The Denver Nuggets are heading into the new NBA season with a familiar look in the starting lineup and not much help waiting on the bench. That’s the reality created by the NBA’s salary cap, and it leaves head coach David Adelman with a roster that looks a lot like last year’s group, plus a few leftovers and castoffs from other teams.
Adelman is back for his second season after a rocky first year in charge, and the pressure is obvious. He stepped in for NBA champion Michael Malone with six games left in the 2024-25 regular season, a move that was described as a relief inside Ball Arena because Malone had grown too intense and too demanding, and the players had tuned him out. At that point, Adelman was not yet 44, had never been a head coach, and his background was said to be less accomplished than basketball Hall-of-Famer Becky Hammon, who had just as much, if not more, NBA coaching experience at the time and has won multiple WNBA titles as a head coach.
The Nuggets still managed to get to the second round of the Western Conference playoffs under Adelman, despite injuries, before losing Game 7 to the eventual NBA champions in Oklahoma City. But the bigger memory from Adelman’s first full season came later, when Denver won 54 regular-season games and then got knocked out in the first round of the playoffs.
That’s the failure people remember.
As training camp opened, Adelman leaned on analytics and spent more time pointing to what went right during the injury-riddled 2025-26 season than dwelling on the postseason collapse. That approach did not land well.
It only sharpened the criticism around him: too dependent on rankings and numbers, too robotic in the way he comes across, and too rigid when the playoffs demanded adjustment. The clearest example was the Minnesota series, when he stuck with “small ball” against a Timberwolves team that played two bigs together for almost every minute.
Minnesota powered right through the smaller Nuggets.
Whether that was a rookie learning curve or plain stubbornness, the answer will come soon enough.
What matters now is the next step, and that starts with Adelman doing a better job than he did a year ago. Denver’s offense may need more flexibility, with less of the familiar - and increasingly predictable - “two-man game” between Nikola Jokic and Jamal Murray, and less dribbling that stalls the action instead of speeding it up.
There’s also the possibility of shifting Murray away from the point guard spot at least part of the time and using him more as a shooting guard. And the Nuggets might get more out of newly acquired Marvin Bagley Jr. if he’s paired with Jokic for stretches, especially when Aaron Gordon is resting, which could open the door to some old-fashioned “bully ball” against Minnesota and others.
For Adelman, the challenge is simple to say and hard to pull off: trust what his eyes tell him more than what his iPad says. If he wants to become truly good at this job, he may need less reliance on the numbers and more of the kind of instinct that basketball still rewards.
In Other News...
Christian Braun Is Suddenly Carrying Bigger Nuggets Expectations
Christian Braun came into Nuggets training camp with a straightforward goal: get back to the version of himself that could bend the floor with his burst and make life easier for everyone around him. After dealing with an ankle issue last season, Braun spent the offseason working to regain that explosiveness while also tightening up his ball-handling, and the early signs in camp and preseason have been encouraging for Denver.
The timing matters because Braun is now entering the first season of his five-year contract, which naturally raises the bar for what the Nuggets expect from him. If he stays healthy, he is no longer just another energetic rotation piece on a contender. He is the kind of young wing Denver needs to keep growing into a bigger role, and the next step is less about effort than whether his game can keep expanding with the opportunity in front of him. [Read more 🡒]
Cam Johnson Is Already Making The Nuggets Feel Better About That Bet
Cam Johnson has wasted little time easing any early nerves about the Nuggets decision to keep him in Denver at a $23 million price tag. After weighing options around the roster and salary sheet, the club held firm on Johnson and has already gotten the kind of preseason showing it was hoping for, with the forward looking more confident and comfortable as a steady part of the rotation.
The Nuggets clearly viewed Johnson as a player worth betting on for consistent production, even with the market around him drawing interest. Rather than treat him like a movable piece, Denver chose to make the financial fit work and leave open the possibility that the real payoff comes once the games count for more than tune-up minutes. [Read more 🡒]
Nuggets May Finally Have An Answer For Their Non-Jokic Minutes
Denvers second preseason game against Utah offered a welcome glimpse of depth, and it came from a group the Nuggets badly need to stabilize. The second unit looked far more organized under David Adelman, with Marvin Bagley III, Alpha Diallo and Julian Strawther all making a visible impact as the bench gave the team real minutes of production beyond the starters.
Bagley was especially active, scoring 10 points and posting a team-best plus-minus, while Diallo added 8 points with a pair of threes. Strawther also stood out with 15 points and three made triples, and the encouraging part for Denver is how cleanly that work fit into a bench rotation that has been searching for a better answer when Nikola Jokic sits. [Read more 🡒]