**ESPN:** [recap](https://www.espn.com/nba/recap/_/gameId/401584136) – [boxscore](https://www.espn.com/nba/boxscore/_/gameId/401584136) – [gamecast](https://www.espn.com/nba/game/_/gameId/401584136) | **NBA.com:** [boxscore](https://www.nba.com/game/0022300048) – [shotchart](https://www.nba.com/game/0022300048/game-charts)
||**Q1**|**Q2**|**Q3**|**Q4**|**Final**||
|:—|:–:|:–:|:–:|:–:|:–:|:–:|
**DEN**|**19**|**24**|**26**|**17**|**86**|[](/DEN)|
**HOU**|**29**|**31**|**24**|**21**|**105**|[](/HOU)|
**Team**|**FG**|**3PT**|**FT**|**OR**|**Reb**|**Ast**|**TO**|**Stl**|**Blk**|**PF**|**Pts**|
|:—|—:|—:|—:|—:|—:|—:|—:|—:|—:|—:|—:|
[](/DEN)**DEN**|**32-95 (33.7)**|**7-30 (23.3)**|**15-21 (71.4)**|**16**|**46**|**17**|**14**|**7**|**4**|**14**|**86**|
[](/HOU)**HOU**|**40-82 (48.8)**|**12-29 (41.4)**|**13-15 (86.7)**|**6**|**49**|**25**|**13**|**8**|**9**|**21**|**105**|
**[](/DEN)DEN**|**Min**|**FG**|**3PT**|**FT**|**OR**|**Reb**|**Ast**|**TO**|**Stl**|**Blk**|**PF**|**Pts**|**+/-**|
|:—|—:|—:|—:|—:|—:|—:|—:|—:|—:|—:|—:|—:|—:|
M. Porter Jr.^^SF|37:11|6-14 (42.9)|2-8 (25.0)|0-0 (0.0)|1|7|1|1|1|2|1|14|-8|
A. Gordon^^PF|39:01|0-12 (0.0)|0-4 (0.0)|2-4 (50.0)|3|7|2|1|0|0|1|2|-9|
N. Jokic^^C|42:09|14-31 (45.2)|3-8 (37.5)|7-11 (63.6)|6|19|8|3|2|0|3|38|-12|
K. Caldwell-Pope^^SG|39:16|7-15 (46.7)|1-5 (20.0)|5-5 (100.0)|3|5|3|2|3|0|4|20|-7|
R. Jackson^^PG|25:18|1-8 (12.5)|0-2 (0.0)|0-0 (0.0)|2|4|3|5|0|1|0|2|-26|
C. Braun|25:48|3-9 (33.3)|0-0 (0.0)|1-1 (100.0)|0|3|0|0|0|0|1|7|-2|
J. Strawther|5:53|0-0 (0.0)|0-0 (0.0)|0-0 (0.0)|0|0|0|0|0|0|1|0|-15|
P. Watson|5:47|0-3 (0.0)|0-1 (0.0)|0-0 (0.0)|1|1|0|0|0|1|1|0|-18|
Z. Nnaji|3:49|0-1 (0.0)|0-0 (0.0)|0-0 (0.0)|0|0|0|1|0|0|0|0|0|
C. Gillespie|3:04|0-0 (0.0)|0-0 (0.0)|0-0 (0.0)|0|0|0|1|0|0|0|0|-7|
J. Holiday|12:44|1-2 (50.0)|1-2 (50.0)|0-0 (0.0)|0|0|0|0|1|0|2|3|+9|
**Totals**||**32-95 (33.7)**|**7-30 (23.3)**|**15-21 (71.4)**|**16**|**46**|**17**|**14**|**7**|**4**|**14**|**86**||
**DNP:** ***DeAndre Jordan***, ***Braxton Key***, ***Jalen Pickett***, ***Hunter Tyson***
**Inactive:** ***Vlatko Cancar***, ***Jay Huff***, ***Jamal Murray***
**[](/HOU)HOU**|**Min**|**FG**|**3PT**|**FT**|**OR**|**Reb**|**Ast**|**TO**|**Stl**|**Blk**|**PF**|**Pts**|**+/-**|
|:—|—:|—:|—:|—:|—:|—:|—:|—:|—:|—:|—:|—:|—:|
D. Brooks^^SF|29:54|2-8 (25.0)|2-3 (66.7)|2-2 (100.0)|1|2|2|2|0|0|4|8|+8|
J. Smith Jr.^^PF|37:58|6-9 (66.7)|2-3 (66.7)|2-2 (100.0)|3|14|1|1|1|1|2|16|+16|
A. Sengun^^C|42:48|8-19 (42.1)|0-4 (0.0)|5-6 (83.3)|1|14|8|5|2|1|4|21|+12|
J. Green^^SG|35:58|10-18 (55.6)|3-8 (37.5)|2-3 (66.7)|0|6|2|3|2|0|0|25|0|
F. VanVleet^^PG|38:59|6-12 (50.0)|3-5 (60.0)|2-2 (100.0)|0|6|11|1|1|2|3|17|+30|
A. Holiday|14:42|3-4 (75.0)|1-1 (100.0)|0-0 (0.0)|0|0|0|0|1|1|2|7|+2|
J. Tate|15:48|2-4 (50.0)|0-1 (0.0)|0-0 (0.0)|0|3|0|1|0|1|4|4|+6|
T. Eason|15:50|3-6 (50.0)|1-2 (50.0)|0-0 (0.0)|1|4|1|0|1|0|2|7|+9|
J. Green|8:03|0-2 (0.0)|0-2 (0.0)|0-0 (0.0)|0|0|0|0|0|3|0|0|+12|
**Totals**||**40-82 (48.8)**|**12-29 (41.4)**|**13-15 (86.7)**|**6**|**49**|**25**|**13**|**8**|**9**|**21**|**105**||
**DNP:** ***Reggie Bullock Jr.***, ***Jock Landale***, ***Boban Marjanovic***, ***Nate Williams***
**Inactive:** ***Nate Hinton***, ***Victor Oladipo***, ***Jermaine Samuels Jr.***, ***Amen Thompson***, ***Cam Whitmore***
||**PITP**|**2^^nd PTS**|**FB PTS**|**BIG LD**|**BEN PTS**|**TOT TOV**|**TOV PTS**||
|:—|:–:|:–:|:–:|:–:|:–:|:–:|:–:|:–:|
**DEN**|36|16|4|5|10|14|21|[](/DEN)|
**HOU**|44|9|14|26|18|13|12|[](/HOU)|
**Lead Changes: 5** | **Times Tied: 5** | **Gametime: 2:07** | **Attendance: 18055**
*Officials: Karl Lane, Jacyn Goble, Dannica Mosher*
by BigHoneyBot
49 Comments
Stinks that I have to be mean to my family for the rest of the night. It’s out of my hands!
I miss Murray. I miss Murray SO MUCH. Jokic basically doesn’t have a number pick and roll option without Murray. Reggie is too inconsistent
Malone overload Jokic and Gordon because Jordan has to sit like a mascot on the bench? What the hell was FO thinking. Why didn’t FO bring in any backup center? Even small children from Fantasy know that last season Jordan, Justin Holiday and Reggie Jackson were among the worst players out of 400-500 NBA players. The young players wouldn’t be so bad if there were even semi-competent veterans instead of Jordan, Justin and Reggie. Denver’s FO and Malone don’t seem to understand that the title was brought about by the fantastic games of Jokic and Murray.
Almost everyone has gotten stronger and Denver’s biggest “boost” is one of the worst players in the NBA Justin Holiday and keeping washed Jordan and semi washed Reggie. Playing with Jokic for 42 minutes in the 16th game of the season is out of the mind, but “Jordan is a great guy in the locker room”. That’s not how you build a dynasty.
Even with Murray, this roster needs to change 4-5 players if we want to be serious contenders. I have the impression that Zeke and Peyton are afraid of making mistakes because of Malone and they come out even worse than they are.
We really suck on the road suddenly … but 10 games on a road in a row did exhaust us as well messy schedule
It’s times like these that I like to remember the old Phoenix Suns adage “Jamal Murray wouldn’t have helped, bro”
My baby AG getting dragged on all social media platforms for the next two days 😭
If the non jokic minutes are bad no matter who is on the floor, it’s a coaching problem.
Pretty messed up that they scheduled us to play a dude from Turkey the day after Thanksgiving. We were cooked from the start smh
How possible is it to trade for kai jones
Are we still allowed to blame the court designs? I vote to blame the court designs.
This has been a pretty rough stretch and showed three of the biggest holes on the team: ball-handling, self creation, and lack of quick first steps…and these are just exacerbated with Jamal out. The offense just can’t generate good looks when there is no dribble penetration and the paint can be packed with any lineup with more than one non-shooter on the floor.
It’s good that it is still early season and there is time to figure out how to adjust to these difficulties, but it’s still rough to watch at times because there is no offensive flow.
This is why the elbow jumper from KCP off of Jokic screens were in full supply tonight with no penetration and a relatively packed paint. Love that KCP stepped up a bit more as the game went along and nothing else was really working, but it’s hard for him to maintain elite defense when he’s also tasked with a bigger offensive role.
Hopefully the team can right the ship soon and some of these issues aren’t just masked by Jamal’s return because it’s good to work through these things early in the season. Go Nuggets and hope the team shows some good improvement over the next stretch of games!
doom takes are the best takes
hate the losses but man our fan base makes up for this with top tier dooming
The lineup is fine. Bad stretches happen to every team.
I don’t think Porter will ever be a well rounded player. He’s just a stretch wing at this point. He’ll never be worth more than 25 mil per year. They need some good veterans on minimum contracts.
We’re gonna be fine. Woulda been nice to have a chance at the IST cup but all that matters is lifting that trophy again in June. Once Mal comes back, things will be fine. It’s not just that we miss his scoring, it’s that everybody else (except Jok) can fall back to their normal roles. MPJ and KCP are going to get so much more space with him in the lineup. Also he’ll run with the bench, which will help Reggie and some of the young guys even more.
As long as #15 is on this team, I’m not trippin. Still the champs baby we’ll bounce back. Go Nugs
N Jokic
O Toppin
L Doncic
K Caldwell-Pope
J Murray
zeke with the 0+- masterclass
The offense shouldn’t be that stagnant just because Murray’s out. Nobody’s moving, nobody’s cutting. It’s like a totally different team.
I am so done with this team.
Can we call Kamagate up?
Yo what’s going on with the nuggets. Jamal Murray being out shouldn’t mean you get blasted like this.
I like how just like the Fire Maloners are always dead quiet when we win and the loudest in the room when they lose, all of a sudden everybodies real brave saying Reggie sucks because of 1 bad game
Relax everyone, I figured it out. Following an 8-1 start, this rough patch began with a loss to the Rockets that kicked off a 10 game stretch where (somehow) 30% of our games are against Houston. Once we beat them next week, we will escape the vortex and everything will go back to normal.
winning teams don’t have 33% of their roster made up of rookies and sophomores. this pre-season was a disaster class from booth.
just looking at the way 36 yr old ingles cooked while barely being able to move the other night should be proof enough of this.
I am definitely taking a break from Nuggets basketball for at least 5 games.
Staying up till 5 am just to mald and watch our guys brick like they’re the 2022 Lakers is not good for me health.
I trust things will eventually get sorted.
This team is a hot mess right now. One of the reasons we won last year was we were the number 1 seed. Thats a long way off right now. Jackson was a -26 in 25 minutes. Watson was -18 in 5 minutes. How does that even happen? Why is Jokic playing 40 minutes in a game we were.never in?
Looks like they’re still drunk from this summer.
Kurtis MacDermid just scored a dangle tie breaking goal for the Avs, which is like the equivalent of DeAndre Jordan hitting a clutch 3 pointer.
Some of y’all gotta figure out how to critique a bad performance by all but one of our players and acting like our season is over. Christ on a stick.
Doomers out in force.
This road trip has been been brutal, sure, but hopefully they can learn some things.
Murray back won’t fix everything. They gotta figure out some consistency all around, besides Joker. It’ll happen imo. Defending Champs for a reason.
Just an itsy bitsy little gully
I don’t think I’ve seen such a bad game from them since I started shipping in 2015?
Please stop paying Reggie with the starters.
Earlier today or possibly even last night some person from this subreddit made a comment about how “if we play defense next game we win simple as that”.
Probably need guys to score too, but you know it’s just one game and it is entirely that user’s fault we lost this one. So thanks, jerk.
My insane delulu take: Broncos go on a playoff run and pulls Super Bowl win out of their ass. Nuggets, being conversely related, will regress to being a play-in team until February. Once the Broncos season is over, Nuggets go on a run to take the top 3 seed, where the top 2 seed gets eliminated in the first round. Nuggets then go onto repeat 😌
Pretty much 4 straight years with no vision for the bench.
Just run Braun MPJ combo in all non Jokic minutes at least try to develop something.
a ‘can’t win with these cats’ game for the ages
Well, we should have seen it coming. Reggie was due for one of his basketball terrorist games, especially with last game’s shot chucking. -26? Gillespie and Pickett couldn’t have been that bad. Gillespie sank a beautiful tough 3 that should have been an and one but was out of bounds. AG should have played stagger on the bench with someone like Nnaji playing with the starters since he’s actually been making his 3s.
Just overall poor effort. We even got beat on the foul numbers. If we can’t guard them without fouling, we should have just fouled.
Justin Holiday shooting 57% from 3 point this year
DeAndre Jordan shooting 100% from 3 point (carried over from last year).
Combine that you have 157% from beyond the arc, a lot better than the 23% we shot tonight for a total improvement of 180%. Fixed our bench problem while Malone continues to do nothing. Make me the coach. Give me the big extension.
AG ate a bunch of Thanksgiving food yesterday and was feeling it tonight. Callin’ it.
# 1. Bruce Brown was a much bigger loss than most of you made it out to be
|PG|SG|SF|PF|C|Possessions|Net Rating|
|:-|:-|:-|:-|:-|:-|:-|
|Murray|KCP|MPJ|AG|Jok|1469|+12.7|
|**Brown**|KCP|MPJ|AG|Jok|463|+16.4|
|Murray|**Brown**|MPJ|AG|Jok|116|+32.7|
|Murray|KCP|**Brown**|AG|Jok|671|+10.2|
* Cleaning The Glass
IMO Bruce might have been the 4th most impactful player on the roster last season behind Jokic, Jamal and AG. People were getting bangers off saying “Nuggets are not repeating because they lost “Bruce Brown” be fr lmaoooo” and it’s like- i mean there’s def a chance, so yes, i mean maybe?
There’s a reason he closed some games in the playoffs over KCP OR Mike. Impact metrics had him as the 3rd best player in the playoffs for the Nuggets. **The Nuggets best 5-man lineups last season all included him**. Most importantly as how it relates to the current situation, last season, the Nuggets are missing Murray, KCP or MPJ (RS talk)? There drop-off in performance nor worry in the world with Bruce filling in (table above). Reggie Jackson isn’t replicating that. Neither is Braun. Neither is Peyton “better than Bruce already” Watson. It’s why the loss of Murray in Nuggets’ play is as glaring as it currently is. Injury or two to the starters and the Nuggets are historically thin, good-players-wise, without him.
# 2. I’m not sure Jamal Murray is saving the non-Jokic minutes
Nuggets’ lineups WITHOUT Jokic since 18-19:
|Season & Type|Lineup|Possessions|Net Rating|
|:-|:-|:-|:-|
|18-19 Regular Season|Murray ON|1200|-1.4|
|18-19 Regular Season|Murray OFF|1496|-0.5|
|18-19 Playoffs|Murray ON|94|-13.6|
|18-19 Playoffs|Murray OFF|145|-36.1|
|19-20 Regular Season|Murray ON|594|-3.2|
|19-20 Regular Season|Murray OFF|1736|-5.5|
|19-20 Playoffs|Murray ON|284|-3.7|
|19-20 Playoffs|Murray OFF|96|-22.9|
|20-21 Regular Season|Murray ON|675|-6.2|
|20-21 Regular Season|Murray OFF|1056|+4.8 (!)|
|20-21 Regular Season|FACU ON MURRAY OFF|666 (😈)|+12.9 (!!!)|
|21-22 Regular Season|Murray OFF (Injured)|2727|-10.6|
|22-23 Regular Season|Murray ON|1188|-8.9|
|22-23 Regular Season|Murray OFF|1752|-13.4|
|22-23 Playoffs|Murray ON|265|-2.3|
|22-23 Playoffs|Murray OFF|45|+38.4|
|23-24 Regular Season|Murray ON|124|-12.8|
|23-24 Regular Season|Murray OFF|272|-15.1|
* Cleaning the Glass
The Nuggets with Murray leading the bench without Jokic on the floor may be better than the bench without both (duh), but the only *big* difference Murray staggering has made has been in the playoffs’ limited sample. Some regular seasons, it’s been even worse with Murray. Now some of that is lineup data noise, some of it is lineups sabotaging him like in 2021 (dreaded three guard lineups), but still. Big picture, Murray hasn’t led any iteration of the Nuggets to a neutral NetRTG in minutes without Jokic, regular season or playoffs. In our championship run, he rose to the occasion, AG staggered, the Nuggets went 7.5 deep and those minutes still couldn’t reach neutral NetRTG.
This season, where the narrative has been that the **bench (with Murray)** has been fine, well, **it hasn’t** and pretty much all numbers that are behind that narrative are garbage time minutes.
What i’m tryna say is, i wouldn’t expect Murray to lead a non bad bench this year (~~^(like some players you guys put him over could)~~). Though i think they should be better than last year with him. And obviously better than they are right now without him. I wouldn’t bet on it, but something around a -5 NetRTG with Murray would be great. And this years’ sample (-12.8) is worth pretty much nothing with how small it is, so obviously holding out hope Mal can prove me wrong and take a leap, along with the bench.
And it’s so funny that for as much shit as Facu got from our fanbase, **crazy enough, he led the best minutes without Murray and Jokic on the floor in the Jokic era** (Yes, better lineup data than Monte).
This team has no urgency, confidence, or killer instinct at the moment. When they do fall behind by double-digits, they play low IQ basketball when discipline is required to chip away.
Re-signing Reggie Jackson was idiotic.
Our bench situation is just painful. Jokic out there killing himself and his teammates are shooting 0 for fucking 12
We get to watch the Rockets fuck us raw again on Wednesday
I’m trying to figure out why we’re paying zeke nnaji 9 million a year. is there even a sample size that suggests he’s an NBA player, much less one who should be making appreciable money on a capped out contender?
Bruce Brown was a huge loss
Thank god my magic are doin good
A simple CB drive is probably the best shot creation weapon outside of Jokic at this point.
Can I donate my hamstring to Jamal? I am not doing anything important with it tbh.
isn’t braxton key on a 2 way? maybe we can waive him and huff and try to get somebody like demarcus cousins to sign a 2 way? idk if somebody like boogie would see it as being beneath him to be a 2 way guy but we could do with that kind of offense right now.