Jamal Murray shows Nuggets what real leadership looks like as Adelman falters

When the Denver Nuggets needed accountability Thursday night, it didn’t come from the coach. It came from Jamal Murray.

In the aftermath of a 113-96 Game 3 beatdown at Target Center that puts Denver in a 2-1 hole, head coach David Adelman stood at the podium and, over and over, pointed to shot-making as the reason his team got run out of the building. Murray, standing at the same podium minutes later, did something different. He took the bullet.

“I missed some easy shots today. I took some tough ones,” Murray said. “A lot of them, I’m overthinking. I just got to make them, and I struggled to make them today for my team. So it’s frustrating when you don’t make it, and you got to think of something of why you make it.”

That’s what leadership sounds like — and it’s the kind of ownership that was conspicuously absent from the man on the sidelines. It was also the only real sign of a pulse from a Nuggets team that didn’t bark back once Thursday night, after 48 hours of Minnesota talking trash and the Target Center crowd showing up to watch the Wolves deliver on it.

Pressed on how the Nuggets came out so flat — trailing 14 after a first quarter in which Denver shot 3 of 21 — Adelman kept returning to the same well.

“The shooting really put us behind the eight ball to start the game,” Adelman said. “They only gave up 25 points in the first quarter. That’s actually a very good number. We just had a hard time making shots tonight.”

On Nikola Jokic’s 7-of-26 dud? “He just missed.”

On the 68 points the Wolves poured into the paint? A gamble on a small lineup that “we knew could happen.”

On Christian Braun (two points) and Cameron Johnson (six points) disappearing again? “They have to screen better.”

Everywhere the finger pointed, it pointed away from Adelman.

And to his point, ball was going anywhere but through the basket.

It was the 11th time since Jokic debuted that Denver scored 11 or fewer points in a quarter.

It was also the 13th time in the Jokic era that Denver was held under 40 in an entire first half.

Of the 81 times in Jokic’s career he has taken 25 or more shots, Thursday was the first time he hit seven or fewer.

When things go this historically sideways, “he just missed” doesn’t really cut it. Especially when it’s the fewest assists the Nuggets have tossed in a game in a decade, when Jokic was still coming off the bench. That’s not just misses, that’s a bad approach. Thanks, coach.

It gets worse when you listen closely. Aaron Gordon, the x-factor of Denver’s lineup and the player Wolves coach Chris Finch called “the perfect fit for that team,” was ruled out with a left calf injury. Adelman made it sound like the decision came out of nowhere.

“No information tonight,” the coach said when asked about Gordon and Peyton Watson, who is also out with a right hamstring strain, for Game 4. “I think they’ll come in see the trainers in the morning. We’ll meet in the afternoon. They’ll give me a chance to have half the day to wait and get a solid answer from the training staff, because I do think, out of fairness to the team, we want to be prepared for who’s going to play that next game. It just helps you, because you guys know the expectation of what’s going to be that night, as opposed to today, where we were scrambling a little bit.”

First off, ‘out of fairness to the team?’ Was it unfair one of your best players was trying to do whatever he could to play, a year after playing a Game 7 with a serious hamstring injury.

And ‘scrambling?’ That’s what the team was… give me a break, man. They played more games without Gordon than with him this year.

But it gets worse when you contrast it with what his MVP said into that same microphone. Asked when the team knew Gordon wouldn’t play, Jokic answered plainly: “Two days ago, we knew it. I knew it. Me personally, I think.”

So either Adelman didn’t know what his best player knew 48 hours in advance, he knew and sent his team into a road playoff game without a real plan, or he’s using Gordon’s absence as a convenient excuse now. Pick one. None of it is a good look. And it’s exactly the kind of disconnect that explains how Denver got blitzed 25-11 in a first quarter and never threatened again.

Contrast all of that with Murray, who finished 5 of 17 with 16 points and could have easily hid behind the same excuses. Instead, the Blue Arrow pointed at himself, pointed at the group, and then — when asked what his team needed to pull out of this — offered a roadmap the head coach never came close to matching.

“We have to play with a lot more togetherness. We have to bring that back,” Murray said. “We have to trust each other more within our offense, take our time a little bit — we’re getting sped up in that first quarter, allowing them to have confidence, allowing them to get on a run, get points on the board, get fans into it. So I just think we just come together and understand what the tempo and what the feeling is like on the road.”

“If we can just control our emotions a little better, control our pace, control our tempo, and get the shots that we create all the time — I think that’s key. We got to play with better emotion and not be as rushed. They’re pressing and then holding and grabbing — we got to do it back, and also calm down at the same time, not let it fuel us into taking bad drives or bad shots. When we settle down, believing in what we do, believing in each other — when we pass, trust the pass. Trust each other’s shot. Just spacing, stuff like that. Yeah. We’ll come back with a better flow for next game.”

Those are all problems the Nuggets should be attempting to solve, especially with the extra day of prep Denver got before Games 2 and 3. The Wolves aren’t doing anything drastically different — in fact, it’s much of the same stuff that knocked Denver out in 2024. Yet a few days later or a few years later — depending on how you look at it — the Nuggets look underprepared and physically overmatched.

But focusing on Murray, he names the mindset required to execute what the Nuggets need — belief, calm, emotion without panic. It’s everything you want the voice of a team to be with its back against the wall on the road, delivered by a player who has lived this exact situation before and has a nickname and championship ring to prove it.

Murray name-checked the 2024 series against these same Timberwolves, when Denver dropped two at home before going to Minnesota and stealing two back. He mentioned belief. He mentioned togetherness. He mentioned trust. And then he did what Adelman didn’t — he owned his piece of the failure while charting the way out.

Adelman, to his credit, invoked last year’s Clippers series as a reason not to panic, a first-round matchup the Nuggets eventually won after dropping Game 3 in similar fashion. He’s right that this team has the scar tissue, going all the way back for almost a decade now. But Adelman has much of that experience as second man up on the sidelines or as an interim, not as the guy.

“The panic is not going to be there,” Adelman said. “But without the panic, there has to be responsibility to get better for Game 4.”

Fine words. But responsibility starts at the top. It means having a firm game plan before getting to the arena. For the team to come out like that, no matter who was on the floor, was a joke. After closing Game 2 in such an embarrassing way, Adelman only said he wanted Jokic and Murray to keep shooting when I pressed with a question about adjustments — and that set the tone. The two of them did shoot a bunch in the first quarter, and much like the fourth quarter from the other night, it was another one of the worst 12-minute stretches of offense of the team’s season.

Maybe Adelman doesn’t call it panic, but responsibility is a big word for a team that doesn’t respect itself enough to howl at its rivals after they smack-talked Denver following Game 2, then came out to embarrass the Nuggets in Game 3 from the jump. From the league’s punching bag in Rudy Gobert locking up Jokic, to former Nugget Bones Hyland breaking ankles and staring down the defense while the talker himself Jaden McDaniels had one of the best playoff games of his career.

Denver can still flip this series and playoff run. The group that beat the Clippers last spring is largely the same group in this locker room, and the Nuggets have made an M.O. out of ignoring the panic button, just look at their stars and go back to 2020. But the blueprint for climbing out of this hole doesn’t start with Adelman’s deflection or his scrambling. It starts with what Murray laid out at the podium in Minneapolis — togetherness, trust, tempo, belief. A better idea for the start of next game and a better flow throughout it. It continues through needing much more from Jokic in the next three games than the first three and it stops with Adelman.

That’s leadership from No. 27. Denver needs more of it, from everyone, including the coach and the three-time MVP. Otherwise, this series is going to end in a place nobody in the Mile High City wants to go.

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