How the Nuggets Got Better in the Playoffs
Or were they always this good? It’s simply complicated
The simplest and most trusted tool to determine team strength is good old-fashioned net rating. To win a basketball game, really any game, you have to score more than your opponent. The better you are at doing that, and the degree to which you do is an awfully compelling measure of team quality. Net rating not only measures how good you are at outscoring your opponent, but it normalizes based on possessions, so fast-paced teams can’t run up the score with conventional point differential.
The Nuggets were the best team in the Western Conference all season by record, but their net rating wasn’t nearly as sterling. While a +3.4 net rating portends a 50-win pace, it would be the lowest regular season net rating of an NBA champion since the 1994-95 Houston Rockets produced a +2.3 net rating before stringing together an improbable postseason run.
However, this Nuggets’ run has been far from improbable. They’ve absolutely dominated their playoff competition to the tune of a +8.6 net rating. And their upshot in production isn’t easily explained by favorable shooting variance. Their effective field goal (eFG%) has fallen from 57.3% in the regular season to 55.9% in the playoffs and offsets their opponents' eFG% falling (improving for the Nuggets) from 54.3% to 53%. As the basic arithmetic tells us, the Nuggets owned a +3% edge in eFG% in the regular season, and in the playoffs, it has been +2.9%, but they’ve still seen a +5.2 boost in net rating.
It’s unusual for teams to improve to the degree that the Nuggets have in the playoffs, and it’s even more unusual for positive shooting variance not to play a role. Take the Heat as an example. Their run to the Eastern Conference Finals and a 3-2 series lead against the Celtics came via an uptick in net rating from -0.3 in the regular season to +3.7 in the playoffs. While their improved play is surprising, how they improved isn’t. Their eFG% improved from 53% to 55.4% in the playoffs, and their opponents fell from 56.1% to 53.8%. Going from a -3.1% hole in eFG% to a +1.6% edge (a +4.7% improvement in eFG% difference) explains a lot of their +4.0 jump in net rating.
The Nuggets' shooting edge has stayed the course, but they’ve still seen a massive jump in net rating. For a team that didn’t make any major roster adjustments, it doesn’t seem possible to improve to that degree, but here we are. So what’s behind the Nuggets’ sudden surge in net rating? And should we have seen it coming all along?
How the Nuggets Have Improved in the Playoffs
The adage that it’s a make-or-miss league is a ubiquitous explanation because it’s true. Makes lead to points, misses don’t, and points are how we determine who wins. Since it really is a make-or-miss league, team and opponent eFG% are two of the best statistics to determine team strength. If the Nuggets haven’t seen their edge in eFG% increase in the playoffs, then they have to be winning the games elsewhere.
If you ever had a coach yell at you about taking care of the ball, here’s why. The Nuggets have improved their offensive rating by +3.4 points in the playoffs, even with a decrease in shooting efficiency, by cutting their turnover rate by 2.7%. A 0.8% increase in offensive rebounding and a +.009 gain in free throws to field goal attempts are marginal, but nearly a 3% drop in turnover rate is massive. A possession that ends in a turnover will never lead to points, and by effectively cutting 2.7 turnovers per 100 possessions, you have that many more chances to score, grab an offensive rebound, and/or draw a foul, and it adds up in a hurry.
On defense, the Nuggets have been the benefactors of a bit of luck, but they’ve also made one notable change that has amplified their good fortune.
Even though the Nuggets are fouling more and forcing fewer turnovers, their defense has improved by 1.8 points per 100 possessions because their opponents have seen their shooting efficiency dip by 1.3% of eFG%, and they’ve become dominant on the defensive glass. Rebounding may be an afterthought, but a defensive possession isn’t over until the ball is secured.
The Nuggets' massive improvement in net rating has been powered by their ability to protect the possession advantage. Instead of trying to win the possessions battle by forcing more turnovers and attacking the offensive glass with abandon, they’ve gone the opposite route. They have stopped turning the ball over, leading to more offensive bites at the apple, and have gobbled up defensive rebounds to prevent second-chance opportunities. The Nuggets have doubled down on winning the possession battle because you can’t.
The Nuggets Were Always Better Than Their Net Rating
Net rating is an incredibly useful tool to determine the best and worst teams, but sometimes it has blind spots, and the Denver Nuggets look to be an overlooked goliath. Everything on the Nuggets starts and ends with Nikola Jokic. He is one of the greatest and most unique players of all time. He is a seven-foot basketball supercomputer with limitless shooting range and the softest of touches, and the Nuggets were utterly lost without him in the regular season.
With Jokic on the court, the Nuggets produced a +12.51 net rating, 126.12 offensive rating, and a 113.6 defensive rating in the regular season. As soon as big honey went to the bench, the Nuggets collapsed to a -10.13 net rating, 105.96 offensive rating, and 116.09 defensive rating, according to PBP Stats. The Nuggets would go from the best team in history to the worst team in the league depending on Jokic’s substitution pattern, which helps to explain their net rating and post-season dominance.
The Nuggets' +3.4 net rating was the product of Nikola Jokic only playing 58.7% of their regular season minutes. The feast and famine their net rating went through underscored how utterly dominant the Nuggets could be when fully operational and became a misleading stat come playoff time.
Jokic has played 583 out of 725 possible minutes, an incredible 80.4% of the Nuggets' total minutes in the playoffs. The Nuggets always had an extra gear come playoff time because they were always going to play the most impactful player in the league more minutes, and the same applies to their best lineups.
Their preferred starting five of Jokic, Jamal Murray, Aaron Gordon, Michael Porter Jr., and Kentavious Caldwell-Pope only played 706 regular season minutes together, producing a +12.95 net rating. In the playoffs, that quintet has already played 276 minutes and secured a +8.75 net rating. The Nuggets were even better when they swapped Porter Jr for Bruce Brown, which has remained true throughout the playoffs.
No team has benefitted more from tightening their rotation in the playoffs than the Nuggets. When their top six players are on the court in any five-man group, they’re an incredibly dangerous unit. By trimming the rotation fat, the Nuggets have also been far better in their non-Jokic playoff minutes, sporting a +3.19 net rating. While that’s largely aided by opponents shooting 30% from 3-point range, as long the Nuggets don’t get slaughtered in the 10 minutes a game Jokic is on the bench, they’ll be as formidable as they come.
The (Re)Emergence of Jamal Murray
The less predictable variable in the Nuggets’ success has been Jamal Murray upping his game. Murray has long been a good player, but he has never really produced at a surefire All-Star level for an entire campaign. Over the past five seasons, he has averaged 19.3 points per game on an eFG% of 52.7%. However, he suffered an ACL injury in 2021-22 at the most inopportune time for himself and the Nuggets.
Right before Murray went down with his ACL injury, he looked like he was hitting another level. He was 23 years old and averaging the most points (21.2) and highest eFG% (55.9%) of his career, and over his final 25 games before going down with injury, he averaged 23.9 points per game on a 60.3% eFG%. Those are not just All-Star numbers, those are All-NBA numbers, and in these playoffs, Murray has been All-Everything.
Through 15 games, Murray has averaged 27.7 points per game on 55.3% eFG% and 59.5% true shooting. That scoring volume at that efficiency is one of the major reasons the Nuggets have improved in the playoffs and has given them the playoffs' most potent offensive one-two punch. Expecting Murray to improve in the playoffs wouldn’t have been crazy, but predicting him to level up like this would.
The Denver Nuggets' run to the NBA Finals took many in the media by surprise. It wasn’t that no one thought they were good, but they weren’t an overwhelming regular season team, and most teams see rotation-tightening gains. According to net rating, the Western Conference was wide open, and the Nuggets were just another team in the mix. No one expected them to rampage through their side of the bracket like a kaiju.
In hindsight, the Nuggets should have been viewed as a more dangerous team than their metrics suggested. Regular season depth was glossed over in favor of being perfectly calibrated for the playoffs. And it wasn’t like this was a bad regular-season team. They won 54 games, were the one seed in their conference, and had the back-to-back (and should have been three straight) MVP. Sometimes the superficial stuff (best record and best player) is more insightful than the metrics.
Even if the Nuggets were more likely than most teams to improve their net rating in the playoffs, the degree to which they did, without shooting luck, is still a testament to their roster and coaching staff. They doubled down on two basic pillars, take care of the ball and finish possessions. It’s training camp mantras, but the Nuggets’ run shows why coaches harp on it incessantly. And while Jamal Murray has had incredible playoff runs before (“Remember the bubble”), maybe we should have been more open to its possibility because no Finals run is without some unexpected excellent play.
I’ve believed in the Nuggets all season, and even I cannot believe how good they’ve been in the playoffs. Teams just don’t get better in the playoffs, or so I thought. As much as analytics help us make more informed decisions, sometimes it’s too easy to take them at face value without a bit of digging. But when you start digging on the Nuggets, you start to find gold.