Each year, new lessons can be learned across the league on how to build a championship roster. From the latest NBA Finals winner, the biggest lesson that can be learned from the 2022-23 Denver Nuggets is patience.
After years of trials and tribulations, the Nuggets finally reached their ultimate goal of winning an NBA championship for the first time ever. The Nuggets were a dominant force throughout the 2023 playoffs and defeated the Miami Heat in five games to win the crown.
When asked about what lessons could be learned from the Nuggets’ title run, Oklahoma City Thunder general manager Sam Presti spoke with fondness about the division rival’s patience and discipline in keeping their core together for the long haul.
“I have a lot of respect for them. It took four years for I think a Jokic team to make it to the postseason. They’ve traditionally had the same coach. The team around Murray and Jokic has changed a little bit, but a lot of the same guys.
They’ve responded to a lot of adversities. To me, when I think about that from my seat, to me, you can see a lot of those things. Those are easy to see.
The thing that I think is a little harder to see is what I see there is a result of commitment, a commitment from — Murray and Jokic are committed to winning with the Nuggets. The organization is committed to those guys. They have just kept at it.
In our society and especially in sports culture today, we’re blitzed every day with the terms windows and timelines. Generally the only time we get blitzed with those things is when one of those entities, their commitment is not quite as strong as maybe it once was. That’s when we start talking about windows and time lines.
The commitment from those guys to the team and from the team to those guys in terms of their compensation and relationships, they’re all in on winning together, and therefore I think it’s allowed the team to really just focus on improving, battling back from adversities, integrating new players, and those guys really being invested in that, knowing that part of the run for them has been there’s been some changes.
But I have to think that the commitment to — the mutual commitment to we’re solving this as a group, that to me is really special, and it’s rare. It doesn’t happen all the time.
That’s not to speak ill of anybody else. I just think that they’ve prolonged that commitment through a lot of adversity where sometimes that can start to fade in today’s world.
I don’t want to speak for them, but I’m sure they know that it gets harder, but I think they’ve just always been — like that group has been together, and they’ve been all in on how do we work on it. There’s never been a weaponization of anything there.”
Unlike most previous champions, the Thunder could learn a lot from the Nuggets’ blueprint. Both are small-market teams that built their core via the draft and added pieces around it with trades and bargain bin free-agent additions.
Stability in head coach is also another similarity both franchises share. Michael Malone has been the Nuggets head coach since 2015 while Mark Daigneault recently signed an extension after being named Thunder head coach in 2020.
The level of respect and comradery between both franchises is mutual. Both teams historically face similar challenges of trying to build contenders in cities that usually never attract top free agents.
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