Tim Connelly built you.
Tim Connelly broke you.
That’s the story of the Denver Nuggets’ season — a season that ended Thursday night in a 110-98 first-round flameout to a Minnesota Timberwolves team missing Anthony Edwards, Donte DiVincenzo and Ayo Dosunmu. A season that ended at the hands of a roster constructed by the same man who once constructed Denver’s championship core. A season that left a three-time MVP swallowed up by a four-time Defensive Player of the Year, a head coach badly out of his depth and a fan base wondering if the championship window has just slammed shut.
It wasn’t just the season that ended Thursday. It feels like the era ended too.
The architect of that 2023 ring was right there at Target Center Thursday, in a different color, watching his current team end his old team’s season — for the second time in three years. It is the most poetic and most painful kind of basketball story. And it didn’t have to be this story at all.
Four summers ago, in May 2022, Connelly was offered five years and $40 million by the Wolves — a contract Stan Kroenke and Kroenke Sports & Entertainment chose not to match. Reports at the time suggested the deal included an equity stake; it was later revealed to be a bonus tied to franchise value, not actual ownership. In other words, the offer that pried Connelly out of Denver was not some unmatchable bid from the heavens. It was $8 million a year and some upside on a billionaire’s books.
Kroenke, the largest private landowner in the country, is worth more than $26 billion. He decided his president of basketball operations — the man who drafted Nikola Jokic with the 41st pick, who paired him with Jamal Murray, who acquired Aaron Gordon, who hired Michael Malone out of Sacramento, who built the front office that built the bench around all of it — wasn’t worth the matching paperwork. Connelly left. Denver won the title anyway in 2023, riding the wave he’d already built.
Everything that’s gone wrong since traces back to that hole at the top.
Calvin Booth was elevated to fill the seat. He’d learned under Connelly. His ideas were good at first — most of them, by his own admission, plans he’d built with Connelly. The Kentavious Caldwell-Pope trade. The Bruce Brown signing. Both credited, in part, back to his old boss.
It only took a few months before the culture began to erode and mistakes began to pop up: a big extension for the little-used Zeke Nnaji, a forced trade of unhappy All-Rookie team guard Bones Hyland — the same Hyland who helped end the Nuggets in this series.
Booth started colliding with Malone soon after the title. Booth wanted to run a soft version of Golden State’s two-timeline approach — backfill the rotation with draft picks, play the kids, develop in real time. Malone wanted veterans who could win games next week. Both had a case. Neither would budge. The two became the war that defined the post-title era. The Nuggets traded three second-round picks just to dump Reggie Jackson’s expiring deal. They let Brown and Jeff Green walk in 2023. They offered Caldwell-Pope a deal so insulting in 2024, per a league source, that he didn’t seriously entertain it. KCP signed in Orlando.
The 2023 champion’s defensive backbone walked out the door because Kroenke wouldn’t pay him either.
In December 2024, with the team mired in another losing stretch, Jokic himself broke character to make a public point. After a 56-point night in Washington — at the time, his career high — he was asked about the team’s effort. The MVP did not soften it.
“In my country, where I’m coming from, after this kind of stretch, you’re gonna get a paycheck that is a little bit less than you are worth,” Jokic said on Dec. 7, 2024. “So maybe that’s what we need to do. Maybe a little motivation in that way.”
Nearly 17 months later Jokic said on Thursday that in Serbia people would get fired for the season the Nuggets had in 2025-26.
But that 2024 quote was the first time Jokic had ever called his teammates out in public. It would not be the last. By March of 2025, with another lost stretch piling up, he openly made an MVP case for himself for the first time — “I think I’m playing the best basketball of my life, so if that’s enough, it’s enough” — a star getting pulled into a kind of self-advocacy he’d spent his entire career rolling his eyes at. He wasn’t doing it because he wanted to. He was doing it because no one above him was. The vacuum Connelly left was eating the locker room.
Maybe that’s why Jokic was first on the podium Thursday — even ahead of his lame-duck head coach.
How did Denver end up with that head coach? Just over a year ago, the cold war between Booth and Malone went nuclear and public. KSE fired both with three games left in the 2024-25 regular season — the latest in-season head coach firing in NBA history — and handed the team to assistant David Adelman. The official line was “best chance to compete.” The real line was that ownership had let the dysfunction run for two and a half years, watched the title defense end early, watched the next year’s team go sideways, and decided in the season’s last week to throw two grenades and run.
The Nuggets, somehow, came out of that mess by winning a playoff series then taking the eventual champions to seven games. That alone earned Adelman the full-time gig.
That and the 54 wins that followed papered over a lot. The limited moves Booth left for Ben Tenzer and Jonathan Wallace. Adelman’s inexperience. The fact that Malone — for all of his flaws by the end — was the guy who knew how to pull this group out of trouble.
The 12-game streak made everything bad this year look survivable. The first round made everything look like exactly what it was.
In the meantime, the man Kroenke wouldn’t pay never stopped building.
The Wolves’ winning core in this series is a Connelly mosaic.
McDaniels blossomed into the perimeter wrecking ball who erased Jamal Murray — 4-of-17 in Game 6, by Chris Finch’s count, scored on Jaden zero times. He got McDaniels to stay on an extension.
Connelly traded for Rudy Gobert when everyone thought it was a mistake — the deal critics ridiculed for years — and watched Gobert deliver some of the best individual defense Finch said he’s ever seen against a player of Jokic’s caliber. Gobert has now gotten to the second round or further in the last three years with the Wolves.
Connelly traded Karl-Anthony Towns for Randle, in a move that also has detractors but is hard to criticize after he led the Edwards-less team for three games to two wins.
Connelly drafted Terrence Shannon Jr. in the 2024 first round, the same Shannon who dropped 24 in Thursday’s spot start. Shannon was selected one slot after Booth got out-negotiated trying to move up to the Suns’ pick to take DaRon Holmes II. The Dayton big didn’t play a meaningful minute in the series.
Connelly flipped Rob Dillingham, Leonard Miller and four second-round picks at the 2026 deadline to get Ayo Dosunmu, who scored 43 in Game 4 to all but end this series.
Connelly brought Mike Conley back. He supported Naz Reid into Sixth Man of the Year honors in 2024. He drafted Jaylen Clark, who hit a corner triple Thursday in his spot minutes.
Every single one of them showed up against the Nuggets in this series. Every single one of them is a Connelly fingerprint.
There’s a cruel symmetry in it, too. Connelly’s run in Denver effectively ended on the heels of back-to-back playoff exits where Murray was hurt — downed by the Suns in 2021 and Golden State in 2022, all with Murray sidelined by a torn ACL.
Connelly couldn’t get his Denver team past injuries to its star guard. In Minnesota, he just won a series in which his own star guard played a grand total of 35 minutes across the final three games, none in the closeout. The man who couldn’t survive injuries in Denver just authored the kind of next-man-up roster Minnesota didn’t even need its star to win with. It’s the difference between a roster built by a champion executive and one stitched together by everyone who came after him.
The bench Denver was supposedly rebuilding into something reliable — a sentence the franchise couldn’t ever say with confidence when Connelly was running things — got outscored 76-16 in Game 4 alone. Without Aaron Gordon and Peyton Watson, Denver’s rebuilt depth looked like a joke against a team that was only depth.
On Thursday night, the Wolves outscored Denver 64-40 in the paint. They piled up 19 offensive rebounds and 20 second-chance points. They got 32 from McDaniels. They got 24 from Shannon. They got 18 from Randle, 15 from Reid, 10 points and 13 boards from Gobert. They did all of it without their best player and three rotation guys. And they still won.
The Nuggets had Cameron Johnson, who poured in 27 points and grabbed eight rebounds and was the only Denver player to truly show up. He enters the final year of a contract now after a very up-and-down single season with the Nuggets after the controversial Michael Porter Jr. trade.
The piece that’s going to hurt the most for Nuggets fans isn’t the result. It’s how Jokic looked while it happened. The three-time MVP went 11-of-19 for 28 points, nine rebounds and 10 assists in Game 6 — a Sombor-double, on paper. In reality, it was a deeply average performance from the best player in the world. He was horrid in the first half. His takeover stretch in the second was one of the rare moments in the series he actually looked like himself.
Asked to grade his showing after Game 4, Jokic gave a one-word answer: “Average.” He was telling the truth. The cumulative numbers across six games tell it: 23 turnovers, the worst playoff three-point shooting series of his career, a fourth quarter in Game 4 where he went 0-of-6 and got himself ejected, a closeout night where he turned it over four times and watched Gobert lead the team to plus-17 on the glass while tossing eight assists.
Across the 17 playoff series Jokic has played in his career, it was the first he never broke 30 in a single game.
Gobert blocked him at the rim. Gobert bothered him on his hooks. Gobert, in Finch’s words, took the matchup “one on one” so completely that the Wolves never had to scheme any extra help. The triple-team Denver counted on opening up the floor for Murray and the shooters never came, because it didn’t have to.
This is the part that feels different. It’s the first summer in a decade Nuggets fans will be openly upset with Jokic. Not whisper-upset. Out-loud upset. And there is a tradition in this league for what comes next, even for the all-time greats.
This was Dirk Nowitzki in 2007, when his 67-win Mavericks were stunned in the first round by the We Believe Warriors and the new MVP got buried in a wave of second-guessing — too soft, can’t carry a team, what’s it all worth if you can’t get out of the first round.
This was Tim Duncan and the 2011 Spurs, who got upset in the first round by Memphis as a 1-seed, openly written off as a closing window. Both of those guys, of course, won another title. Dirk in 2011, Duncan in 2014. Both are Jokic idols. Both went through the exact kind of valley he’s standing in right now. The trough comes for every great player in this league. The only question is whether they climb back out.
He turned 31 in February. He’s logged some of the most minutes of any player in the NBA this decade. He’s just had the worst playoff series of his prime a few months after the first significant injury of his career. And he’s about to sign a contract that will pay him roughly $80 million a year deep into his decline. He says he wants it. He said so again Thursday night.
“I still want to be a Nugget forever,” Jokic said.
That’s a star reaffirming his commitment in a moment when most stars hold their cards. It’s also a star that has asked the franchise around him to do better. Whether they can is the question that defines the next year and one that has been a resounding no since Connelly left.
Then there’s the rest of it. Jamal Murray had a brutal series even if his 24 points per game don’t show it at first. He made just 46 of his 128 shots (36%). After the game, Murray didn’t try to sugarcoat it.
“I just didn’t show up tonight,” Murray said. “Like I said earlier, the leaders got to show up. So if you saw the game, there was no leadership.”
That is the Blue Arrow — one of the best players in franchise history — saying on the record that there was no leadership Thursday. Not from him. Not from Jokic. Not from the bench. You don’t have to read between the lines.
The team’s heart, Aaron Gordon, missed most of the series. The team’s most athletic guy, Peyton Watson, never played. Christian Braun disappeared offensively, then reappeared in glaring ways that severely cost his team. Bruce Brown gave them nothing when it mattered. Tim Hardaway Jr.’s renaissance season ended with him as the team’s third-leading scorer Thursday — a damning sentence in itself.
The vibes were off the entire time.
McDaniels lit them up after Game 2 by calling them out by name.
Adelman fired back at McDaniels on the podium and got smoked.
The Wolves trash-talked. The Nuggets, for all of their championship pedigree and reputation as a tough out, didn’t really do anything back. Jokic got into it with McDaniels at the end of Game 4, picked up a tech and got ejected. He picked up another tech in Game 6 to no real effect. They never punched the bully. They got hit, again and again, and walked back to the huddle. Backup big man Jonas Valanciunas tried to enforce but Adelman only begrudgingly put him on the floor.
For Adelman — who got his start in Denver as a Connelly hire onto Malone’s staff back in 2017, the same window in which Connelly was paving the championship core — this series will define his likely short tenure.
Adelman never adjusted to the Wolves’ physicality. He never figured out how to free Murray. His postgame Game 4 press conference, in which he called the coverage of his team “hilarious” and subtracted “meaningless” baskets to manufacture a moral victory, was one of the worst performances by a Nuggets coach in modern memory.
Finch dog-walked Adelman on every front — Xs and Os, motivation, in-game adjustments, lineup gambles, you name it.
Adelman closed his postgame Thursday taking the loss personally — “that group in there deserved better, and unfortunately, we got beat” — but couldn’t help pointing the camera elsewhere on the way out: “We had to look at our roster and see what’s gonna fit going forward for our best player.” Translation: it’s not me, it’s the roster.
There’s truth there. The roster the post-Connelly front office handed him has been less than ideal. But “the roster doesn’t fit our best player” is also exactly the kind of line a coach with a tightening collar throws up to point everyone else at the front office. Adelman is the head coach. The buck has to stop somewhere, and pointing it upstairs in your closing presser is its own kind of admission.
There’s also the Malone of it all. There is, somewhere in another universe, a version of this season in which Malone is still on the bench and the Nuggets do not lose to a Wolves team without four rotation players. Malone was bad at a lot of things by the end. His message had grown stale. The defense had cratered. He’d told reporters publicly his guys weren’t even watching film.
But Malone was very good at one thing: getting his team to fight. And Jokic, raised in Sombor and not in the American basketball ecosystem of leadership clichés, played his very best basketball when Malone was barking in his ear. Whatever Adelman’s “honest conversations” looked like in this series, they did not produce a team that played with anything close to championship-level pride.
They were out-worked on the glass, mauled mentally and late to every single 50-50 ball.
Which brings us back to where we started. A decade ago, Tim Connelly hired a young coach out of Sacramento named Michael Malone. He drafted Jokic. He drafted Murray. He brought David Adelman onto Malone’s staff in 2017 — the same Adelman who’d be standing on the Denver sideline Thursday night, getting brutalized by what was left of Connelly’s new team.
Connelly set every single domino on the table.
Four years ago this month, he was offered the keys to the Wolves and Stan Kroenke chose not to match an $8 million-a-year deal for the man who built it all. The architect walked out the door because his billionaire owner decided keeping him cost too much. The Nuggets won the title anyway, riding the wave Connelly had built. Then his successor and his coach went to war after losing to his new team. Then both men were fired — only for his old assistant, now the head coach, to lead an embarrassing loss to Connelly’s team yet again.
The same man who built the Nuggets is the man who just broke them. The architect became the wrecking ball. And before he ever picked up that wrecking ball, Denver’s owner handed it to him.
Maybe the Nuggets retool. Maybe Adelman survives. Maybe Murray finds a better balance between regular and postseason performance, or the front office spins gold from limited assets, or Holmes can finally play. They’d have to do all of it while ducking the luxury tax they’re already projected to blow past — Uncle Stan’s deepest fear.
There’s always a maybe. There’s always next year. Jokic himself is the proof that the plateau doesn’t have to be the end. Dirk climbed out. Duncan climbed out. Maybe Jokic does too. Though the league back then favored those bigs and dynasties in a way it hasn’t favored anyone for nearly a decade now.
But the gut feeling Thursday night, watching the Wolves close it out and Jokic shake hands at midcourt before walking off the Target Center floor for the second straight playoff exit at this building, was that the first Jokic era, at least as we’ve known it, has come to an end. The window built by one architect was just closed by him too. And it was the same hand on both sides.
Who opens a second championship window around Jokic — and how long does it take, if it ever does happen?
That’s what we’re left asking.
