The Nuggets say they’re fine, but Aaron Gordon named their problem

DENVER — David Adelman said he had already warned his players what was coming.

“I understand we’re going to say things. There’s going to be narratives, all that stuff,” the Denver Nuggets coach said Monday at media day, recounting what he told the team. “But the men in that room that are back won 54 (games) and won the most road games in the history of the franchise and had the best offense in the NBA. I know you guys want to ignore that, but that’s what they did.”

David Adelman on the playoff loss to Minnesota: "You have to lean into some of the things that you did well (mentions on 54 and won the most road games in the history of the franchise and had the best offense in the NBA) but you sure as hell have to learn from when you lose." pic.twitter.com/0yzmybEKnE

— Jake Shapiro (@Shapalicious) September 28, 2026

Nobody’s ignoring it. Fifty-four wins with a banged-up roster is impressive. So is a franchise record for road wins. So is an offense that, by the team’s telling, ranks second-best in league history.

But the Nuggets aren’t judged by that anymore, and everyone knows their standard. They won a championship in 2023. They have the best player in the world, and he just told us he intends to sign the biggest contract in league history next summer. For this team, the regular season is a quiz. The test comes in April and May and the grade comes back in June.

Last spring they got a big fat F.

The 3-seed Nuggets lost 4-2 in the first round to the 6-seed Timberwolves. Minnesota ended the series without Anthony Edwards, Ayo Dosunmu and Donte DiVincenzo. The Nuggets ended the series without showing much mettle. Jaden McDaniels talked big all series, called out individual players then ended Denver’s season with 32 points in the finale. His teammate Rudy Gobert made Nikola Jokic work for anything he could get, while multiple Nuggets were played off the floor by Minnesota’s young backups. As for the toughness? Denver got pounded on the glass in the series, out-rebounded by 17 in the close-out contest.

It’s the second time Minnesota has ended Denver’s season in three years.

Monday made one thing clear: the Nuggets believe the fix is on the margins. The front office said it didn’t want to overreact to the playoffs. The coach came with a list of adjustments, not an overhaul. And the players mostly fell back on who they know themselves to be: a good team.

Adelman’s shorthand for the rebounding collapse was a ‘bad 10 days.’ The phrase followed the team all day. Cam Johnson even brought it up unprompted.

“We didn’t have a bad year rebounding the ball,” Adelman said. “We had a bad 10 days, that cost us our season.”

He’s not wrong that six games is a small sample, and one matchup can bury you. Asked whether this team is better than the 2023 champions, Adelman said people discount that title because of upsets along the way. “We got upset last year,” he said. “That s— happened.” He called the ending “a horror story,” then told the history of those upsets with real feeling: Utah winning 60-plus and losing in the first round, Dirk Nowitzki’s MVP season ending against the 8-seed Warriors, the 1-seed Spurs losing to 8-seed Memphis.

It does happen. But look at what came next. Dirk won a title four years later, and the Spurs won three years later. Both got there by changing. Dallas eventually surrounded Dirk with Jason Kidd, Tyson Chandler and a tougher defensive identity. San Antonio reinvented how it played around a future multi-time Finals MVP

Adelman, to his credit, described something bigger than 10 days. “You sure as hell have to learn from when you lose, and I wouldn’t even say just the Minnesota series,” he said. He also said he’d been looking back “at all the losses we had last year and trying to find themes.” “There’s no excuses there,” he added.

But the label undersells his own diagnosis.

“What’s funny about last year to me, I kept bringing it up, was the guys were so good in the preseason and early in the year of picking up defensively, of being physical, of hitting the glass,” he said. “And then we changed. It felt like we just completely changed the team throughout the year because we had to, and we never got back to where we needed to get to win a series like that.”

That’s not a bad 10 days. By the coach’s own description, that’s months of drift that got exposed in the playoffs. The injuries forced some of it. But “we never got back” means the team they wanted to be never showed up in April — even during their 12-game win streak to end the regular season.

Earlier, explaining his worries about transition defense, he pointed to “the offensive rebounding we gave up late in the season.” Late in the season is not 10 days.

The front office said nearly the same thing. Co-general manager Jonathan Wallace said the Nuggets “left a lot of money on the table by not being as aggressive” in the playoffs, “and towards the latter part of the season last year.”

The latter part of the season. Not only the playoffs.

Adelman remembered Portland knocking out the first Nuggets team of this era to make the playoffs: “They choked us out.” That summer, he said, the staff asked, “How are we going to beat Portland and teams like that?” That’s the right instinct. But Minnesota also ended Denver’s repeat bid. The offseason that reacted to that should have happened in 2024. This one looked more like trimming than reinventing.

The players stuck mostly to the same script, with some small cracks.

Aaron Gordon rejected the idea that the team’s famous resilience going back years had faded.

“I don’t think we lost it,” Gordon said. “I think we had a lot of injuries last year, so there was a lot of adversity. Still won the most road games in franchise history and won 54 games or something like that, so it’s still there. But at some point in time, you need your whole team to win a championship.”

Gordon’s health matters as much as anyone’s. When he played last season, the Nuggets outplayed their opponents by 13.8 points per 100 possessions. Jokic said Monday “there is no player in the league like him” when he’s right. If Gordon and Peyton Watson had been healthy in that series, it may have gone differently. You can say all of that once. After that it becomes an excuse, and this group has used it a lot.

Christian Braun, asked whether Denver’s issues were cultural, said: “I don’t think it’s culture yet.”

Yet.

That’s quite a revealing single word from one of Denver’s leaders.

Johnson was the bluntest.

“There’s a lot of ways to lose a playoff series, and that way we lost was one of the unacceptable ones,” Johnson said. “It doesn’t sit with you well all summer. … You can chalk it up to whatever you want, a bad 10 days or whatever that is.”

Whatever you want to call it, Johnson called it unacceptable. Keep that word in mind when you look at Denver’s summer.

Some of the media day framing missed the mark. Adelman talked about being “in the mix and peaking at the right time.” Gordon described a roster full of “underdogs” and “dark horses” who’ve “been counted out and underrated.” “And we like hunting,” he said.

That mentality fits the new bench guys. It doesn’t fit a team that raised a banner in 2023 and employs the best player in the world. DeMar DeRozan, who chose Denver this summer after 17 seasons around the league, put it best: “When you have the best player in the world, you know anything’s possible.”

That’s the standard. It’s not “we got upset, it happens.” A team with Jokic in his prime, three years removed from a title, doesn’t get to call a first-round loss to a shorthanded 6 seed bad luck. It certainly doesn’t get to after losing to the same team two years earlier due to many of the same issues. And it just can’t do that when that team talked trash all series and backed it up. It shouldn’t sit right with anyone.

Yes, only one team wins the title as Jamal Murray pointed out — but there’s a big gap between not winning a title and losing in six games to a rival that wanted it more.

Late in the day, I asked Gordon and Murray how they balance two ideas: that they’re a proven, very good team, and that last April requires something to change.

Murray went first, and his answer mostly stuck to the company line.

“We know what we’re capable of, and we just gotta trust it, be consistent with it all year, and not overthink it,” Murray said. He named transition defense and building chemistry with the new pieces as things that have to get better. “All that’s going to matter in the littlest way. It’s going to add up to be big things.”

His coach had already taken some of that on himself. “The amount of pressure that I put on Jamal last year… was just too much,” Adelman said. In Game 6, with McDaniels on him, Murray shot 4-for-17.

Then Gordon gave the answer of the day:

“There’s a certain level of urgency that’s necessary, but bad teams panic. Bad teams push the panic button,” he said. “But there is a certain level of urgency, and there is a certain level of complacency that comes with mastery. So we’re fighting that and making sure that we have the right level of urgency.”

Complacency that comes with mastery.

That’s the tension in this team, said by someone who lives it. It’s the same word Josh Kroenke, the voice of ownership and self proclaimed chief culture office, used at his end-of-season press conference. He named complacency as the problem. This summer, he said everything but trading Jokic was on the table. The starting five came back intact.

Neither Kroenke nor his father, Stan, the actual owner, spoke Monday, even though both were in town Sunday for the Rams-Broncos game. So the executives took the questions, and it was Gordon, the player fans call Mr. Nugget, who brought complacency back up.

The difference is that on Monday, it came after a morning when the resume did most of the talking.

Gordon is right that this isn’t the time to panic. The front office didn’t. Co-GM Ben Tenzer said they were careful “to not overreact to the playoffs.” The proven-to-be-good starting five is intact.

The changes came on the margins, and most of them saved money. Denver moved off the salaries of Peyton Watson and Jonas Valanciunas and let Tim Hardaway Jr. and Bruce Brown walk. The bench was rebuilt with cheaper veterans: DeRozan, Alpha Diallo, Lonnie Walker IV and Marvin Bagley III, with Spencer Jones and Tyus Jones stepping into bigger roles.

Watson is the tell. Adelman said Monday that he could’ve eased some of the load on Murray with Gordon and Watson, “they were a big part of that.” In other words, the coach counts Watson’s absence as part of why the season ended the way it did. This summer, the front office signed-and-traded him to Cleveland rather than pay to keep him.

Johnson called the loss unacceptable. Denver’s summer answered it with a smaller payroll. That isn’t panic, but it isn’t urgency either.

Adelman’s fixes are real, but small: more offensive rebounding to slow opponents in transition, simpler entries against pressure, players “owning their spots,” and DeRozan, Jones and Johnson taking ball-handling duty off Murray. All of this could make the Nuggets better. Most of that is about habits, and habits get built in practice. “We don’t practice a ton,” Adelman said.

On the same day the best player in the world said he’ll commit the rest of his prime to Denver, the brass had to defend a summer of saving money. Jokic ended up as the most urgent voice in the building. That makes sense. It’s his legacy.

“I think that’s some legacy that you’re gonna leave, and the memories that I always like to say when I came here, there was not a lot of people in the stands, and now we have 150 sellouts in a row,” Jokic said. “It really means (a lot) to me. We basically were like so-so team, and then we grow, we won a championship, and we still have a capability and have an opportunity to play, compete on a high level, and to win a championship. So for me, it’s a legacy. Like you want to be legendary, and if you want to be remembered.”

Big Honey said he’ll sign an extension next summer, “if they want me.” When asked about his comment from after Denver’s knockout in April of “not close,” he didn’t recite the regular-season numbers, he said he was emotional in the moment then flashed more gratitude before saying the thing we’re all thinking.

“I think we don’t appreciate that we have a good team, or we have a chance when we have opportunity,” Jokic said. “We don’t have so much time.”

DeRozan, heading into his 18th season, talked about a personal mantra: it’s almost over. The two players with the most perspective sounded the most aware that time is running out — if it hasn’t already.

Nobody should expect Denver to look like a new team in October. Johnson said you can’t fast-forward to next year’s playoffs, and he’s right. No amount of regular-season proof will settle this anyway. Last year showed that six months of good basketball can be erased in 10 days.

Johnson and Gordon said it more plainly than their coach did. Jokic and DeRozan set the deadline.