How the Nuggets have survived without Jokic

A granular look at play types, players, and more

What would happen to the planets if the Sun disappeared?

I’m no astrophysicist, but I imagine that, shorn of their anchoring gravitational pull, the planets would just launch in random, chaotic directions. They’d also turn rather cold!

The Denver Nuggets are making me rethink my hypothesis. Nikola Jokic, the sustaining celestial body around which the entire team revolves, has missed the last nine games. Shockingly, the Nuggets have survived their lack of star power thanks to hot shooting and unexpected contributions.

Denver is 6-3 since Jokic injured his knee against the Miami Heat (excluding that loss), and while a soft schedule has helped, they’ve still beaten a good Raptors unit, a too-cocky 76ers squad in OT (without any of Denver’s five starters, mind you), and a scorching Celtics team.

And all this isn’t just with Jokic missing time. Backup center Jonas Valanciunas got hurt the game after Jokic, and will miss a few more weeks himself. Ballyhooed offseason addition Cam Johnson hasn’t played at all in this stretch as he deals with his own knee injury. Aaron Gordon and Jamal Murray have only played in six of the nine games, and Christian Braun — inked to a $125 million contract in the offseason — has only played in three (injury-compromised and quite bad) matches.

In other words, all five starters and Jokic’s top backup have missed somewhere between lots and all of the team’s games of late. Denver could lose every game from here until Jokic’s return, and David Adelman still might deserve Coach of the Month.

I wanted to look under the hood and see what Adelman and team have done to stay afloat.

Let’s start with some top-line numbers. Would an offense that has never been able to score without Jokic survive? So far, they’ve been surprisingly solid. Their league-leading offense has dropped from an astonishing 125.3 points per 100 possessions to 116.3, a nine-point decrease. But 116.3 is still good for ninth in the league during this stretch! Defensively, they’re sporting the exact same 117.6 rating before and after the Jokic injury, a below-average but not execrable number.

So the offense is decent and the defense is bad. Tactically, though, what goes into that? We can get a little more granular. Synergy data lets us compare the Nuggets’ mix of play types¹. Juxtaposing the 31 games before Jokic’s injury to the nine that came after (excluding the Miami game), we see a pretty massive shift in the team’s playbook: