospect of trading Porter at this year’s deadline was “very much in play,” according to Jones and Amick, who note that the Nuggets gave real consideration to including him in a package for Zach LaVine.
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