Joker and Hyde: The dual personalities of this season’s Denver Nuggets

“I learned to recognise the thorough and primitive duality of man; I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both.”
– Robert Louis Stevenson, “Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”

The terrifying part of Robert Louis Stevenson’s allegory on the duality of a human being isn’t in the graphic description of the horrific acts of Mr. Hyde, quite the opposite, actually. Graphic violence wasn’t so much the order of the day in the late 1800’s. Instead, it was the slowly unfolding reality that the good guy and the bad guy were actually the same guy. The idea that there could be that much goodness and that much badness in a single person (and which side eventually wins out) that thrilled and horrified the Victorian Era readers whose minds it blew. The idea that two completely separate people could be inside any of us was a lightning strike in the moment.

Happily less morally horrific, but maybe no less spiritually terrifying for Denver Nuggets fans is the 2025-26 season and the duality of the team’s ways in so many facets. To wit, in the last eight games:

L (in double overtime at New York)
W (decisively in Chicago)
L (by two to Cleveland)
W (in a squeaker to the Grizzlies)
L (choking away a lead in a one-point loss at the Clippers)
W (stunning the league with 157 points in a 54-point win at Portland)
L (coughing up another late lead at Golden State)
W (holding the league’s second-best offense to 84 points in a 19 point win against Boston)

Slightly psychotic, no? Bouncier than a basketball, yes? But it’s not just the Win-Loss record that has looked more Pollock than scatterplot this year… it’s the arc of the season, the injury report, the individual performances.

• Which of the players will play every night? With an astounding amount of injuries this season, and have had so many starting lineups as to have literally had multiple personalities on the court
• Will the crunch-time Nuggets of the last four years be the norm again, or will it be the team that has often been one of the worst in the league in the clutch?
• Are we the team with the best home record or the one that can barely protect home court? The 10-0 road start, or the middling team since?
• Will the offense be the 157-point juggernaut, or just an offensive jugger-not?
• Will the defense be the Munder-Machine of Wednesday night, or the sieve that keeps choking away all of these fourth quarter leads?
• Which Jamal Murray will we get? The All-Star or the shooting star? Which version of Nikola Jokic? The MVP or the turnover machine? Same for Cam Johnson, Tim Hardaway, Jr., Christian Braun, and the rest…
• Will Peyton Watson be back in time to integrate back in?
• Will Aaron Gordon’s hamstrings ever function correctly again?

Okay, that’s a little hyperbolic, but STILL.

The truth is, they are both of them. All of them. The good and the bad. The superstars and the falling stars. They are a 157-point offense and an 84-point defense. But they’re also about as bad as it gets when things fall apart. They are working it out as they go, bolting whatever pieces they have that day back onto this basketball jalopy that’s going 100 miles an hour down this bumpy road. At their finest, they can trounce any team in the league (even the Thunder), and could be the squad that brings Denver another basketball title. At their worst, they could plummet to the play-in and waste a year in which they were 11 legitimate players deep.

With all the possibility that brings, it’s no wonder the sportsbooks have them as a dark horse for another championship. While all any of us Nuggets Nation hopeful want is another ring, we’re also just hoping that this promising season turns out to be at least a good and exciting one, as good as the virtuous Jekyll. If everything goes to sh–, all any of us is going to want to do is hide.