Golden Nuggets find their Silver Linings Playbook

“Behind every silver lining, there’s a cloud.”
– Glenn Gould

With all the conflict in the world these days. it’s fairly easy to see the world through Glenn Gould’s lens, a place where even the bright spots seem to merely be markers for the often-troubling picture behind them. But Wednesday night, coming off their longest road trip of the season with a sub-.500 record to show for it, the Denver Nuggets gave me a different perspective on the silver linings they had seen from their trip. Coach David Adelman, swiss army knife Bruce Brown, and the newly anointed Peyton Watson were all seeing the trip through a vastly different view than my Eeyore self was looking at it.

Wonderful. Great. Huge. Some of the descriptors bandied about by those three and others, after rescuing the last two games of what had been a 1-4 trip heading into Philadelphia with all five starters and two of their three best bench subs all out of the match. Just over 48 hours later, your Denver Nuggets had handed the streaking Sixers and the red-hot Celtics a pair of L’s in their own homes.

The reason why the players and coaches were so perfectly perky about the outcomes had to do with how the team had handled the sudden spike in adversity, with the traveling accommodations probably resembling field hospitals a couple of times along the way. With every reason in the world to not only lose a few, but let go the rope for a bit in terms of quality of play, the players who were able to take each court fought for each win and loss tooth and nail, and played some pretty exceptional basketball along the way.

With that, you heard not only from the remaining group of stars, such as a pair of career-bests in assists for probable All-Star Jamal Murray, but also had some career-defining moments from the likes of Jalen Pickett, Spencer Jones, and the aforementioned Watson, and even a number of career-redefining moments for Zeke Nnaji. Even in the losses, coaches were looking for good combinations and hot players, not pulling someone from the floor for simply embarrassing themselves. The depth of the team has never been more evident, even as they slog for each win against opponents of all classes.

And that may be the biggest silver lining of them all, when all is said and done for this season. Nikola Jokic, Cam Johnson, and Jonas Valanciunas will all eventually return as Murray, Aaron Gordon, Christian Braun, and Tim Hardaway, Jr. all have. The Nuggets place in the conference standings will be predicated on how much ground they can make up, how cohesively they can rebuild the engine that is their offense, and how much a sprint it will be to climb back into the race. Some of that will have come from the losses they will (probably) inevitably sustain with their best player off the floor. But the biggest upside of all of that is the confidence and cohesion their role players will have found in standing tall without Big Honey over their shoulder and marking each move. The realization that they belong in this fight even without their best amongst them.

And woe be the team that underestimates them when they have returned to full force by the time the playoffs have hit. They won’t just be facing one of the all-time greats in Jokic, or the ascendant Murray having what looks like his best season yet. They’ll be facing a smart and confident group of guys who has shown that there are moments this squad is 16 players deep, and can come at you in waves that would make the Pacific Ocean blush. With all the clouds this squad has faced in the first half of the season, finding their mettle runs all the way to the far end of the bench is a decidedly silver lining. For these Nuggets, that may just be straight-up golden.