Jamal Murray of the Denver Nuggets returns to Toronto to face the Raptors. Would his home-coming go in Favor of the Nuggets?
Heading into Wednesday night’s game at Scotiabank Arena, the NBA’s second-best Canadian player has missed half of the champion Denver Nuggets’ 28 games because of injuries and is on a minutes restriction.
To say it’s been a watershed year for basketball in Canada would probably understate the case.
Start with the men’s national team beating the United States for a bronze medal at the FIBA World Cup while simultaneously guaranteeing a trip to the Olympics for the first time since 2000. Continue with the women’s national team booking a place in February’s Olympic qualifier. Tack on the fact that a former youth hockey player from Toronto is the reigning player of the year in NCAA Division I men’s basketball and that Zach Edey’s reign on that particular throne is looking impressively merciless, what with his Purdue Boilermakers sitting at No. 1 in this week’s Associated Press Top 25 poll. Add all that up and you’ve only just begun to enumerate the heft of the northland’s growing influence on one of the world’s most popular sports.
Even if you subtract a few points for the Raptors’ organizational choice to spend another season stuck in neutral, or possibly reverse, it’s still impressive stuff.
It’s so impressive that you have to go down the list a bit until you get to the indelible mark left by Kitchener’s Jamal Murray. In a world that values banners and rings above most other things, Murray spent 2023 accomplishing something beyond massive. As starting point guard and consensus second-best player for the NBA’s Denver Nuggets, he cemented himself as the greatest Canadian player to win the Larry O’Brien Trophy. Other Canadians have won NBA championships. None has been as important to their squad’s success as Murray. Running a peerless pick-and-roll with NBA Finals MVP Nikola Jokic, Murray averaged 26.1 points, 7.1 assists and 5.7 rebounds a game in the post-season.
As Nuggets coach Michael Malone said recently of Jokic and Murray: “In our opinion (they are) the best two-man game in the NBA.” You don’t need to be employed by the Nuggets to share that opinion.
For all that, 2023 was also the year that saw Murray clearly usurped by Shai Gilgeous-Alexander as Canada’s top hoopster, not to mention the winner of the Northern Star Award as the country’s athlete of the year.
There’s no shame in that, of course, since Gilgeous-Alexander, after a summer in which he lifted Canada to the World Cup podium, has seemingly elevated his game yet again. Last season, starring on a team in Oklahoma City that didn’t make the playoffs, he was voted first-team all-NBA. This season, with the Thunder running a half-game ahead of Denver for second place in the Western Conference heading into Tuesday, Gilgeous-Alexander has vaulted into an MVP conversation that contains the likes of Philadelphia’s Joel Embiid, Dallas’s Luka Doncic and, of course, Jokic.
It hasn’t helped that Murray, who sat out the 2021-22 season and the playoffs that bookended thanks to the ravages of reconstructive knee surgery, has yet again found it difficult to dodge the injury bug. Though Murray attended the Toronto-based training camp for the FIBA World Cup, when the dream of teaming with Gilgeous-Alexander to form the world’s most dangerous backcourt was briefly alive, he ultimately sat out the tournament with an eye toward a healthy NBA season. And even still, heading into Denver’s annual visit to Scotiabank Arena on Wednesday night, Murray had played just 14 of the Nuggets’ 28 games this season, missing 11 with a pulled hamstring and a few more to sprains of both ankles. All that wear and tear has led to a minutes restriction. The same linchpin who averaged 40 minutes in the playoffs hasn’t played more than 32 minutes in a game in more than six weeks.
“That’s not the start (to the season) that Jamal wanted. I’m sure that he wanted to kind of hit the ground running, but it is what it is,” Malone told reporters recently. “We have to and he has to (say) ‘OK, I can’t control those things, but I can control what happens moving forward.’ Obviously, having Jamal back and finding a rhythm for him and getting rid of that minutes restriction that he’s had, I think will allow him to do so.”
Murray’s uphill battle to stay healthy is surely part of the reason why the Nuggets are a modest 18-10 and his numbers are down. Still, down is relative. He’s shooting 45 per cent from three-point range, on pace for a career high. And while the Nuggets have an Achilles heel in their free-throw shooting — 30th in the category to Toronto’s 29th — Murray isn’t contributing to the problem. He’s making 92 per cent from the charity stripe.
“He’s got great confidence, even when his stats may say otherwise” is how Malone put it to reporters recently, speaking of Murray. “He’s still finding his rhythm coming back from the injury and missing time. But when he’s getting downhill, and he and Nikola are playing that patented two-man game, you know something good is going to happen.”
The Nuggets, while their championship core remains the same, aren’t without their challenges. Missing from the group this season are Bruce Brown and Jeff Green, Denver’s first and second men off the bench during last year’s run to the title. Brown and Green left via free agency for bigger pay days in Indiana and Houston, respectively, and the Nuggets are hoping the addition of Reggie Jackson and the development of their relatively young bench can ultimately make up for the loss.
None of it will matter much if Murray can’t find his way to the post-season in one piece. In a remarkable year for Canadian basketball, one of the game’s best practitioners is proving the old sporting maxim about the best ability being availability.
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