MPJ pinpoints where the Nuggets’ title window cracked

Michael Porter Jr. was spot-on when he talked about on hist podcast, Curious Mike, where the Denver Nuggets’ post-championship downfall began.

“(Letting go of Kentavious Caldwell-Pope) that was the beginning of our (the Nuggets) downfall,” Porter said to his guest Lonzo Ball.

Porter, now with the Brooklyn Nets after last summer’s trade sent him to New York City, laid the whole thing out. How Tim Connelly built Minnesota with two bigs to counter Nikola Jokic. How the Wolves came back against the Nuggets in a Game 7 in Colorado. How a year later Denver had another Game 7 and lost to Oklahoma City, with Porter playing through a Grade 2 AC joint injury, numbing his shoulder with a needle before every game. How he got shipped out. How Peyton Watson just got dealt to Cleveland. How piece after piece has been stripped from a championship core that fit together perfectly.

He’s right. And if you’ve been reading Denver Sports the whole time, you know we’ve been saying it through it all.

The Nuggets have lost one significant player from that title team every single offseason since the parade. Bruce Brown walked in 2023 because Denver was boxed in under the old CBA. KCP left for Orlando’s three-year, $66 million offer in 2024 because ownership wouldn’t stomach the second apron. Porter was traded in 2025 for flexibility that was barely used. Watson was sign-and-traded to the Cavaliers for future picks just last week. That’s four guys in four summers. What they have in common is the appearance of the NBA’s rules punishing teams via the second apron and tax bill.

Calvin Booth told us at the time they’d be fine. Plug and play, he called it. He pointed to Christian Braun’s net rating and defensive profile as evidence the Nuggets could survive losing a two-time champion who hit 41% from deep and solved the perimeter defense problem that plagued the entire Jokic era before his arrival. Braun is a good player. He proved that as a starter. But he isn’t KCP, and those are two different conversations the Nuggets never really had.

KCP was a small guards nightmare. He is a screen navigator. He chased shooters off the ball all night and then knock down the open three on the other side that Jokic created for him on offense. He made 125-plus threes in each of his two Denver seasons. Braun, at the time he was slotted in, hadn’t cracked 100 in a single year as a pro and went 20 straight playoff games without hitting from deep. Braun brought grit and defense, but he clogged the spacing alongside Aaron Gordon, who at the time was another uncertain deep shooter. The balance of that starting five walked out the door with KCP.

What makes it sting more is KCP told us afterward exactly what happened during that 2024 run. On Draymond Green’s podcast, he said the Nuggets burned themselves out chasing the No. 1 seed down the stretch of the regular season. They lost a late regular season game to the lowly Spurs and ended up second anyway. By the time the playoffs arrived, they had no gas.

“We felt like the Lakers (in Round 1) should’ve beat us, we was down every game,” KCP said. “Taking that energy, using it there, there was a lot that went into that season.”

Denver survived Los Angeles in five but trailed for nearly 75% of the series. Then came the Wolves and that 20-point blown lead at home in Game 7 — the last playoff run under Michael Malone, who was fired late in the 2025 regular season along with Booth. The Nuggets looked exhausted. They were. On top of that, KCP and Jamal Murray were dealing with injuries that sapped their explosiveness against Minny in 2024.

I’ve said it over and over: Denver either wins the title in 2024 if they don’t tax themselves trying to lock up that top seed, or they beat Oklahoma City in 2025 if KCP is still on the roster. That Game 7 against the Thunder, with Porter and Gordon hobbled and the Nuggets needing one more reliable body — that was the margin. One player. The player they let walk for financial reasons a summer earlier.

Pope’s wife said after he left for Orlando that the Nuggets never even offered him a similar deal to the one he got.

Porter knows the Nuggets were one player short. He also acknowledged something important on the podcast — the Nuggets aren’t dead. As long as Jokic, Jamal Murray and Gordon are together, and with DeMar DeRozan now in the fold, they’ll compete. But compete and contend aren’t the same thing, and what Denver had in 2023 was a contending roster with camaraderie and depth that has never been replicated.

“We had some camaraderie,” Porter said. “We had the guys you needed to win. We just perfectly fit.”

As for KCP, his career arc since leaving Denver tells its own story. He went to Orlando and his shooting numbers plummeted on one of the worst 3-point shooting teams in recent memory. The Magic got bounced in the first round again. He was traded to Memphis in a Desmond Bane blockbuster, then bought out by the Grizzlies this summer and signed a one-year deal with the 76ers to reunite with LeBron James. The man Denver wouldn’t pay $22 million a year is now making the veteran minimum. His Orlando contract may have been a bad deal for the Magic, but the Nuggets never actually replaced what KCP brought.

Maybe not re-signing KCP was the right move, but not directly replacing his skillset or signing-and-trading him to Dallas for Tim Hardaway Jr. was the biggest sin.

At the time, Booth compared Braun and Watson to Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown. He compared the young core to Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili around Tim Duncan. He told ESPN “be careful what you wish for” when Brown left and Watson’s role expanded. Then Watson broke out and got dealt to Cleveland for a 2031 first-rounder because the Nuggets wouldn’t go into the second apron to pay him either.

Porter, from the outside now, just confirmed what this outlet has been documenting in real time since draft night 2024 — the moment Booth started hinting that KCP was probably gone. The best starting five in basketball didn’t break up because the fit stopped working. It broke up because the Nuggets didn’t want to pay the bill, and that’s likely where the window shut.

Related

Nuggets’ Christian Braun: ‘We’ve got everything we need’ to win a championshipNuggets show off new dual-toned home floorPeyton Watson thanks Nuggets fans, teammates and front officeThe Nuggets’ problems run much deeper than one addition can fixThe illusion that the Nuggets are a contender won’t survive the playoffsESPN gives Nuggets solid grade for DeMar DeRozan signing