Christian Braun’s place in Denver’s closing five may not be as secure as it once looked.
The Nuggets are counting on a rebound from Braun in 2026-27 after a rough season and a tough playoff series against the Minnesota Timberwolves. His $125 million contract extension also begins this season, which only raises the spotlight on what he does next. But even if Braun takes the step forward Denver wants, there’s still a real chance he’s not on the floor when the game gets tight.
That’s where DeMar DeRozan comes in.
Braun has been part of Denver’s closing rotation for the last two years, but the Nuggets added one of the league’s most reliable late-game scorers in DeRozan. That kind of presence changes the math. Braun’s clutch production fell off a cliff in 2025-26, and the Nuggets may not have the luxury of waiting around if the game is on the line.
The contrast with the year before is striking. In 2024-25, Braun handled clutch situations well enough to matter.
The clutch is defined as the final five minutes of a game with the score within five points, and Braun logged 121.8 clutch minutes that season. He shot 46.2% from the field, knocked down 6 of 11 from three, finished second on the team in clutch rebounds with 17 behind Nikola Jokic’s 50, and posted a plus/minus of 48.
Then came 2025-26, and everything went sideways. In 105 clutch minutes, Braun shot just 16.7% and made only 2 of 7 from beyond the arc.
Those two threes were his only clutch field goals all season, and his plus/minus dropped to -40. It was the kind of collapse that makes you wonder whether injuries were the driving force, because otherwise Braun was a liability in the moments Denver needed him most.
Denver did lean heavily on Tim Hardaway Jr. in those situations, with the sixth man logging 128.5 clutch minutes. That only underscores the point: if Braun doesn’t reclaim that late-game trust quickly, the Nuggets already have another option ready to take over.
And DeRozan is no ordinary fallback. He has built a reputation as one of the NBA’s best clutch performers.
In his final two seasons with the Chicago Bulls, in 2022-23 and 2023-24, he finished third and second in Clutch Player of the Year voting. Even with a struggling Sacramento Kings team in 2024-25, he still ranked fifth in the NBA in clutch points.
Over the last four years, DeRozan has not shot worse than 44.1% in the clutch, and his average over that span sits at 46.4%.
That kind of résumé doesn’t leave much room for mistakes. If Braun doesn’t rediscover his edge, Denver has a veteran who has made a career out of delivering when the game tightens up.
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Adelman is expected to use October to sort through the second unit, test different combinations and get a better read on who can hold up if injuries force the issue later. The unanswered pieces are the ones that matter most in the long run: who backs up Jamal Murray, who can help with secondary playmaking, and which reserves can turn preseason minutes into something closer to a real role once the games count. [Read more 🡒]