The Nuggets are investing big in the star duo of Nikola Jokić and Jamal Murray. Will it pay off?

NBA teams tell you what they believe by how they spend, and on whom they spend it. And by agreeing to terms with Jamal Murray on a four-year, $208 million maximum contract extension, the Denver Nuggets are telling us they believe their best chance of continuing to compete for NBA championships lies with the Canadian point guard flanking Nikola Jokić through the balance of his prime.

They’re also telling us that they believe Murray’s rocky last few months, marked by a disappointing postseason and a disastrous turn at the Olympics, and his relative lack of individual accolades — he’s the only player set to make more than $50 million a season on average without an All-NBA or even an All-Star selection — don’t matter nearly as much as the eight years of chemistry he’s built with the three-time Most Valuable Player. That’s important, because if the total dollar amount of the agreement didn’t raise eyebrows — 30% of the 2025-26 salary cap amid the post-new broadcast deal boom — the timing of it might.

Re-upping now eliminates the possibility of the 27-year-old Murray leaving in free agency next offseason — welcome news to Nuggets fans, surely, after watching 2023 title contributors Bruce Brown and Kentavious Caldwell-Pope exit on the unrestricted market over the past two summers. (It also removes yet another star-caliber talent from the 2025 free-agent class, which is shaping up to be something of a Yikes Festival.) It also secures his services beyond the end of Jokić’s current contract — the big fella’s deal runs through 2027-28, with a $62.8 million player option for that season — which ensures Denver will continue to have access to the sterling two-man game that has bedeviled defenses, and consistently produced top-10 offenses, for the better part of a decade.

In theory, securing that cornerstone seems like a no-brainer stomach-settler. In practice, though, there’s some slight cause for queasiness. Denver backed up the Brinks truck to extend Murray through the end of the 2028-29 season on the heels of a campaign in which he was limited by hamstring, ankle, shin and knee injuries to just 59 games — the fourth straight season in which he has made 65 or fewer appearances. (He also missed the entire 2021-22 season after tearing the anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee.)

It gave him the biggest bag possible coming off the least productive postseason run of his career, in which a pair of very loud shots in the opening round against the Lakers …

… drew attention away from an overall performance that saw him shoot just 40.2% from the field and 31.5% from 3-point range. Playing through a calf strain, Murray struggled mightily to generate separation and clean looks — especially against the likes of Jaden McDaniels, Anthony Edwards and Nickeil Alexander-Walker in a second-round series the Timberwolves won, knocking off the defending NBA champions in seven games.

Murray’s fortunes didn’t turn with the Canadian men’s national team at the 2024 Paris Olympics, either. Coming off the bench behind superstar lead guard Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Murray totaled just 24 points on 9-for-31 shooting across four games, including a 2-for-14 mark from long distance. Lineups featuring Murray were outscored by 23 points in 82 minutes during Canada’s Olympic tournament, which ended in a frustrating loss to host nation France in the quarterfinals, one win shy of the medal round.

But despite his shaky recent form, and despite the prospect of those lower-leg injuries persisting as he moves toward age 30, the Nuggets had reportedly always planned to offer Murray a max extension following the Olympics. That they did so before getting to see how Murray fared going through a full training camp and preseason suggests they believe his playoff and Olympic dip stemmed from “dings” that the Kentucky product has since buffed out.

“I think that’s something that gets underestimated because of how tough he is as a person. He was playing through some dings, some pretty good dings, that probably would keep most people out of games,” Nuggets president Josh Kroenke said last month. “… I know he wasn’t 100%. I know getting him back there is a big step toward seeing the Jamal who was throwing up triple-doubles in the NBA Finals.”

(For what it’s worth, DNVR’s Adam Mares reported after the extension news dropped that Murray is “in good health — that some of these lingering soft-tissue things that have plagued him, even as far as the Olympics, now look good. Everything checks out. And you should expect him to come into media day and training camp with a clean bill of health. … The team feels good about that aspect of it.”)

That, ultimately, is why the Nuggets paid as much as they could as long as they could to someone coming off some of the rockiest performances of his career. They don’t have to accept that Murray can deliver on the biggest stage as an article of faith; they’ve seen it with their own eyes.

Murray is all of 15 months removed from playing near-peerless ball, averaging 32.5 points per game on 53/41/95 shooting in the Western Conference finals before becoming just the fourth player ever to average 20 points and 10 assists per game in an NBA Finals. The other three? Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan and LeBron James. (Decent company.)

He’s just five months removed from the best regular season of his eight years as a pro, setting career highs in [deep breath] scoring, assists, 3-point accuracy, usage rate, assist rate, value over replacement player, win shares per 48 minutes, box plus-minus and estimated plus-minus, among other metrics [exhale]. Only three players in the NBA last season averaged more than 20 points and six assists per game while knocking down better than 40% of their 3-pointers: James, Jalen Brunson and Murray. (Again: decent company.)

And, perhaps more important than any individual counting stat or efficiency metric, he’s now eight years, 510 regular- and postseason games, and God knows how many pick-and-roll repetitions into his partnership with Jokić, which is not only one of the most overwhelmingly successful offensive handshakes in NBA history, but is also the bedrock foundation of everything that has led to the West’s best winning percentage since they first paired up.

“A lot of guys play with each other,” Nuggets head coach Michael Malone told reporters during the 2023 Finals. “I think those two guys play for each other, and off of each other, and they read each other so well.”

The Nuggets went 51-19 across all competitions last season when Jokić and Murray both played, outscoring opponents by 11.5 points per 100 possessions in their shared minutes — on par with the full-season mark the Celtics put up en route to an NBA championship. Stretch back to 2019-20, when they made their breakthrough Western Conference finals run in the bubble, and the Nuggets are 185-90 when Jokić and Murray play together — a 55-win pace over a five-year span, with a +11.1 net rating across nearly 6,000 minutes.

In every postseason in which they’ve had a healthy Murray to line up alongside their Serbian savior, the Nuggets have won at least one playoff series, with two conference finals berths and one championship. The one time in the last six years they’ve been drummed out in the opening round? The one where he wasn’t available, and Jokić and Co. fell in five to the eventual champion Warriors.

Putting Murray alongside Jokić has all but guaranteed Denver a top-five offense, a top-four seed and a bona fide chance at a long playoff run. It might not continue to guarantee that much longer in a West that’s getting deeper and more brutal with each passing year. But by making the deal now, Nuggets brass is telling us it believes that bypassing any disruption of that rhythm — the potential rancor of Murray entering the season on an expiring deal, with questions swirling over whether management really believes he’s the right long-term running buddy for the best player in the world — is worth the high price of a max deal running through Murray’s age-31 season.

And make no mistake: It’s a high price. In 2025-26, Denver will be on the hook for just under $140 million in guaranteed salary for Jokić, Murray and Michael Porter Jr. alone, and is currently projected to be between $7 million and $8 million below the second apron.

Teams who pass that second-apron threshold incur massive financial penalties and punitive roster-building restrictions — a harsh new reality that has led multiple teams to change their thinking on contract offerings. One of those teams, it’s widely believed: the Nuggets, who lost starting shooting guard Kentavious Caldwell-Pope in free agency to a $66 million deal with the Magic that might have pushed Denver past the second-apron line for multiple seasons. Team president Kroenke recently stopped short of saying he sees the second apron as a hard cap for the franchise — but only just short.

“Not necessarily,” he told Bennett Durando of The Denver Post. “But when you talk about our starting five, and you understand the rules of flexibility when you’re in that second apron, it’s a real juggling act. We call it, we’re spinning as many plates as we can, trying to keep those plates as stable as possible. But yeah, it was a different exercise [this offseason]. … We were excited about the possibility of retaining [Caldwell-Pope], but we also knew that once he hit the open market, it was going to be something that we may have to step away from to preserve our future flexibility.”

The big question: Was Denver preserving flexibility with an eye toward ponying up — and blowing past that second-apron line — to retain power forward Aaron Gordon, who holds a $22.8 million player option for ’25-26, and who can hit the unrestricted market by declining it? Or might the Nuggets — who, as longtime NBA insider Marc Stein recently put it, have “given the impression to some around the league that, after finally winning the club’s first championship in a 47-year run in the NBA, they are satisfied with that” — be bracing to lose yet another key piece of that championship core in favor of maintaining a friendlier balance sheet and keeping its roster-management options open in the years to come?

We’ll get some answers soon enough. For starters, Gordon becomes eligible for a contract extension of his own later this month. “There is mutual interest in getting a deal done,” according to Durando; if no deal is reached before the start of the season, though, it’ll certainly be a situation worth monitoring for a team with title-or-bust aspirations.

The real answer, though, might be simply that Kroenke, GM Calvin Booth and Co. believe that the championship core wasn’t the NBA’s best five-man unit, but rather the Jokić-Murray tandem itself. Striking this deal now tells us the Nuggets believed that paying up to keep that two-man power trip together was a risk they had to take, injury issues and concerning recent play aside.

If it costs them Gordon or more complementary talent, and if Murray’s play continues to dip, then the bet could go bust sooner rather than later. If their bookend stars are making beautiful music in the pick-and-roll again come next June, though, the Nuggets may well be laughing all the way to the bank.