Nuggets look suddenly healthy

Denver opened the playoffs looking like a different team: healthy enough to put four regular starters around Nikola Jokić again, and deep enough to change the shape of the West bracket. (sports.yahoo.com) In Saturday’s 116-105 Game 1 win over Minnesota, Jokić finished with 25 points, 13 rebounds and 11 assists, while Jamal Murray added 23 points and Aaron Gordon scored 18. The Nuggets opened their first-round series at Ball Arena with Christian Braun and Cameron Johnson also available after injury interruptions during the season. (sports.yahoo.com; sports.yahoo.com) Yahoo Sports reported that Jokić, Gordon, Braun and Johnson all entered the opener back in the lineup after missing significant time in the regular season. That gave interim coach David Adelman a fuller rotation than Denver had for long stretches of the winter. (sports.yahoo.com) The timing matters because Denver did not spend the season looking like a fully intact contender. ESPN’s standings page shows the Nuggets finished 54-28, good for the No. 3 seed in the Western Conference behind Oklahoma City and ahead of Minnesota, which finished 49-33. (espn.com; espn.com) That set up a first-round series that already carried weight in the conference race. ESPN’s playoff watch listed Denver-Minnesota as the 3-versus-6 matchup in the West, and ESPN’s first-round takeaways said Denver’s Game 1 performance immediately sharpened the question of who looks most dangerous outside the top seeds. (espn.com; espn.com) Health has been the missing piece for months. In January, the Associated Press reported that Gordon and Braun returned against Brooklyn after lengthy absences, with Gordon having missed 19 games with a hamstring injury and Braun out since November. (nba.com) By mid-February, Yahoo Sports was reporting another setback for Gordon, saying he would be reevaluated in four to six weeks after aggravating that hamstring. That helped explain why Denver’s depth chart kept changing late in the season. (sports.yahoo.com) The opener against Minnesota was physical from the start. The Associated Press game recap said officials called 42 fouls, assessed an unsportsmanlike technical to Jaden McDaniels for shoving Jokić in the back, and gave Adelman a technical as Denver absorbed the contact and still controlled the game late. (sports.yahoo.com) What changed Saturday was not Jokić’s role so much as the number of credible options around him. After months of patchwork lineups, Denver started the postseason with Murray, Braun, Gordon and Johnson all in place, and that made the Nuggets look much closer to the team the rest of the conference had been waiting to see. (sports.yahoo.com)