For the first time since June, the band was back together.
Nikola Jokić returned from his lively summer in Sombor, Serbia. Jamal Murray was reunited with his running mate following a relaxing offseason of sparring with UFC greats. Aaron Gordon's worldwide travels had come to a close, at one point visiting Jokić in his hometown of Sombor.
Media Day 2023 was a symbolic day. At long last, the defending champions were all in the same room, meaning that the 2023-24 NBA season was officially underway.
The message that day? The Nuggets want another one.
"Win another championship," said Jamal Murray about his goals this upcoming season. "Just win another championship."
It won't be easy for the Nuggets to repeat. Winning a championship never is. The ballclub fell short numerous times before achieving their goal of securing their first-ever NBA title in June.
Sure, the league's power balance has shifted like plate tectonics in the weeks leading up to the season. Damian Lillard landed in Milwaukee alongside Giannis Antetokounmpo, and Jrue Holiday was subsequently rerouted to Boston in a separate deal.
"Today is the start of a new season, a new challenge, and we understand what's at stake," said head coach Michael Malone. "We're gonna get everybody's best 82 games this year. And we've gone from being a team that has been hunting the teams in front of us to now, we're gonna be the hunted. And hopefully, our guys understand the responsibility that comes with being a defending champion."
The Nuggets showed they have what it takes to come away with the Larry O'Brien trophy in hand; they lost just four total playoff games in the 2023 postseason en route to one of the most dominant postseason runs of the last 20 years. They still have the best and most harmonic starting lineup in the sport.
Denver's biggest adversary is internal; it has nothing to do with what's outside of the glass walls of Ball Arena. Fighting complacency, that dreaded championship hangover will be of the essence this season.
"I'd say from my experience with other teams is mindset, not to allow complacency to set in," Nuggets' President and Governer, Josh Kroenke, explained to the media. "When you achieve the ultimate goal, your natural reaction is to relax a little bit."
"We have the same starting five, which we feel is the best in the NBA," Kroenke continued. "But our bench is gonna look a little bit different. And so, can our new guys embrace those new roles? Can certain guys step up into new roles? And then the guys that have been around and playing extended minutes, just continue to get better as a group?"
Malone is well aware of that challenge, the battle against complacency.
"John Wooden, the legendary coach of UCLA, had a great quote, and I think it applies to our group. 'To win, you have to have talent. To repeat, you have to have character'... We have talent, but are we going to be thinking about last season? Because in my eyes, last season's over," said Malone. "If we're serious about being a team that can repeat, if we're serious about trying to be a team that can be a dynasty, we have to bring our best every single day, starting tomorrow in practice."
The last part is crucial, and it's something we've touched on before. The Nuggets don't want to have their names etched in the history books as just champions; they want to become a dynasty.
"I think winning the championship was a huge step for our program going forward. We probably, quite frankly, did it sooner than a lot of people thought we would," said general manager Calvin Booth. "Repeating would be great, but more importantly, how do we sustain this to win multiple championships?"
Denver's roster looks different than last season. Bruce Brown, Jeff Green, Ish Smith, Thomas Bryant, and Jack White have all departed, and in their place is a cadre of young and unproven players hoping to make a splash in the league.
That's not an accident, by the way. Denver is preparing for the future while committing to a competitive present. Its starters are all locked down on long-term deals until 2025, and they're all 30 years old or younger, so the team's infrastructure is here to stay. After that is a sea of first- and second-year players that will likely comprise Denver's bench.
Why, you might ask, would a team coming off a championship house so many young players?
The looming new CBA, or collective bargaining agreement, shaped Denver's offseason according to the front office. The agreed-upon deal between the Players Association and the NBA is much more punitive for teams with multiple max-level players... of which the Nuggets have two with Murray and Michael Porter Jr., plus one supermax player in Jokić.
The new rules make it much harder for the Nuggets to sign players to lucrative deals, especially as free agents. As such, the team's only alternative was to prioritize internal development and hope to unearth long-term contributors through the draft process. Denver selected Julian Strawther, Jalen Pickett, and Hunter Tyson in this June's draft. The hope is that their 13 combined years of college experience could ease the strenuous transition to the NBA.
"As the CBA is concerned, when you throw a lot of the attributes that are valued like positional size, skill, toughness, character... athleticism," explained Booth, "If you take a few of those things and put them together into a player, that player becomes really expensive, right? So what we did is we tried to acquire some of those players in the draft, and we got a discount because of experience. They don't have any. We're gonna have to roll with them and allow them to gain some experience. And in the meantime, that's how we got value."
In order for those players to thrive, however, it'll be on the longstanding members of the Nuggets' organization to get them up to speed. That goes beyond just teaching the new guys the terms and philosophies of Denver's offense which hums at a rate of 120 points per 100 possessions in the postseason. Rather, it's a commitment to what makes this organization special, and what allowed the team to cruise to their inaugural NBA title in June.
"We've got different players that have come in," said Kentavious Caldwell-Pope. "It's all about just getting everyone else to buy into what we have here and how are we going to accomplish our goal."
And what exactly makes Denver special? What message needs to be passed down to the young players from veterans like Caldwell-Pope in order to hoist another championship banner?
"The thing that needs to continue from the group last year to this year is belief," explained President Kroenke. "The first time you do something, there might be a few questions in the back of your mind about whether can you do it. I saw a change in mindset collectively at a certain point of the playoffs—it was actually after one of our four losses—where our guys came off the floor... and they looked at each other and they said, 'We're better than these guys. We can do this. Let's regroup and let's go back out there.' And I think that sense of belief is now fully in the room."