‘Seven, Richie thought. That’s the magic number. There has to be seven of us. That’s the way it’s supposed to be.’
– Richie Tozier, Stephen King’s “It”
Stephen King touches on the idea of magic numbers throughout the storyline of his masterpiece, It. The mysticism of numerology is woven through the tale, with the ‘Loser’s Club’, the heroes of the story, knowing they need to stack the deck as best they can to defeat Pennywise not only once, but twice.
Those Losers also know all too well that if those numbers drop too low, they won’t survive until the end of the tale.
A group that has been both penny-wise and pound-wise this offseason is the front office of your Denver Nuggets, who have re-stocked their bench with vigor after slowly but surely watching their “magic number” of players dwindle year over year since their championship victory in what will soon be three seasons ago.
When Denver brought home the Larry O’Brien in 2023, the team played a tight playoff rotation of eight primary guys, often closing that to seven between whichever of the pair of Christian Braun and Jeff Green was playing best. The remaining six: Bruce Brown, Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, Michael Porter, Jr, Aaron Gordon, Jamal Murray, and Nikola Jokic were the engine that could outplay whichever five the other guys could put on the floor. They were no longer the Loser’s Club, they brought exactly the magic number to that year’s party. A Magnificent Seven. An Elite Eight.
By the following year, with Brown and Green gone, Denver used more gas gunning for the top of the conference, and unsure which players beyond the six left from above they might best trust to go deep into a playoff run. The answer turned out to be not enough of them, and the Nuggets still came within a fourth quarter meltdown of possibly running it back. But there weren’t more than six they could lean on. No Magnificent Seven. Maybe a Super Six.
Astoundingly, they still didn’t ensure they were a lot deeper going into last year, with the Western Conference running at an even more competitive pace. Similar tactics produced similar results, and the Nuggets still came within a game seven meltdown of maybe climbing back to the top. Maybe. But in the end, there weren’t really more than five-and-a-half they could lean on. A Fab Five and a Half?
The trend was getting troubling.
That mismatched bet of internal development and squeezing every drop out of every game cost a couple of smart guys their jobs before last season’s end, but also installed a few also-smart guys into the void those first gents left behind. What Ben Tenzer and Jonathan Wallace have brought back to head coach David Adelman this offseason is a cracking chance at a roster maybe even eight or nine (or could it actually be ten?) guys deep, which is wildly reminiscent of what took them on their first championship run. Having a bench that deep took them well through the ’22-’23 season, and allowed their top six to be rested enough for some 45 minute nights in the playoffs.
In the two seasons following their title, the starter’s average per-game regular season minutes have only continued to climb, and the toll has shown by the time they’re at their literal last gasp. But by swapping the salary of MPJ for the combined salaries of Cam Johnson, Jonas Valanciunas, Bruce Brown (the return!), and Tim Hardaway, Jr, Denver has suddenly given themselves a depth and internally competitive edge that even the ’22-’23 squad could only dream of. Adding those four names to the quartet of Braun, Gordon, Murray, and Jokic makes the mathing an easy eight-deep, and still leaves room for the growth and emergence of a Peyton Watson, Julian Strawther, or Jalen Pickett. Even the new-youth group of DaRon Holmes, Tamar Bates, and Curtis Jones should get their chance to shine in the appropriate spots and moments. These Nuggets are quite literally a stacked deck with a hole-card Joker sitting on top.
Nothing is guaranteed at season’s beginning, and maybe the year takes an unexpectedly bad twist, or the players don’t line up as tantalizingly as they appear to in the eternally hopeful offseason. But if this team has something resembling a Tremendous Ten through the better part of the year, it seems even more likely they could have another Magnificent Seven (or Eight) at season’s end. This front office seems to realize that there are only so many chapters in this story of Jokic, and that he and Nuggets Nation deserve as many happy endings along the way as they can muster. Even with the best player in the world, capturing another elusive title is all in being the team that has the magic numbers.