Three years ago, the smart money said the West belonged to Denver for the rest of the decade. Nikola Jokić was a two-time MVP with a fresh Finals MVP to match, Jamal Murray had turned into a playoff flamethrower, and the Nuggets had just bulldozed through the 2023 postseason like the whole thing was a formality.
They were the first champion after the Golden State Warriors’ 2022 ring, the fourth of the Stephen Curry era. And per The Ringer, when Denver climbed the mountain the word “dynasty” got tossed
around Ball Arena like free T-shirts at a timeout:
“Fresh off a summer of victory cigars, champagne toasts, and celebratory dances, the Denver Nuggets are not just preparing to hang their first championship banner in 47 years—they’re eyeing a dynasty.
Nuggets general manager Calvin Booth was candid about his franchise’s goals when we met for lunch in Denver this offseason. “Our guys are tired. It’s going to be hard to repeat,” Booth said. “But if everything is optimized, we should win three or four [titles].”
Damn, three or four huh? Then the rest of the league showed up looking for their turn. To be fair to Denver, winning a title is brutally hard. The Nuggets have been in the mix everywhere, they played Game 7s in back-to-back years, and plenty of franchises would kill for that kind of “failure.” They’re absolutely relevant to the title picture out West and they’re a major problem in the conference.
But look at how those runs ended. In 2024, Denver coughed up a 20-point lead in Game 7 at home against Minnesota. In 2025, Oklahoma City dragged them to seven and sent them home. Somewhere in between, the front office fired the head coach and the GM.
And then this past April, it got worse. A Minnesota team missingAnthony Edwards, Donte DiVincenzo, Ayo Dosunmu and Kyle Anderson knocked Denver out in the first round, 110-98 in Game 6 at Target Center. Jaden McDaniels dropped 32 and talked trash the entire series, and he backed every word of it. The Denver Gazette pointed out that this was the first yearDenver went out without either Jokić or Murray hurt in a playoff series, and the Nuggets were the No. 3 seed and the favorite.
Jokić’s own assessment afterward was that a first-round exit put them a long way from contention. When the three-time MVP is letting you know the team isn’t good enough, that’s pretty telling. So the charge against Denver isn’t that they only won one ring. It’s that they were set up to contend for years, with the best player in the world locked in, and kept letting the opportunity slip through their fingers one spring at a time.
Jokić is 31. He put up 27.7 points, 12.9 rebounds and 10.7 assistsper game last season like it was a casual Tuesday. The problem has never been the big Serbian man. The problem is everything around him. Yahoo’s preseason preview noted that over the last five regular seasons, Denver was 18.3 points per 100 possessions worsewith Jokić on the bench, and called the backup options lackluster again. Some of that gap is just how ridiculous Jokić is, and any team would fall off a cliff without him. But you can trace the rest of it to actual decisions.
The 2023 title team let Bruce Brown walk that summer, then watched Kentavious Caldwell-Pope leave for Orlando a year later, and never really replaced either one. Denver opened this season with an ugly 96-84 loss in Oklahoma City where Jokić went 5-of-19 for 13 points, then needed overtime and a 35-15-10 triple-doublefrom him to get past New Orleans, with the home crowd booing along the way. Do dynasties get booed??
As the last true dynasty, Dub Nation can now look inward for their own woes.
Golden State walks into Denver at 0-3 after losses to the Lakers (127-105), Memphis (111-108) and Phoenix (131-122). Steph is 38 and Jimmy Butler is still working back from that torn ACL, with a possible return sometime between January and February. Meanwhile Moses Moody is out, and Kristaps Porziņģis isn’t even with the team. Warriors are in no position to be throwing stones. Unless they are stones encrusted into the championship rings from the past decade, then in that case please do.
But that’s how it goes in the Wild Wild West; where fate hands you the keys to the kingdom for a season and immediately starts looking for a new tenant. The difference is the Warriors got four of them before the landlord came knocking. Denver got one, and it’s watching the clock on Jokić’s prime tick louder every spring.
Which brings it all back home. Curry’s window isn’t infinite either, and every game like tonight is a question about whether the Warriors are spending his late years better than Denver is spending Jokić’s prime.
