It’s time to freak out about the Nuggets

DENVER — The vibes feel familiar, and not in a good way.

This time last year, the Denver Nuggets were spiraling toward a dramatic head coach and general manager firing to save their season at the last second. Now, after a promising start to the season, Denver finds itself right back in that dark place — a team that is stuck and searching for answers they can’t seem to parse.

Sunday’s 117-108 loss to the Minnesota Timberwolves at Ball Arena was just another of the same old losses we’ve become accustomed to as of late, and it’s looking like a referendum on who these Nuggets are.

Denver fell behind by as many as 14 points and never led after seeing their first-quarter lead squandered, getting outscored 36-19 in the second period as their season-long issues crystallized into one brutal afternoon.

“That run was, I believe, was in two minutes and three seconds,” coach David Adelman said of the decisive Wolves surge where they started the second period on a heater. “Told them after the game, that’s just inexcusable.”

At one point during that ugly stint, Tim Hardaway Jr. was the lone Nuggets player to hit a shot for over nine minutes of game time.

So inexcusable? Yes. That’s the word. And it keeps applying to this team with simple mistakes both late in contests and throughout them, if you’re looking hard enough.

The Nuggets are now 37-24, and they’ve gone 17-18 in their last 35 games. They’re 16-12 at home, where they used to be nearly unbeatable, but where they’ve been pretty pedestrian since the Wolves killed them in Game 7 of the 2024 playoffs.

The Nuggets have the toughest remaining schedule in the NBA. And they just got steamrolled by a Timberwolves team that took getting at least one game off of Denver seriously enough to shorten their rotation to eight players.

It was good enough to swap the two teams in the standings, dropping the Nuggets to fifth in the West for the first time since Hector was a Pup while the Wolves rose to a coveted top-four seed.

The championship swagger that defined this franchise just a few years ago? That’s gone.

The optimism that accompanied a strong start to this season? Evaporated.

What’s left is an exhausted team now facing the cumulative impact of some bad losses and the amount of time some players have had to be on the court with all the injuries the Nuggets have faced.

The larger worry now is that Denver is just Milwaukee 2.0.

Are we watching Nikola Jokic follow the same path as Giannis Antetokounmpo’s Bucks — a transcendent talent surrounded by a crumbling supporting cast watching a championship window slam shut after a panicked trade to shake up the core. In Milwaukee’s case, the team shipped out Jrue Holiday.

In Denver’s case, it was Michael Porter Jr.

On Sunday, his replacement Cameron Johnson went 0-for-6 from the field, 0-for-4 from three, and finished with zero points in 23 minutes. He was a minus-13, worst among the starters, coming on the heels of his stinker in Oklahoma City. Johnson, acquired to be the difference-maker Denver needed, has been far from that in his injury-limited action.

Adelman pointed to the ankle.

DA says Cameron Johnson’s ankle pain really impacted him but reaffirms he’s the Nuggets starting small forward “I trust him, his body just wasn’t there.” pic.twitter.com/3N62HnyaeT

— Jake Shapiro (@Shapalicious) March 1, 2026

“He did not move well today,” the coach said. “Obviously Cam knows we’re out a lot of people at the wing position, and so he fought through it. And I think it obviously affected his game. He had a hard time moving side to side.”

But Johnson himself refused to hide behind the injury.

“It’s no excuse,” he said. “If anything, everybody’s dealing with stuff at this point of the season.”

When asked what’s not working, his answer was somewhat haunting: “Simple things, man. Just simple things. Such as bounces are not going my way, and kind of the compounding effect and frustration.”

And the most telling quote of all?

“Most frustrating thing is just not really being able to find a consistent rhythm, just feeling, you know, real stuck,” he said.

Stuck — it describes more than just Johnson.

Hardaway Jr. and Adelman both expressed faith in Johnson publicly, with Hardaway saying he just needs to “instill his confidence back.” But faith doesn’t win playoff games. Production does.

Porter was hurt plenty of his career but he played through much of the pain and, when he was out there, he almost always made an impact. That was until the shoulder injury that heavily limited his postseason last year. He had three games in the playoffs where he was worse than a -10 plus-mins and scored fewer than 10 points. Johnson was pitched as somebody who could do the little things that would have a positive effect even when he wasn’t scoring. In his last two games, both over the weekend against teams Denver will need to beat to make a run, he’s -38 with just seven points. That includes a missed possible-game-winning triple.

Maybe it’s too much to ask of Johnson, who has only played into the final rounds of the playoffs once during the bizarre 2020-21 season. But if that’s the case, the Nuggets are beyond screwed already.

The questions around Johnson might be easier to dismiss if the rest of the team were picking up the slack. That’s what happened earlier in the season during the forward’s struggles then. Now, they’re not.

The Nuggets led 31-22 after the first quarter. Jokic was cooking and the offense was clicking, rare for a day game in Denver. Then the second quarter happened: Minnesota 36, Denver 19. The Wolves shot 60.9% in the period while the Nuggets shot just 28.6%. A 12-0 Minnesota run turned a nine-point Denver lead into a deficit, part of a 27-9 stretch that effectively ended the game before halftime.

“I thought we let struggles offensively, missed shots, turn into horrendous defense,” Adelman said. “I have to find a unit that will actually do that, compete at a higher level, because to me, that was the game.”

This wasn’t an isolated incident. “It’s happened two games in a row,” Adelman admitted. “It’s cost us big time.”

Jokic didn’t agree with his coach’s take, saying the Nuggets had plenty of time in the second half to make up for that sour stretch but the team wasn’t able to execute.

And to be fair, it’s hard to execute against a good team four times for wins in the same year and it’s even tougher without three of your power forwards in Aaron Gordon, Peyton Watson and Spencer Jones.

That’s where Jamal Murray’s head was at.

“Once we get healthy, figure it out, and kind of get back to base of who’s out there and stuff like that, we’ll be fine.” But then I asked Murray about the team’s uncharacteristic struggles at home and in close games. “Yeah, for sure, it’s frustrating, it’s uncharacteristic, but it’s okay. It’s okay.”

I’m not so sure it is okay this time around. Though I do agree with Murray that there’s a great team somewhere inside the Nuggets, it’s just been way too long since we’ve seen that version of the group.

If anyone has earned the right to sound the alarm, it’s Jokic. He did everything he could Sunday: 35 points, 13 rebounds, 9 assists on 15-of-26 shooting. He looked back to 100% healthy after his January off with a knee injury, and his first dunk of 2026 kind of proved that.

In Joker’s postgame press conference, the three-time MVP wasn’t interested in sugar-coating anything, coming across as pretty irked.

“We cannot let our offense, shooting — bad shooting — affect our defense,” Jokic said. “I felt like in those moments where we didn’t make shots, we kind of stopped playing defense. In those moments. I think, overall, we kind of played good. But in those moments, like it was like three, four times during the game when they had the runs, we kind of stopped playing defense, and that cost us the game.”

Asked if the struggles could be a good thing, Jokic offered a cryptic response.

“I think it’s a good thing to happen, then you start worrying and you start caring probably more. I think the struggle is good,” he said.

And then came the question everyone wanted answered: Does this team have enough time to figure it out? While Murray answered that confidently, Jokic didn’t.

“Hopefully,” Jokic said. “I think hopefully we do.”

Hopefully…

“We are not healthy, probably the whole season, and we will see when we’re going to be healthy, because it seems like every time something happens,” he said.

For those that want to side with hope — last year the Nuggets only had three games to figure it out and nearly did all the way to a ring.

But Jokic’s uncertainty is pretty stomach churning, as was the cruel irony of Sunday’s collapse.

Bones Hyland — the guard Denver traded away — torched his former team for 18 points in just 15 minutes, shooting 6-of-7 from the field and hitting all three of his triples. He did most of his damage in that second-quarter avalanche, when the Nuggets’ bench couldn’t buy a bucket and couldn’t get a stop. The same Hyland who didn’t have the attitude to stick in Denver was the one delivering the biggest blow.

Meanwhile, Julian Strawther, who was drafted a year later to replace much of that role, finished with 2 points on 1-of-4 shooting in 17 minutes. Johnson had his goose egg. The depth that carried this team in Jokic’s absence is now becoming a problem.

The one bright spot? Jalen Pickett, who scored 4 points with 2 assists in just 6 minutes, was a plus-8. Adelman noticed.

“Actually thought Jalen Pickett’s minutes were pretty good,” the coach said. “He came in and gave us something. We need more of that from more people.”

But one six-minute stint from a deep bench guard isn’t going to save this season, nor will it stop the Bucks allegations. Those run as deep as the same playoff pattern and a similar type of turnover at coach.

Adelman seemed lost on Sunday, or at the very least miffed. He called his last timeout with almost eight minutes to go in the fourth quarter. That’s how out of sorts the team was. He called a timeout a minute into the fourth quarter after a 4-0 start by the Wolves. He unsuccessfully used a challenge to attempt to prevent a Johnson foul and Rudy Gobert free throws in the second quarter.

Why was he using it there in there first place? Not sure, but it’s some of these in-game management decisions that make you wonder about a first-year head coach with the pressure of an all-time great chasing a second title after turning 30 in Jokic.

It’s hard to take shots at Adelman’s rotations given the team’s limitations, but they’ve created some of those issues for themselves by sticking with 14 players for the entire year and 13 players for as long as they were allowed.

Why? Because the team’s ownership wants to duck the luxury tax.

Would a buyout player swing a playoff series? Probably not.

But could he have taken some minutes off of somebody’s legs when Denver spent three weeks without a center? Yeah.

The buyout deadline with players already on rosters is later on Sunday. If the Nuggets fail there, it’s a pretty telling indictment from ownership and their so-called promise of owing it to Jokic to do whatever it takes to win.

Adelman tried to find silver linings after the loss.

“We won the season series. I’ll say that. So we won the season series 3-1.”

That is a victory in some ways, given how the Wolves had owned Denver the past few years.

But if Denver hadn’t lost unnecessarily to Dallas, Chicago, the Clippers, and a handful of other teams they should have beaten, going 3-1 against Minnesota would feel meaningful. Instead, it feels hollow. Sunday was a big game for Minnesota, and the Nuggets got torched.

Hardaway was asked how the team finds energy at this point of the season. His response was rather concerning.

“If you’re trying to find energy right now, it’s an issue,” he said. “We got some of the best, like one of the best jobs in the world, go out there and do what we love. To answer your question, we got to go find energy.”

Energy shouldn’t be optional this deep into the season, not for a team with championship aspirations.

The Nuggets, exhausted and beaten, somehow have a game Monday night in Utah against the tanking Jazz. Maybe the fact that Utah is more motivated to lose for a draft pick than they are to win can get a few Denver players off their legs before coming back home for Thursday and Friday night contests.

But this isn’t about one game. It’s about a pattern. It’s about a team that looks lost, sounds uncertain and plays like it’s waiting for reinforcements to fix the problems.

The injuries are real. The schedule is brutal. But the margin for error is well past gone.

Johnson left the game with his right ankle issue and is doubtful to play in Utah. Even if he plays, can you trust him right now? Murray says the team will be fine once healthy. But now there’s one more injury. Jokic says hopefully there’s enough time. Adelman says the collapse was inexcusable.

None of that sounds like a team that has “it.”

Calvin Booth already lost his job doing whatever it is that he did to this roster. Michael Malone already paid the price for a season that slipped away. Now Adelman and a new front office are watching the same movie play out in front of them — and they’re running out of time to change the ending.

It’s March. The playoffs are nearing. And the Denver Nuggets look nothing like champions.

It’s time to freak out, because even the star player knows we’re only relying on hope in the Mile High City.