The Denver Nuggets were lined out to ride mediocrity with a young frontcourt tandem of Nikola Jokic and Jusuf Nurkic, playing the role of power forward and center, respectively, in a miscalculated equation that just didn't add up to the desired results. On Dec. 15, 2016, the Nuggets made Jokic the team's starting center and brought Nurkic off the bench, before eventually trading him to the Portland Trail Blazers for Mason Plumlee on Feb. 12, 2017.
“It was a defining moment for us,” Nuggets swingman Will Barton said of Nurkic's move to the bench, according to Nick Kosmider of The Athletic. “It hit right away. It just freed everyone up. It allowed everyone to play the way we needed to play to be successful.”
The Nuggets were no longer stuck on retrograde, playing The Twin Towers in true Popovichian way, as he did with Tim Duncan and David Robinson to snag his first NBA title in 1999 — they instead went with the craftier, though defensively challenged Jokic as the pivot man to their offense.
“From that point in time, man, we just took off,” said head coach Mike Malone. “It was great to see. That’s really when our identity was formed, on that day.”
Jokic, however, still thinks he could have made that partnership work, if not for the nature of keeping a competitive team afloat.
“I think we could have played together, it just didn’t work well that season,” Jokic said. “Maybe if we had a little more time or we had played a little bit differently, maybe it would have worked, but it didn’t. But I started and things began to click and we started to play well. It was a really good thing for us.”
The Nuggets of today boast one of the most dynamic offensive systems, using Jokic as a Swiss army knife that can score, rebound and make plays for his team, used as the catalyst of Malone's offense ever since.
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