Nuggets Scenarios - Final Four Edition

We take a clear-eyed look at where the Nuggets sit with five games left, why the West standings feel like a coin flip, and how injuries keep shaping everything. Then we run a March Madness style Nuggets Final Four of outcomes and land on why Jokic and Jamal still give us real championship belief.
• West seeding chaos and why the final five games matter
• Current Nuggets record and the ongoing injury grind
• Why finishing fourth might be the cleanest path
• A Nuggets themed Final Four with dream, nightmare, cursed and potential
• What “Nug Life” means for Denver fans
• Why we still believe in Jokic’s era and Jamal’s peak
• Spurs matchup prediction and why Jamal might hunt 40
• The rough Nuggets schedule, altitude travel and a possible injury link
• How to be a better fan by seeing Zach Lowe live in Denver

If you can click on that link and send me a voicemail, I think that’d be really fun. So tell a friend who loves basketball

Transcript

West Standings And Five Games Left

Brian 0:03

All right, everyone. Welcome back to Fandom from Afar. It's been a bit, but we are closing in on the end of the regular season. Can you believe there are only five games left? Uh it's going to be an interesting ending. The West is very bunched up. Uh San Antonio and Oklahoma City are kind of fighting for the one and two seeds. And then the Lakers, Nuggets, Timberwolves, and Rockets are all fighting for those last couple spots. So should be fun. All the teams are playing some tanking teams, and then the Nuggets and Spurs play each other a couple times. So should be a mixture of some laughable games and some good matchups. And if you're listening to this on the day the podcast comes out, the Spurs and Nuggets have a very interesting matchup this afternoon, actually. And it will hopefully be a good test for both teams to see how they will fare in the playoffs. But we'll have to see if both teams have all their people. Well, you know the Nuggets don't because they never have all their people, but it'll be interesting. It's going to be a good, good matchup. I'm excited for it. This episode's going to be good as well. We're going to kind of go over a quick overview of where we're at in the season. I had a fun idea since the final four is this weekend for college basketball. I thought I'd do a little twist on the final four, Nugget style. And then, of course, we'll always finish up with our predictions and how to be a better fan. So uh let's jump right into it. The Nuggets are 49 and 28, so overall that's pretty good. But obviously, as we've talked about all year, it could have been so much more. Nuggets just can't stay healthy. When we last recorded, the Nuggets were finally getting all their guys back. But unfortunately, recently, Peyton Watson re-injured his hamstring. Tim Hardaway kind of had a knee issue. Spencer Jones is hurt. Zeke Najee got hurt. So it's just a little bit more of the same. So unfortunately, the Nuggets just have to keep fighting that uphill battle. But hopefully we can kind of have everybody back by the time the playoffs roll around. As I mentioned, there's there's quite a battle going on for third through fifth, and it seems to change every day. The Nuggets do have the tiebreaker over the Rockets and the Timberwolves, so it's looking more and more like the Nuggets are going to finish in the fourth spot, which really isn't that bad. It does mean that we'll probably have to play Oklahoma City in the second round, but with the way the Nuggets have been getting injured, maybe that's a good thing. And then if we do end up somehow beating the Thunder, that wouldn't be bad to take on the Spurs in the third round, just because they are such a young team and don't really have that playoff experience yet. So I would love it if we can finish in that fourth spot. Luca just got hurt for the Lakers the other night, and it seems like he's going to be out for a bit. So it's possible the Nuggets finish in third as well. And so that would kind of flip the script where we would take on the Spurs in the second round and then play the Thunder in the Western Conference Finals. But that is a ways down the road. I think the way it's going, we need to focus on our first round opponent and make sure we get out of that first round healthy and hopefully with a win. So interesting end of the season. We'll see how it goes. We're going to start recording a little bit more often now that the games are actually going to mean something. Obviously, five more games left in the regular season. We'll record an episode once we know all the playoff matchups. And then obviously, once the playoffs roll around, just like we've done the last couple years, we'll record after every two or three games just to kind of check in and see see how the Nuggets are doing. So I mentioned I have an interesting twist on March Madness. I love March Madness. I think that the single elimination tournament is quite fun. Obviously, the NBA playoffs are best of seven, which really is a better way to determine the better team. And the way the Nuggets kind of play, I think the best of seven is more appropriate for their style. But this week I wanted to do a final four for nuggets possibilities. And so I came up with four different possibilities for our Nuggets, and each one of them is possible. I rated them with the number one seed being the most likely and the number four seed being the least likely, but I do think there is a chance for each of them come playoff time. So the four seeds are. In this scenario, well, it's it's it's much like the curse scenario, except worse. We can't stay healthy, we lose in the first round, and we suffer a major injury to one of our star players that impacts next season as well. That is the nightmare scenario. And then rounding it out is our fourth seed, the least likely to happen, but still a chance. The dream scenario. This is where everyone stays healthy. We dominate our way to a second championship. That would be a dream. So let's go over the matchups and see what happens. In the first matchup, we have the number one cursed scenario versus the number four dream scenario. In a blowout, the curse scenario wins. The curse scenario is much more likely to happen than the dream scenario. Nuglife will never let us have something easy. So if you're new to Nuggets Fandom or to this podcast, Nuglife, it's really just a way of life for us Nuggets fans that we don't get the big free agents like some of the big cities. We don't get the good referee whistle. We don't get to move up in the NBA draft. Nothing comes easy to Nuggets fans, and that's okay. That's Nug Life. Well, Nug Life will not let us dominate our way to a title in a dream scenario. It probably is much more likely that we will get more injuries in the playoffs and they will get the best of us. So unfortunately, in the first matchup, the cursed scenario advances to the championship. In our second matchup, we have the number two seed, potential, versus the number three seed, nightmare. This was a very close matchup until the very end. Because the Nuggets have too much potential. There is a championship team in there somewhere, and there's no way that the Nuggets are going to go down without a fight. The nightmare scenario loses, and potential moves on to the championship. So we have number one, cursed, versus number two, potential. The matchup that we knew was coming all season long. It really comes down to can the Nuggets stay healthy? They haven't been able to all year. AG and Watson are already dealing with some minor injuries again right before the playoffs. But Jokic is the best player in the world. Jamal is having a dream year, and I think that they will battle through adversity. Yes, people are gonna get hurt. Yes, our we'll call them other players, not Jamal and Jokic, will have off games. But I think both Jokic and Jamal are at the peak of their powers, and potential, the number two seed, pulls off the upset. Jokic reminds everybody why he is one of the all-time great players. It doesn't matter if they're not going to give him MVP anymore. They're tired of that narrative, but he is going to remind the world that this is the Jokic era, and we will win our second championship. Huh. Well, that was exciting. I have to pretend like I didn't know the outcome of that, but that was still fun. I think the Nuggets can still do it. This has been, in some ways, the nightmare scenario, and in some ways the dream scenario. Before the season started, we all wish that Jamal would have a year like this. Jokic is putting up better numbers than ever. It just so happens to be kind of sprinkled in between all these injuries and just kind of the media getting tired of Jokic's greatness, so they're kind of downplaying the fact that he's going to lead the league in rebounds and assists while scoring 27 points a game. If any other player would be doing that in the NBA, it would be the biggest story of the year, and they would be a runaway winner of the MVP. But because Jokic has kind of made it normal for him to do that, it's not even mentioned. People are talking about him coming in fourth in the MVP. And like I said, I think I think he's going to remind some people. So I hope that gives you hope. The potential of the Nuggets won our March Madness. Let's move on to some predictions. Like I mentioned, the Nuggets and Spurs play this Saturday. If you are listening to it when this episode comes out, it could be a big matchup. It could be something where both teams know that they're probably going to match up in the playoffs, so they don't want to show too much. I hope and I predict that both Wemby and Jokic take the game seriously and have monster games. And what I think will put the Nuggets over the top is Jamal Murray will score 40 points and the Nuggets will win. I think Jamal is really going for the all-NBA team, which means he's one of the best players in the league. It's a really cool title. It's it's I think way better than being an all-star. Really, not many players can say that they were all NBA during any year. And so Jamal has a chance this year, and I think he knows this game's on national TV, and he is gonna gun for a big performance. Well, since we do predictions every episode, we do have to go over what I got wrong about the last episode, and this one's pretty obvious. The title of the last episode was The Nuggets Are Getting Healthy. That lasted, I think, less than one game, and still battling injuries. It's just it's not gonna happen this season, and that's okay. They're gonna fight through it, they're gonna get through it. And I think come playoff time, once all the guys are focused and and playing like they actually can play, I think we'll be all right. I did see an interesting stat. Like these Nuggets injuries have been outrageous this year, but it could be a coincidence, but it also could be that the Nuggets have had one of the roughest schedules that a lot of these guys that are covering their NBA have ever seen. And DNBR had an interesting story that I guess a few teams complain to the NBA that it's too big of an advantage that teams have to fly into Denver and then play in the altitude. And so the NBA really geared the Nuggets schedule to they have very few homestands and very few games where they're not coming in off the road as well. And I really think that could be why the Nuggets have got hurt so often this year. There was one chart that they showed just showing the days at home for each NBA team this year, and the average I think was in the 60s and 70s. Some teams were even in the 80s, meaning that they actually got to sleep in their beds. They just got to rest for a day in between games while they were at home. And the Nuggets were down in the 40s. Like the NBA, I think, went a little bit too far trying to appease these teams that complained and really gave the Nuggets a rough schedule. And I think it's it's kind of beaten them up a little bit. So I hope the Nuggets can fight back before next year's schedule is made, and hopefully we can balance that out a little bit because it's not the Nuggets' fault they play in altitude, it's not their fault that their airport is 45 minutes away from the stadium. But yeah, this year it's just been rough. I always like to finish the episode with How Can You Be a Better Fan? And I'm actually excited about this one. Zach Lowe, one of my favorite basketball podcasters, is doing a live podcast in Denver at the Fillmore Auditorium on April 13th. So that's not too far away. If you are a basketball fan or just a Nuggets fan, I think you should try to make it down there for this. Zach, he's an awesome basketball mind. He's super entertaining to hear talk. But obviously, being in Denver, he's gonna gear this episode towards the Nuggets. And Zach was one of the very first national media members to love Jokic. Like he was one of the very first ones to appreciate what he was doing, loved his game. He's always been on the Jokic bandwagon, kind of fighting the good fight when all the other national media members were saying that Carl Anthony Towns was better, Joel Embiid was better. They were even saying that Chris Kristopp Sporzingus was better. Like Zach was there from the very beginning. Obviously, Adam Maras from DNVR was the original Jokic fan, but Zach Lowe, as far as uh ESPN national voice, he was one of the first. So if you can make it down to see his live performance at the Fillmore on the 13th. All right, so that is it. Obviously, I'm very excited for the playoffs. I do have one thing to ask. My podcast host, where I where I publish this podcast, they just came out with a new feature. And in my episode description, you've always seen the link that says send me a text. And some of you have done that and I appreciate it. Now there is an option where you can leave a voicemail. So I thought that'd be kind of fun. If you listen to this episode and you have a prediction for how the Nuggets will do in the playoffs, I would love a voicemail. If you want to tell me what you had for lunch today, I would love a voicemail. I just think the the feature is pretty cool, and I think it'd be fun to hear from people that listen to this show. So if you can click on that link and send me a voicemail, I think that'd be really fun. So tell a friend who loves basketball, we're getting ready for the playoffs, and it's gonna be gonna be a fun next couple of weeks. Thanks everyone.